This explains a lot

The rather astute, insightful and pretty perceptive Naomi Klein wrote many good things in her book, Doppelganger, including this…

It’s no good to only try to understand how things have gotten so strange – we also have to understand how strange they already were. In the neoliberal era that began in the 1970s and has not yet ended, every hardship and every difficulty – from poverty to student debt to home eviction to drug addiction – has been pathologised as a personal failing. Every success, meanwhile, is lauded as proof of the relative superiority of the supposedly self-made. And, of course, these delusions of rugged individualism go far deeper than the half century of neoliberal unmaking. We who live in settler colonial states like the United States, Canada, and Australia have, for the most part, never truly reckoned with the fact that our nations exist only because of the twin thefts of stolen land and stolen people, that slavery and genocide were the bloody subsidies that allowed colonists, many of whom were themselves in debt peonage, to engage in their self-making adventures. And neither have the European nations that launched those colonial crusades in the first place.

We are now reaping the rotted harvest of decades of deliberately sown mistrust – mistrust of the very idea that we are members of communities and societies, mistrust of any expectation that governments can and should do anything positive for us. ‘There is no such thing as society,’¹¹ Margaret Thatcher once declared. Can we really be surprised that so many people believed her? This impoverished way of seeing the world and one another has gone on for so long, expressed itself in so many dialects (union busting, border cruelty, crumbling public hospitals and schools, etc.), that the very concept of a public good has now become foreign. Literally foreign, in the sense that policies that ask anything of individuals – whether in the face of Covid or the climate crisis or the inequality crisis – are now cast in the Mirror World as part of a Chinese plot to impose CCP values on the West.

Of course our societies – born out of the narrowest definitions of don’t-tread-on-me liberty and a staunch commitment to not seeing what’s right in front of us as a way of life – struggled to metabolise the Covid shock. This was a crisis that could only be met if we chose to truly see one another, even those labouring and living in the shadows, a crisis that could only be addressed with collective action and a willingness to make some individual sacrifices for the greater good. Who can forget those first tender weeks when everything froze. When so many of us were so alone, but at the same time alive with connections. Every intake of breath outside the home forced us to think: Who else exhaled into this air? Every time we touched anything – doorknob, elevator button, park bench, food carton, delivery box – we had to think about who else had touched it. Were they well? If they weren’t, did they have the right to call in sick? Did they have access to health care? The illusion of our separateness fell away. We were not, and never were, self-made. We are made, and unmade, by one another.

Our governments didn’t do nearly as much as they could have and should have to build a true infrastructure of care and solidarity during the pandemic – not compared with what we know is possible from the New Deal and the World War II mobilisations of the home front. Still, the period when many governments paid people to stay home, and offered Covid testing and vaccination for free, represented an extreme and historic deviation from every major public policy trend of the last half century, which has been a headlong flight from the very notion that we owe one another anything by right of our shared humanity. They had no choice: without these measures, millions more would have died needlessly and entire economies would have crashed.

It is worth remembering that it took decades to desocialise people to accept neoliberalism’s cruelties. Anti-Black racism and anti-migrant hysteria played powerfully enabling roles, with a steady stream of politicians and media titans equating social programs designed to help everyone in need with Black ‘welfare queens’, ‘super predators’, and ‘illegals’. There is no need to rehash the 1980s and ’90s yet again. But in mapping the contours and happenings of the Mirror World, we do need to understand this: the legacy of generations of messages that pitted members of society against one another does not disappear overnight simply because there is a pandemic. And yet, strangely enough, when Covid hit, that was precisely the expectation among most centrist politicians. Which was itself a form of magical thinking.

With no warning, the message from much of our political and corporate classes changed diametrically. It turned out we were a society after all, that the young and healthy should make sacrifices for the old and ill; that we should wear masks as an act of solidarity with them, if not for ourselves; and that we all should applaud and thank the very people – many of them Black, many of them women, many of them born in poorer countries – whose lives and labour had been most systematically devalued, discounted, and demeaned before the pandemic.

Those expressions of solidarity were the real vertigo, the real upside-down world, since they bore no resemblance to the ways capitalism had taught us to unsee and neglect one another for so very long. Looking back now, it seems entirely unsurprising that a subset of the population said, Fuck you: we won’t mask or jab or stay home to protect people we have already chosen not to see. It also makes perfect sense that the vaccines being free worked against them for many people especially in the United States, a country that treats health care as a profit centre and where many have come to equate good medicine with ‘gold-plated’ private insurance plans. As Kevin Newman, a thirty-one-year-old estate agent in Arkansas reasoned, ‘If Covid was really serious, we’d have to pay for the vaccine. Everything else is expensive so why are they giving it out for free? It’s suspicious.’¹²

It is notable also that the Covid protests took aim at symbols of collective action including, in both Italy and Australia, trade union headquarters, which were attacked and ransacked by diagonalist demonstrators. ‘FREEDOM’, they bellowed in the streets. That empty, heavy word. Freedom to do what? Protests usually are expressions of collective power, based on the core principle that we are stronger when united. But this was something different: a temporary conglomeration of atomised individuals who saw anything collective as the enemy, set against their individual bodies and their individual families. It was, in a way, a revolt against connectedness, a howl against the lessons the virus had taught us all so jarringly: that we share the same air with people we don’t know, the same hospitals, the same biome. That we are enmeshed with one another, like it or not. No, the demonstrators were saying, we are individual islands, shaped with our own hands alone; we answer to no one. We are ‘sovereign citizens’¹³ they declared, and you cannot force us to be in community or society.

None of this should have come as a shock. What is surprising, and frankly heartening, is that, after decades of frontal attacks on the idea that we live in a society, a critical mass of us had held on to enough of a civic and community spirit that we went along with these new rules for the better part of two years, and, moreover, that so many of us rejoiced at the sudden apparition of a social state. Yes, when our governments abandoned their Covid policies, we lapsed back to the crisis called ‘normal’ – but for a time, we glimpsed another world, another kind of collective flip.

A bit this like this passage too...

The extreme consolidation in the corporate world over the past three decades has produced a playing field so rigged against consumers that pursuing the basics of life can feel like navigating a never-ending series of scams. It’s as if everyone is trying to trick us in the fine print of pages and pages of terms of service agreements they know we will never read. The black box is not just the algorithms running our communication networks – almost everything is a black box, an opaque system hiding something else. The housing market isn’t about homes; it’s about hedge funds and speculators. Universities aren’t about education; they’re about turning young people into lifelong debtors. Long-term care facilities aren’t about care; they’re about draining our elders in the last years of life and real estate plays. Many news sites aren’t about news; they’re about tricking us into clicking on auto-playing ads and advertorials that eat up the bottom half of nearly every site. Nothing is as it seems. This kind of predatory, extractive capitalism necessarily breeds mistrust and paranoia. In this context, it's not surprising that Anon, a conspiracy theory that tells of elites harvesting the young for their lifeblood (adrenochrome), has gone viral. Elites are sucking us dry – our money, our labor, our time, our data. So dry that large parts of our planet are beginning to spontaneously combust. The Davos elite aren’t eating our children, but they are eating our children’s futures, and that is plenty bad. QAnon believers imagine secret tunnels underneath pizza parlors and Central Park, the better to traffic children. This is fantasy, but there are tunnels – literal Shadow Lands – under some major cities, and they do house and hide the poor, the sick, the drug-dependent, the discarded. Under the flashing lights of Las Vegas, hundreds or even thousands of people really do live in a sprawling network of storm tunnels.

Like my doppelganger [Naomi Wolf] projecting all of our surveillance fears on a vaccine app, conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right - the feeling of living in a world with Shadow Lands, the feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation and extraction, the feeling that important truths are being hidden. The word for the system driving those feelings starts with c, but if no one ever taught you how capitalism works, and instead told you it was all about freedom and sunshine and Big Macs and playing by the rules to get the life you deserve, then it’s easy to see how you might confuse it with another c-word: conspiracy.

[...a few sections later...]

The Covid era forced a reckoning with all kinds of truths that many of us would rather not know – about our present economic order, and the callous ways that our elders and so many who do the most critical work are treated. And about our collective past: the truth about the centrality of violently stolen African people and violently stolen Indigenous land to the creation of the modern world. It is this reckoning with the past, and its imprints on the present, that so many in my doppelganger’s circle are trying hard to remove from textbooks and the shelves of school libraries. As if this weren’t hard enough, we are also in a reckoning with the future, a future racing toward us after more than three decades of government and corporate leaders doing the precise opposite of what climate scientists pleaded with them to do: reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We feel the brutal futures that lurk behind the glow of our screens, the purr of our engines, the speed of our deliveries. We know the deadly prices that will be paid by our fellow humans both far and near, and by countless other-than-human beings and ecosystems as well. We glimpsed it in the fall of 2022, when floods in Pakistan displaced almost as many people as live in my entire country and drowned a season’s worth of crops, and yet disappeared from our screens long before the waters receded.

In the relatively wealthy parts of this planet, these parallel Shadow Lands are our personal and planetary subconscious, and they haunt us. The ghosts of the past, present, and future, all racing toward us at once. We sense that the barriers that separate these worlds cannot hold for much longer. That, even for the most resourced among us, the curtain hiding the suffering and the ugliness is badly frayed. That just as societies can flip into their monstrous doppelgangers, so can the earth – from habitable to uninhabitable. That, as the Amazonian rain forest incinerates and Antarctica’s ice cliffs heave into the sea, this process has already begun.

...and this one as well...

[…] Just as the Old Jews were trapped in a fraternal battle with European Christians, cast as devils onto which all evil was projected, so the New Jews required their own anti-self: the Palestinian, a locus of perpetual threat inside Israel and on its borders.

To explain how we got to this seemingly intractable place, a little history is required – never a simple proposition in a part of the world where rivalling versions of the past are a dense thicket. The 1930s saw a series of Arab revolts against the influx of Jewish migrants to Palestine, which was then under British control. This wave of Jewish immigration was regarded by many Palestinians as a colonial imposition, a perception that was further cemented when British troops and local police put down the Arab uprising with tremendous force, fuelling further resentment. When Palestine was partitioned in 1947, a move with overwhelming Arab opposition, and Israel declared statehood the next year, the first Arab-Israeli war was locked in. These were the years that Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe: roughly 750,000 Palestinians were expelled, hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed, and thousands were killed, with many of the horrifying truths about these atrocities finally escaping Israel's own Shadow Lands in recent years.

Of course Palestinians would resist such ethnic cleaning with violence of their own. Yet rather than seeing Arab resistance for what it was – a nationalist, anti-colonial battle over land and self-determination (with some anti-Semitic elements, to be sure) – many influential Zionist leaders portrayed the entire Palestinian cause as nothing but more irrational Jew-hatred, a seamless continuation of the very same anti-Semitism that had resulted in the Holocaust, and that therefore needed to be crushed with the kind of militarised force that Jews had not been able to marshal in Nazi-controlled Europe. Within this imaginary, the Palestinian, as the Jew’s new eternal enemy, was treated as so illegitimate, so irrational, so other, that Israelis believed themselves to be justified in reenacting many of the forms of violence, dehumanising propaganda, and forced displacement that had targeted and uprooted the Jewish people throughout Europe for centuries, a process that continues to this day with ongoing home demolitions, Israeli settlement expansions, targeted assassinations, settler rampages through Palestinian communities, openly discriminatory laws, and walled ghettos into which Palestinians are corralled.

[…]

To do onto others the same othering that has been done onto you is, of course, psychologically intolerable. Indeed, such actions are so antithetical to Jewish values that they demand extreme repression and projection. Doppelgangers in literature often embody a partitioned self, and, as [Caroline] Rooney [professor of African and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Kent] writes, ‘doppelgänger politics is first of all a politics of self-partition’,³⁷ with everything we cannot bear to see projected onto the other. If Israel practices doppelganger politics by imitating European nationalisms, it also enacts it in this second way: by projecting all criminality and violence onto the Palestinian other, lest the state’s own foundational crimes be confronted. Meanwhile, the colonial nature of the project only grows more naked with time, with openly racist and Jewish supremacist political players consolidating their power at every level. When it formed at the end of 2022, Israel’s new far-right government called not just for continued occupation of the West Bank but for its annexation, explicitly stating in its coalition agreement that ‘the Jewish people has an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israelin the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.’³⁸ The frontier was moving, as all frontiers do.

With plenty of decent perspective and insight, like the above quoted passages show, Naomi Klein’s memoir, Doppelganger, is well worth your reading time.