I don’t think anyone who has done any thinking on this topic would deny this, but our hypocrisy does not mean that change isn’t desired or is somehow impossible.

Naomi Klein has written well on this topic in her book Doppelganger, which is the first place I ever heard this concept mapped out in all its dark detail.

I’ll just paste the Q & A here, because I think it’s important that people read it. You can look up more on this yourselves:

Q: You also write about another kind of shadow self, borrowing a formulation from the writer Daisy Hildyard—the idea being that, while we’re typing on iPhones, we also exist in rare-earth mines alongside poisoned teen-age laborers. The awareness of the plunder and damage inherent in the idealized American life has increased, but so, perhaps, has the lived acceptance of it, and the result is a simmering sense of unease.

NK: I quote James Baldwin a lot in the book, because I think he’s probably the most powerful theorist of the fear of what Hildyard is talking about. She calls it the second body—the shadow self that’s implicated in all of these systems that are unveiled. It isn’t just that they’re hard to look at, it’s also that we are implicated; we are not apart from them. There is my body sitting in this chair, and there’s my other body, hovering over the tax dollars funding drone warfare, implicated in oil wars, implicated in the plastic in the ocean. That’s not other people—that’s me, that’s us.

Emphasis mine. I just chose this link because it’s free. Not the original source.

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