Human-made systems like monarchies and borders are changeable rather than immutable.

Evidence

I’m honestly not sure why anyone should see one queen as absurd and the other as perfectly reasonable. It seems to me that fantasy is at work anytime anyone dares to put on a crown, or draw a line on the earth and declare a new country (especially if it’s someone else’s country, which it always is). In these lands designed to be doppelgangers of other lands (New York, New England, New France, New South Wales, and so on), created by decree by men in various kinds of robes far away, when we start trying to clear away the fact from fiction, fantasy from reality, it will be a good long time before we find something solid. If there is one thing I admire about the diagonalists and other denizens of the Mirror World, it’s that they still believe in the idea of changing reality, an ambition that I fear too many on this side of the glass have lost. We shouldn’t make up facts like they do, but we should stop treating a great many human-made systems—like monarchies and supreme courts and borders and billionaires—as immutable and unchangeable. Because everything some humans created can be changed by other humans. And if our present systems threaten life to its very core, and they do, then they must be changed. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1121

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘lands designed to be doppelgangers of other lands’ point echoes the book’s central doppelganger thesis and the article on Grafting & Growth’s conception of imposed landscapes. — connects to: Adaptability is a key asset that makes regimes easier to modify than replace — Robert B. McCalla, NATO’s persistence after the cold war, 113
• DEEPTHINKING: The move — granting the Mirror World its one genuine virtue (belief in malleability of reality) and retrieving it for the left without adopting its fact-making — is a dense, genuinely dialectical insight that resists one-line summary.
• QUESTION: Does Klein follow through on ‘we must be changed’ — does her device actually deliver a concrete program for changing systems, or is it rhetoric? Worth tracking through the final chapters.