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rodions_hatchet's review
slow-paced
5.0
While I've listened to interviews Naomi Klein has done and I'm familiar with the influence and insights she had presented in her previous works this was the first text of hers I'd sat and read cover to cover. It certainly will not be the last.
Using the progressive Feminist author turned reactionary conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf as the doppelganger imposed on her, Naomi Klein goes on to interrogate what it means to have these bizzare, frustrating, and all too common experiences of being mistaken for someone else, of having her cultivated sense of self and security in her individual personhood simply ignored or rushed past. Things Klein never said, or was even aware of for that matter, resulted in strangers praising, reproaching, or pittying her with the passion and certainty characteristic of the expectations we as a society have come to hold over anyone with a platform, anyone who has successfully developed and marketed their personal brand. However, this is just the beginning, the scaffolding around which the rest of Klein's analysis and critique will be build and expanded upon.
While this doubling experience, this confusing doppelganger dilemma, turns into a bit of an obsession for Naomi Klein in her personal life and conception of her personhood she begins to see these reflecting forces play out in broader political spaces, a distorted presententation of reality. Think QAnon, COVID restriction and vaccine denial, the white-supremacist "Great Replacement Theory", thinly veiled (or overt) antisemitism and eugenics, straight up recycled Nazi propaganda, charges of a world controlling cabal drinking the adrenachrome of murdered children, and so on. These conspiracy theories do not exist in a vacuum, they are the result of history, culture, social forces, and the crushing weight of late stage capitalism. The FEELING that there is a mass conspiracy to keep the majority of the population subjugated, exploited, sick, financially unstable, alone, and surveilled in everything we do is the expected outcome of capitalism, of the very systems we've accepted as inevitable and correct by the simple fact of their existence. However, class analysis, placing these recurring themes and ideas in a broader social and historical context, patiently building mass movements capable of enacting the necessary changes, daring to dream of new ways of being and relating to one another are not as glamorous or exciting as conspiracy theories in which all the negative, ugly, and unbearable realities we face (Klein calls these features the Shadow World) are the result of a small group of malicious evil doers, bad actors who need only be removed from the system for it to function humanely and correctly. These conspiracy theories take actual concrete problems plaguing our common existence and refract them through a series of distortions until the solution to them can be enacted in a way in which those snake oil salesmen, people like Tucker Carlson, Steve Banon, Ben Shapiro, and that whole band of reactionary ghouls, can continue to profit off them while fomenting division and retaining their positions of power and influence, while doing absolutely nothing to address the actual systemic forces creating and sustaining these problems.
If there is one thing our collective experience of living through those uncertain, lonely, and scary days of the COVID lockdown and pandemic have laid bare its this: despite the constant forces of atomizion and individualizion telling us we are, each of us, our own person who makes our own choices that affect our own life, we exist with and through each other, the progressively more polluted air we breath is shared, the precious metals extracted from the earth by enslaved and exploited hands the world over are finite, the climate catastrophies we have created will not go away if we stop using straws. The solutions to these earth altering problems are necessarily collective, inherently shared, revolutionary and massive, they can only be solved through community and inclusion.
This book is thought-provoking, expertly written and meticulously researched. I've only given a broad overview here, I highly encourage you to go pick up a copy from your local bookstore or through bookshop.org.
Happy reading friends, give yourself grace, never stop struggling.
Using the progressive Feminist author turned reactionary conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf as the doppelganger imposed on her, Naomi Klein goes on to interrogate what it means to have these bizzare, frustrating, and all too common experiences of being mistaken for someone else, of having her cultivated sense of self and security in her individual personhood simply ignored or rushed past. Things Klein never said, or was even aware of for that matter, resulted in strangers praising, reproaching, or pittying her with the passion and certainty characteristic of the expectations we as a society have come to hold over anyone with a platform, anyone who has successfully developed and marketed their personal brand. However, this is just the beginning, the scaffolding around which the rest of Klein's analysis and critique will be build and expanded upon.
While this doubling experience, this confusing doppelganger dilemma, turns into a bit of an obsession for Naomi Klein in her personal life and conception of her personhood she begins to see these reflecting forces play out in broader political spaces, a distorted presententation of reality. Think QAnon, COVID restriction and vaccine denial, the white-supremacist "Great Replacement Theory", thinly veiled (or overt) antisemitism and eugenics, straight up recycled Nazi propaganda, charges of a world controlling cabal drinking the adrenachrome of murdered children, and so on. These conspiracy theories do not exist in a vacuum, they are the result of history, culture, social forces, and the crushing weight of late stage capitalism. The FEELING that there is a mass conspiracy to keep the majority of the population subjugated, exploited, sick, financially unstable, alone, and surveilled in everything we do is the expected outcome of capitalism, of the very systems we've accepted as inevitable and correct by the simple fact of their existence. However, class analysis, placing these recurring themes and ideas in a broader social and historical context, patiently building mass movements capable of enacting the necessary changes, daring to dream of new ways of being and relating to one another are not as glamorous or exciting as conspiracy theories in which all the negative, ugly, and unbearable realities we face (Klein calls these features the Shadow World) are the result of a small group of malicious evil doers, bad actors who need only be removed from the system for it to function humanely and correctly. These conspiracy theories take actual concrete problems plaguing our common existence and refract them through a series of distortions until the solution to them can be enacted in a way in which those snake oil salesmen, people like Tucker Carlson, Steve Banon, Ben Shapiro, and that whole band of reactionary ghouls, can continue to profit off them while fomenting division and retaining their positions of power and influence, while doing absolutely nothing to address the actual systemic forces creating and sustaining these problems.
If there is one thing our collective experience of living through those uncertain, lonely, and scary days of the COVID lockdown and pandemic have laid bare its this: despite the constant forces of atomizion and individualizion telling us we are, each of us, our own person who makes our own choices that affect our own life, we exist with and through each other, the progressively more polluted air we breath is shared, the precious metals extracted from the earth by enslaved and exploited hands the world over are finite, the climate catastrophies we have created will not go away if we stop using straws. The solutions to these earth altering problems are necessarily collective, inherently shared, revolutionary and massive, they can only be solved through community and inclusion.
This book is thought-provoking, expertly written and meticulously researched. I've only given a broad overview here, I highly encourage you to go pick up a copy from your local bookstore or through bookshop.org.
Happy reading friends, give yourself grace, never stop struggling.
dkpalmer13's review
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Could have been shorter.