The Replacements: Capgras and the Anthropocene

Thoughts on a world of adversarial doubles and surreptitious imitation

TERRESTRIAL CAPGRAS SYNDROME

Last month, a retired UFC fighter began claiming, in a series of images posted to Instagram, that his family had been murdered and replaced with actors. Going as far as requesting assistance from the local police department, he displayed side-by-side photos of his relatives, claiming that the image on the left depicted a real, now-missing brother, while the image on the right showed an impostor, he wrote, an uninvited stand-in.

While there are various explanations for why he might make such claims, one convincing possibility is that the aging combat-sports veteran has developed Capgras syndrome, an unusual disorder in which someone becomes convinced that their friends and loved ones have been surreptitiously replaced by imitators or duplicates. Capgras has been described as a “delusion of doubles,” and it can extend even to non-human creatures—pets, wildlife—as well as to objects, such as the belief that your favorite possession has been replaced by a knock-off or forgery. Because it operates in an anxious haze of counterfeits and replicas, Capgras syndrome suggests an “existential conundrum—the question of what makes an original different from a copy,” as Liesl Schillinger wrote in a review of Rivka Galchen’s novel Atmospheric Disturbances, about a man with Capgras. In literary or even scriptural terms, we might say that Capgras syndrome is when the Friend or the Beloved becomes the Adversary: a sinister replacement, tricking you with demonic ingenuity.

Capgras syndrome, or the belief that something previously real is now fake, seems increasingly useful as an interpretive lens for much of what is happening today on technical, religious, and even climatological fronts. The Anthropocene, for example, is an alleged new era in the Earth’s planetary history in which human beings have become so widespread and so powerful an influence that they have achieved the status of a geological force. Seen abstractly, the Anthropocene represents a transition point after which “nature,” as such, becomes fundamentally contaminated by the artificial or synthetic. It becomes, as it were, Capgrasian. Humanity now looks out upon the world, only to see that world’s anemic replacement: not real but counterfeit. Not original but a forgery. A surreptitious double.

To explore this from a theological angle, when I first heard that Pope Francis had written an encyclical on climate change—Laudato si’—I tried to imagine, before reading it, what a specifically Christian message about climate change might entail. The most likely approach, I assumed, would be that humanity has become lost in an idolatry so extreme that the effects have taken on literally planetary significance—that the world has been replaced by the artificial and unholy, and that this has happened because we allowed ourselves to become hypnotized by our own creations. Enraptured by adversarial synthetics, we lost sight of the divinely real. All of the things we now covet have mesmerized us, locking us in a state of sinful distraction so complete that, through climate change, the world is becoming hostile to our presence. Worship false idols long enough—consume too much, want too much, hoard too much—and the world becomes deadened, identical in outward appearance but fundamentally emptied of life and spirit. The absolute limit of idolatry: total world-replacement. The Earth, become unearthly.

No longer just a question of atmospheric carbon, ocean acidification, or degrees celsius, climate change and the greater Anthropocene it occurs within become symbolic of the Fall—a world definitionally limited to Man, an uncanny valley stripped of any presence of divinity. (Perhaps I was reading the encyclical impatiently, but I recall being disappointed by its almost Thunbergian focus on scientific talking points, as well as what I perceived to be an absence of more powerful metaphoric takeaways—maybe it’s time for a re-read.)

In any case, it strikes me that one way to describe the current, strange planetary moment we are in would be to say that we are willingly stumbling forward into a kind of climatological Capgras syndrome. The atmosphere is now semi-artificial; even rock itself, the very geology of the planet, is being marked by new synthetic compounds and anthropogenic minerals, such as plastiglomerate. Seen this way, what is climate change—metaphorically speaking—if not the Capgrasian replacement of the real with the inimicably artificial? What is the Anthropocene—again, metaphorically speaking—if not an encounter with a kind of psychotic double or sinister twin, a planet coextensive with and identical to the Earth but that no longer offers earthly solace?

I’m reminded of a trip last spring, when I had the pleasure of hiking the length of Loch Ness with my wife and a small group of friends. It was a four-night journey along a network of forest roads, past waterfalls and ravines, beneath grey skies and plentiful Scottish rain. What I had not known before we began, however, was that the forest we’d be hiking through was actually a timber plantation. Regularly spaced, eerily identical trees surrounded us, bearing almost no signs of animal life. No deer, very little birdsong, not even squirrels. It looked like a forest and smelled like a forest, but somehow was not a forest. It was, we might say, a Capgras ecosystem. A replicant landscape.

Although these comparisons falter when taken too literally, it is nevertheless possible to see Capgras syndrome everywhere today, to the extent that Capgras seems to be the guiding logic of the Anthropocene. Consider the rise of artificial mega-constellations, whereby “the stars of the sky compete with thousands of satellites… with companies planning to launch orbiters by the tens of thousands to transmit internet and other communications signals back to Earth.” Even the heavens are now unnatural, so to speak, false stars misleading us with their ersatz zodiac. Capgras constellations. Or consider the rise of chatbots, AI assistants, and smart appliances, all masquerading as others with whom we can engage. And, of course, many people now prefer responsive objects over human interlocutors.

The logic of Capgras is that an adversarial double has arrived—a changeling, a malevolent twin—a contagious replacement that spreads through and consumes the world, while nevertheless appearing identical to what it’s chased away. An insurgent imitation, confronting the world it seeks to replace. This fear, that we have been taken in by an impostor, animates so many of today’s concerns, from how our ecosystems are changing or whether the stars themselves are now something other than they purport to be, to whether our online connections—the acquaintances we follow, the journalists we read, the strangers we hope to date—are actual human beings or merely bots. It is the logic of the surrogate, the replacement, the double, the counterfeit, the simulated, and the faux. It is the logic of Capgras.

Briefly, I want to loop back to the theological. Two quick stories come to mind. The first is something that the writer and theologian Duncan Reyburn posted on social media last year, a remarkable quotation by Scottish poet and minister George MacDonald: “If the Father says, ‘My child, that is a stone; it is no bread;’ and the child answer, ‘I am sure it is bread; I want it,’ may it not be well that he should try his ‘bread’?”

There is something chilling in this—allowing a person to try something, even if, or precisely because, they are lost in delusion, watching someone learn the lesson of first-hand consequence—but it is an image deeply relevant to the present discussion. In our intensifying Anthropocene, our denuding of the world of life and biological richness, our replacement of the wild with the produced, of the different with the same, of the chaotic with the controllable, we are in the process of learning that the stone we wanted to try is not the bread we hungered for. A Capgrasian moment appears to be approaching, in which the entirety of the world beyond ourselves—from the Earth’s atmosphere to engineered species haunting managed landscapes we ourselves have planted—has been demented from within by artificiality. We will interact only with a psychotic imitation of the world; we will eat only stone masquerading as bread.

Finally, something perhaps more hopeful. In a 1978 essay called “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” science fiction novelist and Gnostic paranoiac Philip K. Dick described what he called “fake fakes.” In Disneyland, he wrote, “there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions… The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces… What if the entire place, by a miracle of God’s power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible?” It is the reverse-Capgrasification of the world, in the service of restoring life and divinity. Real birds set loose in a demonic simulation.

This re-eruption of the real amidst its simulations and copies—a cure for Capgras, so to speak—has extraordinary revelatory promise, even if it remains tactically opaque. After all, how does one actually do this? Releasing songbirds in Disneyland is a prank, not a philosophy. Is it possible to out-fake fakery, to preempt the rise of the limitless copy, and to rediscover not the simulant but what the simulant replaced?

AUDIOGRAPHY

As with previous newsletters, I thought I’d end with a couple musical recommendations.

Both because of its heaving, melancholic power and because of its thematic relevance to the discussion above, consider spending some time with the soaring buzzsaw ambience of “that had from eternity been the same and could not be separated or cut into two” by Adam Badí Donoval, taken from his forthcoming album, a mirror where the image and the mirror wholly coincided. It’s abrasive, to be sure, and certainly not for everyone, this short track sizzling with a raw, electric darkness, limping forward in frustrated loops.

Changing genres, I linked to the music of Hieroglyphic Being in a previous newsletter, but a recent track called “U Done Lost Yo Got Dam Mind” is so good, so relentless, and so rewarding of repeated listens that I feel compelled to include it here. Take the growling menace of the Donoval track, soldered onto a bleak and wild switchboard of techno, then play it loud and often.