Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

But doppelgangers, by messing with our heads and our illusions of sovereignty, can help teach us this lesson: that we are not as separate from one another as we might think. Not as individuals, and perhaps not even as groups of individuals who have been born into various kinds of seemingly eternal fratricidal duels.

That, I have always believed, is one of the core reasons for the left to exist: to provide a structural analysis of wealth and power that brings order and rigor to the prevailing (and correct) sense that society is rigged against the majority, and that important truths are being hidden behind pat political rhetoric.

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

The deeper I went, the more I noticed this phenomenon all around me: individuals not guided by legible principles or beliefs, but acting as members of groups playing yin to the other’s yang—well versus weak; awake versus sheep; righteous versus depraved. Binaries where thinking once lived.