Renaming a doppelganger fails to defuse the force that trivializes everything it touches.

Evidence

In Operation Shylock, Real Roth attempts to exercise some kind of control over his “preposterous proxy” by refusing to call him by their shared name and instead renaming him Moishe Pipik—pipik being the catchall diminutive given to naughty kids and schlemiel-like characters in his childhood home; the name literally means “Moses Bellybutton” (fitting for all this navel-gazing). The renaming delivers short-term relief, but ultimately it backfires: Fake Roth is still ensnared in what Roth terms “pipikism,” or bellybuttonism, “the antitragic force that inconsequencializes everything—farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything, superficializes everything.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 470

Categorization

• XREF: Roth’s literary model of doubling (Moishe Pipik) is the direct source of Klein’s own doppelganger method — worth tracking against how she uses her own fake-self in later chapters.
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘pipikism’/‘bellybuttonism’ as a named force that farcicalizes and trivializes — a key concept for the chapter’s argument that the right weaponizes absurdity.