Something strange has happened ...

welcome to the Mirror World

Doppelgänger by Elaine Shemilt (1979) via Lux.org

When I was twenty-two I spent an implausibly hot summer working on David Lammy’s (failed) campaign to become the Mayor of London. A disused mobile-phone shop¹ in Fitzrovia became our ad-hoc HQ, and I spent many hours there drinking diet coke and writing briefing notes for David. At the end each day, a dozen boxes from ICCO pizza would arrive to encourage our volunteers to stay and keep making phone calls to party members. I loved the free pizza this experience, and particularly the people I got to meet through it. Most days, for example, a handful of older (and supposedly wiser) advisors and analysts would appear at our HQ offering their two cents on what we should be doing, amongst them: a PR guy called Delroy Corinaldi, former Guardian journalist Martin Bright and a communications specialist called David Mencer.

I tell you these facts because I am trying to understand something that happened last week: as I was scrolling through Twitter on Wednesday, I noticed that an interview Krishnan Guru-Murthy had done with an Israeli government spokesperson was trending. When I watched the full clip, I felt my eyes widen in disbelief. The official government spokesperson, who was ‘expressing grief’ about the killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers by the IDF, was David Mencer, the same David Mencer I had worked alongside on David’s campaign all those moons ago. The David Mencer I was friends with on Facebook.

How had this happened? I found myself wondering that night, and in the days since. How had the affable, friendly person who drove around Fitzrovia on his moped become the official mouthpiece for a government at the exact moment it was prosecuting a merciless campaign described as a ‘text book case of genocide’ by a plethora of human rights experts? Something about watching that clip has stayed with me ever since, it’s a feeling of it not being real, as if it is something I have imagined, or perhaps only dreamed about. But then I search for it again, and it’s still there, playing on loop.

I’ve recently been reading Naomi Klein’s new book ‘Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.’  It’s quite a departure for Klein, as it uses an odd personal experience, that of being frequently mistaken for the journalist

Dr Naomi Wolf

, as it’s jumping off point. Klein argues that this is a problem because Wolf is ‘in open warfare against objective reality’, peddling anti-vax and QAnon conspiracy theories. She argues that her sense of unease about being mistaken for Wolf is linked to this broader feeling she has about how reality is ‘warping’. In this Mirror World, as she calls it, ‘People, once familiar … have become unrecognizable. Altered.’

Perhaps you know this feeling? Of having a schoolfriend you considered ‘normal’, only to find out years later that they are now part of some unhinged conspiracy movement which has transformed their entire outlook. Maybe it took you a few years to clock what had happened, but the tone of their posts on Facebook or Twitter gradually helped you understand that you no longer had much in common. Just last night a friend was telling me about an experience she had of being very close to someone at university, but after he converted to a fundamentalist form of Christianity he cut her off completely. ‘I think he was worried I would judge him’ she explained.

After I watched Kirshnan’s interview, I went on Facebook to check David’s page, and found that he had blocked me. It must have been during a recent clean-up of his socials, as only a few months ago we had an interaction on there. I had shared some of my feelings about the way politicians seemed not to care about the innocent Gazan population, and David had commented, underneath, ‘no poetry when my people are slaughtered and kidnapped?’. He shared some pictures of installations in Israel which highlighted the missing hostages. I shared a piece I had written shortly after the Hamas attack, questioning how we should respond to evil when it arises.

Had he blocked me because he was worried I would judge him? Or because I might scrape his profile and hand it out to journalists? Perhaps the mere presence of my posts on his feed was something he was no longer able to see, an act of self-preservation.   

Klein suggests that this ‘Mirror World’ creates strange chasms between communities and people we once thought we knew, in the realm of politics especially we see ‘each side defining itself against the other … whatever one says and believes, the other seems obliged to say and believe the exact opposite.’ We see this dualism playing out in Krishnan’s interview with David. After one exchange, David gets annoyed with Krishnan, and says ‘At some point, you’ve got to take our side over Hamas’. ‘We don’t take sides’ replies Krishnan, ‘we’re journalists asking questions … what about the other 196 aid workers that have been murdered by Israeli strikes?’

It strikes me that the way we form judgements about who people are (who they really are) is a slippery thing, especially now that so much of our interaction takes place online, through our digital avatars. It is through these lenses that we now gather intel on each other, and come to make conclusions about people based on the ‘evidence’ of their online persona. Over the years, I imagine David came to view me as a naïve, pro-Palestinian bleeding heart who fails to grasp the ‘reality’ of the situation. I’ve come to view him as an increasingly extreme apologist for a racist regime that has killed 33,000 people.

In her conclusion, Klein seems to argue that the ‘Mirror World’ is the result of our failure to see ourselves, and each other, clearly. This is because a digital, hyper-capitalist world forces us to perform an ‘idealized version of ourselves’ in which we continually partition and perfect our ‘self’ based on the way others are likely to perceive us. ‘I think this, more than anything else, explains the uncanny feeling of our moment in history’, she argues, ‘with all of its mirrorings, synthetic selves, and manufactured realities. At bottom, it comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see-in our past, in our present, and in the future racing toward us.’

And so this has led me to wonder: what are the things that I cannot bear to see about myself? What are the things I obscure and preserve myself from, in an effort to reinforce my own sense of self. Yesterday, for example, The Cass Review into gender care was published – this report found that gender services for young people was failing to match the standards of other NHS care. It also argued that the use of puberty blockers lacked a proper evidence base and shouldn’t be prescribed on the NHS.

As a trans-ally, my natural ‘position’ in this debate has always been to listen to the experiences of the trans community – many of whom have been vocal about the important role puberty blockers play as part of a medical pathway. But in doing so, have I failed to also listen to medical professionals because it does not reinforce the narrative I have constructed for myself, because of how much I loathe JK Rowling? Have I failed to listen deeply to the voices of Jewish people as they express their fears around anti-semitism in the UK? Have I failed to recognise that the real currents which underpin the ‘divisions’ I participate in are; Imperialism, Capitalism, Racism and Patriarchy, and not the tweets of a somewhat deranged author?

The Culture Wars are a byproduct of these structures, of course, but my participation in them won’t go very far toward their destruction.  ‘We can be hard and critical on structures, but soft of people’ said the civil rights scholar john a. powell. ‘That is the opposite of the discourse that dominates today’ suggests Klein, ‘the one that is so very hard on people and far too soft on structures.’

There is an alternative version of this piece in which I told you that I always knew David would end up working for Netanyahu, that I perceived this about him from the very moment I met him. But that version of this story would not be true, because people do not conform so tidily to the narratives we are culturally determined to impose upon them. Dismantling the oppressive treatment of the Palestinians will not happen by simply portraying those who support or work for the Israeli government as ‘evildoers’. It will happen when our own governments recognise that the inhumanity of this situation is a stain on every one of us. It will happen through BDS (boycotts, divestment and sanctions), and the collective power of individuals refusing to ignore the plight of the Palestinian people. It will happen because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

It’s a very very strange world: Recommendation Corner

Doppelgänger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein - a brilliant and highly original exploration of culture, division and the human self. I read it in just a couple of days and found myself underlining every other page.

Serial Podcast Season Four - Guantánamo - I’m three episodes into the latest Serial offering and have found interesting parallels between the experience of military staff working in the prison camp and the themes raised by Klein in her book. One former army soldier describes the ‘unreal’ feeling of working in Guantánamo during the day, before heading down to the beach for Pina Coladas and snorkelling(!).

Let there Be Light - this is a short documentary made by megachurch worship leaders Matt and Beth Rodman, detailing their experience of spiritual and emotional abuse by Mike Pilavachi during their time working at Soul Survivor. They do an excellent job of bringing in experts on psychology and spiritual abuse to bring depth and insight to their horrendous story.

Maggie Rogers Higher Calling - NY Times - Maggie Rogers went to Divinity School at Harvard as she was making her second album - who new!? ‘I wanted to build a framework for myself, for how to keep art sacred’ she says.

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1. I think? It might have been an estate agent’s office or something like that.