December 18, 2024

I really tried to persist with finishing Naomi Klein’s book Doppelgänger, exploring the confusion between herself and Naomi Wolf, in the hope of understanding what leads people to fall prey to conspiracy theories. Disclaimer: In my extended Maltese family I have members who believe all the crazy theories about vaccines, Bill Gates, and many more.

In the end I simply gave-up. Life is too short to struggle through books.

I though the idea of using someone broadly similar to the author to explore why they end up in the ‘mirror world’ was very attractive. My problem was that the content of the book was rambling, and that Klein doesn’t set out her thesis strongly enough early in the book (I made it through 100 pages).

The single idea that most resonated with me was that her young students are haunted by a personal doppelgänger — that they are competing against an idealised alternative version of themselves, driven by social media pressures, more than previous generations.

Books


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