Have a good book by Naomi Klein about doppelgängers and the mirror world we have created and are adding more to, seemingly because of convenience and things being someone else’s problem because they don’t ’live well’ and the technology that delivers that.

Here’s a good passage...

When we get vaccinated against diseases that pose a greater threat to other members of our communities than they do to us, we are saying that all people, no matter their bodily impairments or challenges, are of fundamentally equal value and have a right to equally access the public sphere and a good life. This is the principle at the heart of the disability justice movement, which, after decades of struggle, is thankfully encoded in some (though not enough) of the laws in most constitutional democracies. This struggle is the reason buildings have ramps and elevators, and the reason public schools are required to have accommodations for kids whose brains and bodies are atypical. But these victories are under constant assault because the idea that we should think and function as communities of enmeshed bodies with different needs and vulnerabilities flies in the face of a core message of neoliberal capitalism: that you are on your own and deserve your lot in life, for better or worse. And, relatedly, it also flies in the face of a core message of neoliberal wellness culture: that your body is your primary site of control and advantage in this cruel and polluted world. So get to work optimising it!

The disability justice advocate and author Beatrice Adler-Bolton refers to the mindset that has animated so much Covid denialism as ‘deaths pulled from the future’³¹ - which she defines as the judgment-laden posture that frames ‘deaths from Covid-19 as somehow preordained’ because the people doing most of the dying were probably going to die prematurely anyway. Covid just moved up the timeline a few years, so what's the big deal? And that’s at the moderate end of the spectrum - at the extreme, sandalwood-scented end, those deaths pulled from the future are actually welcomed. Like the yoga woman said, ‘I think those people should die.’

At the risk of causing more confusion by sounding like my doppelganger [Naomi Wolf], this is fascist thought. More specifically, it is genocidal thought. It recalls the ways in which colonial massacres were rationalised because, within the ranking of human life created by pseudoscientific racists, Indigenous peoples, such as the original residents of Tasmania, were cast as ‘living fossils.’ Lord Salisbury, the UK prime minister, explained in an 1898 address that ‘you may roughly divide the nations of the world as the living and the dying.’³² Indigenous peoples were, in this telling, the pre-dead, with extermination merely serving to accelerate the inevitable timeline.

These are the histories currently being conjured up in mainstream wellness culture, which has adopted Silicon Valley’s notion of self-optimisation, itself a by-product of the personal-branding culture that torments so many young people today. Every step counted. Every sleep measured. Every meal ‘clean’. And it is this context that has prepared the ground for a redux of the 1930s fascist/New Age alliance. The very idea that humans can and should be ‘optimised’ lends itself to a fascistic worldview-because if your food is extra-clean, it can easily mean other people’s food is extra-dirty. If you are safe because your immune system is strong, it can flip to mean others are unsafe because they are weak. If you are optimised, others are, by definition, suboptimal. Defective. Next door to disposable. This is also the context in which some prominent anti-vaxxers have taken to calling themselves ‘purebloods’, since their blood is supposedly untainted by the jabs, never mind the term’s chilling supremacist overtones.

Which brings us to the Mirror World’s most pipiked projection of all. From the very first ripples of Covid conspiracy theories to the tidal waves of lies that would go on to inundate us, one claim has recurred with more frequency than any other: that the plan behind all of this was to cull large parts of humanity. First, it was that the virus was a bioweapon designed by the Chinese to cull us; then it was Bill Gates, supposedly a closet eugenicist, who cooked up the virus to push the vaccine, which was the real mechanism to cull us. But who is actually engaging in behaviours that have contributed to a culling, to mass and unnecessary human sacrifice? It is the diagonalists themselves - by systematically refusing the simple and safe measures that were our best chance of preventing a highly infectious disease from culling the more vulnerable members of our communities: the already sick, the disabled, the immunocompromised, the elderly. Culling the herd of its weaker members to strengthen the genetic stock is the central goal of eugenics. And to a large extent, it has happened. Of the first 800,000 people who died of Covid-19 in the United States, three-quarters were over the age of sixty-five. And, according to an analysis conducted by the Poor People’s Campaign, people living in poor U.S. counties³³ died at almost twice the rate as those living in wealthy ones; during the outbreak of the Delta variant, people in the poorest counties of the country died at five times the rate as those who lived in the wealthiest areas. These numbers tell a story of Covid as class war.

Naomi Klein Doppelganger

...that makes some great observations.

Sort of in response

It’s a near dissolution of the individual, ironically by the very neoliberal – if not the far-right further down the political spectrum as well – that seems to espouse individualism, not the state, nor collective responsibility and assistance through that political architecture; democracy can work it just rarely seems to get the opportunity as nearly everything gets reduced to (and made into some kind of) competition, certainly more so these days with our tech obsessions and its binary-world creations.

The state does need to change in attitudes and approaches certainly with and from its many institutions and ways of working but, without real, fair and genuine citizen involvement and active participation (like having citizens’ assemblies for the many societal and community-led services, not just juries) can be a good thing. If not, don't just end these things, learn from them, mould and adapt them and re-make and re-own them.

Often, those in power, whether ensconced via democratic means, nationalism, populism or otherwise, don’t wish to topple the very systems that allowed them to be there in the first place.

However, if you break those hierarchies and the many take ownership and responsibility (and are constructively, safely and legitimately allowed to) of the invariably simple structures and processes involved in governing and collectively running the show, simpler complexities arise and can be better managed and learned of and from.

Democracy is difficult. It’s kind of its point and part of its beauty. It aids and helps break societal attitudes and barriers down and gives voice to the many, as difficult and diverse as those might be but surprisingly present more similarities and ambitions than certainly the market would care to have us believe if you’re showing success without using one of its (successful) products and/or services.

Where’s the political party that will dare to stand comfortably in the centre (and even one made up of many sides/party colours), listen, converse and debate with and for all, to uphold the difficulties and diversity that life can and does present and fight for the long-term future and benefits of thinking a little beyond the basic mathematics and being led predominately by a monetary (if not singularly profit-led) economy that works mostly for a minority not a majority and requires more regulation as that also can help more and reduce the power of monetary gain.

Oh, but within a day you can get your [insert product name here] and bemoan the state of the world behind a screen… oh, but watch this now… then this.

Anyway...

...I’ll get me coat.