Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

With the public terrified and distracted, power-hungry players were able to move in and ram through policies that benefited corporate elites without debate or consent—not unlike the brutal methods deployed by torturers who use isolation and stress to soften up and break their prisoners.

“Gather together, find your footing and your story.” That is the advice I have been giving for two decades about how to stay out of shock during moments of collective trauma. Metabolize the shock together, I would tell people, create meaning together. Resist the tin-pot tyrants who will tell you that the world is now a blank sheet for them to write

I came to feel as if I were seeing not only undesirable parts of myself but a magnification of many undesirable aspects of our shared culture as well. The ambient and all-pervasive hunger for ever-more-fleeting relevance; the disposability with which we treat people who mess up; the trivialization of words and displacements of responsibility, and m

To prove to others—and to myself—that I do indeed exist, I needed to give the machine fresh content: new takes, new rage, new intimacy. Yet I found myself utterly unable to deliver, unable to do the basic identity maintenance I had done for my entire adult life and that the attention economy demands.

In an odd way, their over-the-top conspiracies fed our overcredulity; their “question everything” led to many of us not questioning enough.

Asperger created the controversial distinction between “high-functioning autism” and “low-functioning autism.” This is Asperger’s legacy: lifting up a small group of neuroatypical children as supposedly superior to all the others, while being part of an apparatus that sent children without that competitive edge to their deaths.

At bottom, I suspect that much of the mirroring and doubling we are seeing comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see, to really look at—in our midst, in our past, and in the tumultuous future racing toward us. There are many different ways to try to outrun our shadows.

This is a crucial point: conspiracy culture does not challenge the hyper-individualism that is at the heart of so many crises reaching their breaking points. Instead, it mirrors it, putting all the blame for society’s ills on singularly powerful individuals: Fauci. Gates. Schwab. Soros.

Evidently, a great many of us want nothing more than to find another person who knows precisely what it is like to live inside our bodies and minds—and that desire coexists with the drive to be unmistakably different.