My dive into doppelganger culture helped attune me to many examples of that-and-thisness, in myself and in others. Extreme cases, like Hans Asperger, who went from a doctor who was curious and caring toward people like my son, to a man who sent kids who were a little different to their deaths. Or even my own Jewish culture—the way it flipped from a place of such bold and elastic debate to the rigid orthodoxies of with-Israel-or-against-us that are only now beginning to crack. Or the way many people joined the 2020 racial justice uprisings, full of revolutionary hope at the prospects for transforming a society based on principles of equality and care—and then, one year later, some of those very same people seemed unreachable, lost to despair and, at times, conspiracy. “If you have never believed yourself to be entitled to anything, you are less likely to turn against others than you are to turn against yourself,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor told me. Each flip is different, but we are all surrounded by evidence of the different people we might have been, and might still become, under slightly different circumstances.

XREF: Connects to the doppelganger/conceptual twin theme and the 'that-and-thisness' exploration of divided selves.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 1099