Doppelgangers, however, are not only forms of torment. For centuries, doubles have been understood as warnings or harbingers. When reality starts doubling, refracting off itself, it often means that something important is being ignored or denied—a part of ourselves and our world we do not want to see—and that further danger awaits if the warning is not heeded. That applies to the individual but also to entire societies that are divided, doubled, polarized, or partitioned into various warring, seemingly unknowable camps. Societies like ours.

XREF: Connects to Freud's uncanny and literary double traditions, plus contemporary polarization discourse.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 25