Meeting yourself#

Warning: This post contains some spoilers about the movie “Coherence”.

Imagine that, right now, through the door that is closest to you, someone walks in, and it is… you. A complete, full, physical double of yourself. This other you is as perplexed as you: similarly shocked to find a complete, full, physical double of itself.

If you think this would merely be interesting and cool you probably have not seen the movie “Coherence”.

In this movie, a small group of people - stuck together in an isolated house during a full power/communication outage - finds itself confronted with a bizarre anomaly in the fabric of space and time. As the power goes down, they go out to ask for help at a house several hundred meters down their own driveway, but as they approach the house, and look through the window, they see another group of people, equally confused and worried about the outage, planning to ask for help at the nearby house. These people, on closer inspection, turn out to be… themselves.

Reality appears to have bifurcated, and the two realities seem to have started to overlap 1

The rest of the movie basically revolves around the question how to respond to such a insane (temporary) rupture in space time.

Trusting yourself#

The reason why I think this is an interesting movie, is not just because it (metaphorically) scares the cr*p out of me,2 but also because I believe it presents us with a very interesting question, the answer to which, I believe determines - let’s keep it light - the fate of our species: if we would run into ourselves, would we trust ourselves?

If you would run into someone who knows exactly what you know, who knows you as well as you know yourself, who wants exactly what you want, who has the same dreams, desires, who loves the same things, who is attached to the same things, who wants for itself exactly what you want for yourself: what would happen?3

Would you be able to share your reality? Would you be able to make space? Would you be able to co-exist? Or would you be afraid? Afraid to be replaced? Displaced? To lose out? To be undermined?

Self-fulfilling (dis)trust#

One reason why I find this an interesting question, is because there is a powerful self-fulfilling (reinforcing) feedback loop here.

In the movie, one of the protagonists starts to contemplate to preemptively take out (kill) his other self, because knowing himself, he is worried that his other self is contemplating (and worrying about) the same thing. In a quite literal way, he is fighting his inner demons, except they are now real and out there.

In this unstable self-fulfilling situation, the smallest dark thought, if not controlled by some reflex of trust, can create the world in it’s own dark image.4

Whereas the movie is mostly approaching this question from the perspective of individual psychology and small groups, I can’t help but wonder how things would work out on “higher levels of social aggregation”: would a country like the Netherlands trust itself, if a double would suddenly appear off its coast? If we would suddenly “discover” ourselves the way we “discovered” other places in the world?

Would we be driven by the fear of ourselves? Given what we know about what we did to others? Throughout our blood-stained (colonial) history?

You have to distrust yourself, before you can distrust someone else#

In the end, luckily, chances are quite low that we will actually meet exact copies of ourselves. If not for the (probably) shaky physics behind the movie, then for the fact that the comet that is blamed for messing up reality (“Miller’s comet”) does not seem to exist.

Still I believe (a variant of) the question raised in this movie can shed an important light on contemporary politics, both on a national and a global level.

We just need to make a slight adjustment: we might be unlikely to encounter ourselves, but in our encounter with others, the ideas we have of these others depend to a large extent on the ideas we have of ourselves. In our attempt to understand what goes on in the minds of others, our own minds are the closest thing we have to study.

White nationalists, to take an example, are afraid of the growing emancipation of other ethnic groups, because they know what they themselves would do to themselves (white people) if they would be the emancipating ethnic group that has been oppressed for so long. As such, the fear of the so-called “Great Replacement” (the supposed extermination of the “white race”) in (for example) the U.S. has to be understood in the context of the actual historical “great replacement” (i.e. large-scale genocide) committed by the white settler colonists. People simply fear (or are convinced) that others will treat them the same way they have proven capable of treating others.5

A racist can simply not imagine a world without racism, which means that he will do whatever he can to at least make sure that “his race” stays on top. Any attempt to dismantle the current racial hierarchy is simply the first step towards a new racial hierarchy in which he might just as well end up at the bottom.

In a similar way, in their murderous Zionism, many settler colonists in Israel can’t even begin to imagine a secular, democratic state in which they live peacefully as equals with the indigenous Palestinian population, simply because they know how far they themselves are ready to go (and have gone)6 to protect themselves against any kind of risk.7 They simply can’t imagine Palestinians being any different. “Given that genocide is inevitable”, they appear to think, “we’d better make sure we’re the ones committing it”.8

Forgiving the racist colonial masters of the past and present#

Something similar could of course be said about the people arguing for peace and co-existence: they believe a world without hatred and hierarchy is possible, because they feel within themselves, that such a world is possible.

They are willing to give up any privilege they have, because introspection has led them to believe that others will not (necessarily) abuse this to simply flip the oppression. They are willing to “degrow” their economy, and give up military and economic superiority, because introspection has led them to believe that this will not (necessarily) expose their kids (and their kids’ kids) to a mirror image of their own violent and colonial past.

This, for sure, is an enormous leap of faith. If only because it requires an unprecedented act of forgiveness on behalf people who - after having been massacred and exploited for centuries - are expected to renounce any kind of retribution: “the atrocities of colonial exploitation can never happen again” the trustful peace advocates expect everyone to say, after having reaped the fruits of colonialism and fossil-fueled industry for centuries.

In fact, I might agree with some of pessimists here, that without some serious global “truth and reconciliation” and large-scale national and international reparation, more than a “leap of faith”, such a renunciation of privilege and superiority is probably going to be a naive leap into the abyss.

But in claiming this, I might be mistakenly ascribing to others, my own inability to forgive the racist, colonial masters of the past and present.

  1. The premise behind the movie is that whenever something can happen in multiple ways, reality splits (branches out) into multiple realties, in which each of the possibilities materialize (see the Many Worlds Interpretation). Normally, these realities remain completely separate: you always only exist in one reality. But sometimes, the movie speculates, the proximity of some massive celestial body, like a passing comet, can break this decoherence, causing the multiple realities to temporarily overlap. ↩︎

  2. Lot’s of uncanny valley moments. Also: when imagining monsters, we often imagine beings that are very different from us (thick fur, horns, big sharp teeth, or slimy, insect bodies), but looking at the (historic) scale, utter depravity, and treacherous horror of human violence (to other humans and other species), nothing is as scary as we are. Especially, as a friend recently pointed out, because we don’t treat each other (for example) as animals: it’s much worse than that. We carefully adjust our violence and torture to what we know would terrify and hurt us: we use our knowledge of ourselves to inflict maximum suffering. ↩︎

  3. It is much harder to live together with someone who is the same/ very similar, for the simple fact that you both want the same things. See also the Narcisim of small differences. ↩︎

  4. In Dutch, there is a saying: “zoals de waard is vertrouwd hij zijn gasten”, which translates to “the innkeeper trusts his guests the way he trusts himself”. You could maybe also say that the innkeeper creates a world in the image of his own imagination. ↩︎

  5. There are many parallels between these ideas/thoughts and Naomi Klein’s amazing book “Doppelganger”, which makes me wonder why she doesn’t refer to it. Maybe she hasn’t seen it? ↩︎

  6. Of course, it requires more than a footnote to recognize that part of this world view is rooted in the Holocaust. See also this article. ↩︎

  7. There is a strategic reinforcing feedback loop here as well: the more outrageous and murderous the Zionist violence, the more plausible the prediction will be (to many people) that, when given the chance, Palestinians will engage in some form of violent revenge: a prediction that in turn is used to justify the ongoing outrageous and murderous Zionist violence. ↩︎

  8. People interested in International Relations will probably recognize the basic (self-fulfilling) logic of Realism. Fans of Kurzgesagt might think of this video. ↩︎