Am I who I think I am, or am I who others perceive me to be? And if enough others start seeing someone else as me, who am I, then?

get serious about demanding an information commons that can be counted upon as a basic civic right.

That sentence—“exterminate all the brutes”—is the murderous annihilatory impulse to pursue one’s interests at all costs. It is the supremacist mindset that casts the extinguishments of entire peoples and cultures not merely as an unavoidable element of the march of progress but also as a salutary stage in the evolution of the human species.

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. Having

Whether we are loving ourselves too much or loathing ourselves too much—or, more likely, doing both—we’re still at the center of every story. We’re still blotting out the sun.

Because unlike so much else upon which we might like to have some sort of impact, the canvas of the self is compact and near enough that it feels like we might actually pull off some measure of control. Even though, as I have discovered, this, too, is a grand illusion.

But so, too, is what more centrist leaders have been doing for much longer: using words as intended, yet with no intention of acting on them. And one form of denialism feeds the other: the outright denialism in the Mirror World is made thinkable by the baseline war on words and meaning in more liberal parts of our culture.

“I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the black people in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch … I have no special place in my heart for the [Jewish] ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.”

There are frescoes that still hang in Polish cathedrals showing plump perforated babies at the feet of hunched-over Jews.