50 Philosophy Classics: Thinking, Being, Acting Seeing - Profound Insights and Powerful Thinking from Fifty Key Books (50 Classics)

His vision was instead a world in which individuality is a myth, and where people are units reflecting whatever is happening in the media, their only purpose to consume images and signs; in this new universe, something is real only if it can be reproduced endlessly, and what is singular or unshareable does not exist.

Baudrillard calls this new world the “hyperreal” and one of its interesting qualities is that it obviates the need for the imaginary, since there is no distinction between what is reality and what is imagined. We are left with a world that is a “gigantic simulacrum” (a simulation or likeness), one that is “never exchanged for the real, but exchange

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”

As rational beings, our greatest happiness comes from choices that we arrive at through reason. We work out what is best for us in the long run, and in following that path happiness comes as a by-product.

The Medium Is the Massage

We can wish for something, but to attain it we have to decide to take particular actions. Similarly, we can believe certain things, but it is action that forms our character.

Baudrillard notes that people are now measured by the extent of their involvement in the flow of media messages. “Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial,”

Emerson implies that it is hubris to believe that our little selves can have any real effect, when, as Chaucer put it, destiny is the “minister-general” that actually decides the course of war and peace, hate and love.

Philosophers have spent centuries arguing about the relative weight between “subject” (I) and “object” (the world), but Baudrillard saw the debate as having long since become insignificant – the object had won hands down. A person today is not a project in selfhood, as many traditions of philosophy and theology have told us, but more like a machine