Pavlo’s Reviews > Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World > Status Update

I so want to love this book. It has so much in it that’s so right on. And then it does sort of what it tells others not to do, which is selectively ignore victims by comparing non-comparable, unrelated injustices and injuries

"Remembering puts the shattered pieces of our selves back together again (re-member-ing); it is a quest for wholeness. At its best, it allows us to be changed and transmuted by grief and loss. But re-traumatization is about freezing us in a shattered state; it’s a regime of ritualistic reenactments designed to keep the losses as fresh and painful as possible.”

“Many years later, my friend Cecilie Surasky, then one of the leaders of Jewish Voice for Peace, observed of these kinds of educational methods: 'It’s re-traumatization, not remembering. There is a difference.' When she said it, I knew it was true. Remembering puts the shattered pieces of our selves back together again (re-member-ing); it is a quest for wholeness."

“Like my doppelganger 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.”

“What is this strange drive to reveal the nonhidden? Maybe it’s that, in liberal democracies that still pay lip service to social equality (or at least “equity”), there is something profoundly unsatisfying about how open our global elites are about the power they believe they have a right to wield over the rest of us.”

“The problem is no longer that we do not know these weighty truths—it is that too many of us do not know how to know them. We all know that our world sits on top of the Shadow Lands. But what do we do with that knowledge? Where does it go? Where is the outrage and shame and sadness diverted?”