Double trouble

YOU can be this AND that.

Reading Naomi Klein’s latest book Doppelgänger has made me make sense of people, which is quite an achievement. Klein began writing the book because people kept confusing her with another writer, Naomi Wolf, whose views are diametrically different from hers. Thinking it was funny at first, she realised that this confusion had real world consequences with people attributing the strangest conspiracy theories to her when it was Wolf who was promoting them.

But in researching doppelgängers, she found that the idea of people having doubles has been a source of fascination and inspiration for many writers, filmmakers, philosophers, and psychoanalysts for a long time – Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886.

Doppelgängers are not necessarily twins or two people who look alike but are two different sides of the same person. In 1977 Richard Brooks directed Diane Keaton in Looking for Mr Goodbar in which a quiet teacher in the daytime becomes a “good time girl” at night and inevitably gets into trouble. Sigmund Freud wrote about “the double” in his work The Uncanny where he theorised that every person has a double when he or she encounters “the narcissism of the child”.

In short, we all have a doppelgänger, the person we present to the world and the person we really are. It is the distance between the two that causes us trouble or not. Some people can keep one persona going without conflict with the other persona, perhaps because they don’t have to keep it up all the time. We may have noticed people who are quite different when they’re in the country and when they’re abroad.

Politicians can be prone to this, often saying things they think we want to hear but that they don’t always mean. Election campaigning induces all sorts of promises of goodies, but after winning and becoming the government, few of those promises become reality. We the voters are left wondering which personae of those politicians are the real ones.

Sometimes people can have more than one doppelgänger (triplegänger? Multigängger?). They can be one type of person to one audience, another type to another audience, and yet another to another group of people. This can only be kept up if there are concrete barriers between these different audiences. The trouble is, in this age of social media, barriers are paper-thin if there are any at all. Sooner or later, some more discerning folks notice the different, even conflicting messages, emanating from the same person. Confusion understandably ensues.

Doppelgängering is not limited to individual people, though. It can also apply to countries, where they claim to be one thing and do the opposite. Israel claims to have “the most moral army in the world” which is quite startling considering the bombings of hospitals, schools, universities, and homes, and the killings of doctors, journalists, and all sorts of ordinary people, not to mention at least 15,000 children in Gaza in the past eight months.

The United States claims to be the most democratic country in the world, where free speech is sacrosanct, but then sends the police onto university campuses to dismantle encampments and arrest students and faculty calling for an end to all genocides and to divest from investments that support the Israeli war machine. This is not to say that the United States is entirely undemocratic, but doppelgängering means you can be more than one thing at a time, including being contradictory.

Take us for instance. For all our support for stopping the attacks on not just Palestine but other countries in the Middle East, we’re quite happy not to have the refugee problem that Europe has. Of the relatively few refugees we have here, despite our sympathy for their troubles in their home countries, we often don’t treat them any better here because we think of them merely as illegal migrants. Coming from their open-air prison in Gaza, Palestinians who find their way here sometimes find themselves in our immigration detention camps, even if they are children.

Klein also talks about the “Mirror World” where many doppelgängers hang out. She cites the right wing American political strategist Steve Bannon whose tactic is to watch what his opponents are doing and then do a distorted copy of them. In this way, he persuades people who would not normally agree with him to join him because he’s found supposed common cause with them.

One example is how a strange coalition of antivaxxers got together in the United States. On the one hand there were the groups who resented any government “’interference” in their lives with mandated mask-wearing and vaccinations, on the other hand there were the fitness and wellness groups who believe that they are so fit they don’t need vaccines and who believe the vaccines would besmirch their bodies. Many groups found common cause during the Covid-19 pandemic, but some influential ones found it by spreading much misinformation and disinformation.

The Mirror World also works by using the same language that opponents use and twisting them around. The words “freedom of speech” for instance is often co-opted to mean the freedom to say nasty things about other people with impunity. There is also a Mirror World version of human rights that people use to defend exclusivity, discrimination, and even punitive actions. The so-called right not to be offended, for example, that many people here love, is a great excuse for all manner of censorship.

Klein’s book – which has a lot of interesting historical facts including that Adolph Hitler was an admirer of America’s discriminatory and segregationist laws back then against any non-white people – makes us look at everyone and see the doppelgangers in them. I now understand why some people have behaved the way they have in the past few years and still are. Where there is too big a difference between their different selves, I don’t think I really need to engage with them.

We also have doppelgängers in ourselves. We might look the same, but we may be one type of person in front of our parents, say, and a totally different one with our friends. There may be good enough social and cultural reasons to keep our personas separate. But if we’re not being Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde all the time, which must surely mess up our minds if not our relationships, then we’re probably all right.

Marina Mahathir insists on being the same person wherever she is; she can’t handle more than one Marina. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.