The precession of simulacra discusses about how the border of the real and unreal has gradually disappeared. Eventually, it is the simulacra, the imitation of the real world become what makes sense for us and what makes up our mentality about the world. Disneyland was an interesting example of how a commercial imaginary world persuades us that the man-made world out there is the real world. We went from having something original to a culture of counterfeiting, and finally reaching a point where the duplicate replaced the original. The example of a crazy person who faked being crazy was an example of simulation removing the impact of reality. Because craziness could be faked, some may believe all crazy people are taking it. One example is of a historical cave, which was reproduced in order to leave the original intact, but the two caves might as well have been the same because the impact of the simulated cave is the same.
War footage has in many cases replaced the reality of war; we believe war is what is represented in the images/videos in the media but the footage is typically sanitized to remove the reality of the violence (Americans banning footage of dead Iraqis and soldiers in Iraq). Once simulated, a situation goes through a process of interpretation which may involved removing (censoring) and/or adding (overemphasizing) certain elements. A faked illness could appear real, including all symptoms, however it is not real in that the source is not real. Baudrillard talked about how the simulacra starts as the imitation of the real and becomes the real itself. Someone said that words are dangerous because they make up what doesn’t exist. It is all our idea about the universe. By simplifying this world and its diverse body of elements through language as the simulacra, we lost contact with the nature of things and are attached to the abstract world of the mind. Language is a powerful yet dangerous tool: communication organizes the world, but it also takes away the divinity of the real things and leaves us with the abstract ideas about the world that only exists in our mind. Through a distinct environment like politics, such as the Watergate example, “some would say” that if a system is corrupted, it works because actions are taken to denunciate it! Hence, the simulacrum/existence of democracy is then reinforced, but deceitfully hides it defects.
If humankind was able to perceive things by their essence and not through their symptoms/effects. Would simulations replace reality? How would people base their understanding?
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