When one of my children was about four-years-old, I posed this question: "Are cars alive?"
The answer surprised me: “Yes.”
I asked why.
The reasoning seemed sound. “They move.”
They are, of course, auto-mobiles, the key part of the word being auto, “self.” And although we adults know that they are “not alive” though capable of “self propulsion,” we recognize the difference between their inorganic nature and our organic one and the necessity of a force of some kind to imbue an object with motion.
With regard to my question, note that I am not some Skinnerian experimenter, so my asking one child one question doesn’t constitute a “scientific inquiry” about the human brain and perception or about any system in the brain, such as the limbic system. But that question I posed decades ago now resurfaces in the context of an article by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “evolutionary psychologists” at the University of California at Santa Barbara, * a book by Jean Baudrillard **, and my 11-month-old great granddaughter’s first trip to Disney World.
Not-So-Auto Automobiles: A Context for Our Simulated Lives
As children riding in cars, we gradually recognize that some human is in control of the movement. Eventually, we recognize the complexity of the processes involved in the context of adults taking the wheel. When we move from the back to the front seat, we observe hands on steering wheel, maybe on gear shift, and, if we can see over the transmission hump, feet working accelerator and brake, and in stick shifts, the clutch.
Wow! These hunks of metal require a great deal of human attention. Who thought to name them “automobiles” way back in the nineteenth century? Didn’t people also drive those first cars?
Maybe it’s from the perspective of the sidewalk that we learn about the difference between a hunk of metal moving itself voluntarily and a hunk of metal under the control or out of control of a human. Somehow we come to the realization that inorganic objects don’t move without some force moving them and that they don’t stop without a counter force or resistance, such as friction applied by road and brakes, uphill’s downhill pull of gravity, or a solid object like a utility pole, wall, or other car. And although motion is often a part of life, we learn to distinguish the reality of what it means to be alive from the concept of motion.
In this fledgling era of self-driving cars, the distinction between auto and controlled might be even more difficult to distinguish for a young mind. If I remember writing this in a couple of years, I might ask that same question about cars and life to my great granddaughter. Again, my asking will lead to a mere anecdote and not some research in evolutionary or developmental psychology worth publication.
But the answer that a three- or four-year old might be typical of how a young brain sees the world, particularly how it might associate moving with living or moving as a representative parameter of living. And it might also be indicative of how we come to relate objects to objects and objects to ideas as representations of “real things,” even representations of life.
Art as Representational of Idea
Sculptures and paintings represent the real world, don’t they? But what of a Jackson Pollock painting, such as “One: Number 31, 1950” hanging in MoMA? What does it represent? Or what of a Barbara Hepworth’s “Mother and Child” and “Pierced Form” sculptures with twists and holes? Are we looking at representations of ideas and feelings and not actual objects upon which we can stub a toe in the dark? Think of Picasso’s “Guernica,” called by some the best of anti-war art. What does it represent? The pain caused by war? If I go to the doctor with a pain, I might have to rate it on a scale from 1 to 10. But what if on some medical form I am asked to “paint” my pain? Should I hand in a picture of Picasso’s picture? Should I paint in light gray, gray, dark gray, charcoal, or black, using shading to represent pain’s intensity?
Adults can comprehend “pain caused by war” as a “reality.” They can see the relationship between the art and “something real.” But that “seeing” the reality of a chaotic phenomenon like war requires either direct or indirect experience. I can read about destruction, injury, and death caused by a specific war, and I can see the connection between a work of art created to represent those products of war and the war that caused them. I understand that representation can occur between symbol and simulacrum and something I know in my “real world.” The Statue of Liberty doesn’t represent a woman; it represents liberty, an intangible, but nevertheless a “real” intangible.
Disney
Among the topics Baudrillard discusses in Simulacra and Simulation is Disneyland (read Disney World, also). During my granddaughter’s first visit to Disney World, her mother carried her to see Minnie Mouse. As Minnie waved to the approaching child, the baby waved in return, and upon getting close, reached out to touch Minnie’s plastic nose. She obviously recognized Minnie from the Disney Channel’s programming, that recognition evidenced by her beginning to wave and point as she waited her turn.
But what did she think? I assume she will never remember the incident because our memories don’t go back to 11 months of age. At least, mine don’t, and I haven’t met anyone who can actually remember the specifics of the first year of life. But I do know that she appeared to recognize Minnie even though she had only seen her simulacrum on TV, a big TV, but nonetheless, a TV, and therefore a two-dimensional simulacrum. In Disney World she encountered a three-dimensional Minnie who moved and returned her “hello” wave. Was Minnie as “alive” for her as the car was for my talking toddler all those years ago?
My great granddaughter was in full recognition mode. And Minnie was “larger than life,” waving, and putting out a big white gloved three-fingered hand to touch this little human’s outstretched arms and pointing finger. The question I wish I could ask is one that adults could ask about monsters in the closet or under the bed. “Is Minnie Mouse alive?” has a corollary in a question that could be posed to almost any child who grows up in a home that has a Christmas tree and cookies laid out on Christmas Eve: “Is Santa real?” Had anyone asked me that question when I was four, I would have answered, “Yes.”
Art as Nonrepresentational
As Baudrillard points out, a Disney character like Minnie ISN’T A REPRESENTATION OF REALITY, unless one counts art that represents art as such. In fact, Disneyland and Disney World represent a world that doesn’t exist, but a world that seems very real to those who go to the parks. When one enters the parks, he encounters “a play of illusion and phantasms” (12). And simulated experiences abound: Mission Space gives one the feeling of weightlessness and space travel; Test Track gives one the feeling of race car driver; Soarin’ and Avatar’s Flight of Passage give one the feeling of flying over this world and over a fictional world. And throughout the parks there are rides that fool the brain by the subtle manipulation of moveable seating, lighting effects, and tracked cars. Disney World’s and Disneyland’s thrill rides are representations of extreme movements that we imagine occur in the “real world.” In Disney’s rides one can experience Einstein’s equivalence principle: Acceleration is not different from gravity. That begs a question from me: Is a model the equivalent to a real-world phenomenon?
Can we assume that adults can distinguish representations of the “unreal” from the representations of the “real” just as we can distinguish between an object that moves and a living being that moves? Baudrillard wrote his book at the beginning of a new era of movie-making. In the 1980s the advent of computer generated imagery (CGI) led to representations that appear to be “real” and indistinguishable from actual actors. Directors can now film whole scenes knowing that CGI editors can eliminate certain realities like wires and microphones and insert “human figures” doing the impossible, as in Spiderman’s leaping from building to building. We adults know that such representations represent no real-world phenomena. But Baudrillard makes another point, and this one is a serious assault on our supposed “adult” view of the world.
“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation” (12).
I’ll restate: We have put the cart before the horse. We have “models” of reality, and we interpret them as reality. And we are so convinced that our models are real that we prefer them over what is truly real. And now we live according to models imposed by those who control entertainment, the media, and government. If you doubt this, I invite you to revisit the history of the recent pandemic, when all of the above forced Americans and Europeans into obeying intrusive restrictions on individual freedom, like making people wear masks, getting vaccinated, closing their businesses, following arrows on the floors of grocery stores, and restricting their travel. Sold by the idea that they knew best, the “authorities” mandated their ideal rules—though many of them believed themselves to be above restriction (Thank you, Gov. Gavin Newsom for enjoying a meal at an expensive restaurant and Speaker Nancy Pelosi for getting your hair done at a salon while the rest of America hoped the bare grocery shelves would soon be refilled and the beauty salons would reopen for the ordinary citizen). The “authorities” and their “minions” had models of the ideal protective world to follow, and they made everyone save themselves follow those models. Baudrillard cites this form of control as “the invisible violence of security” (57).
Climate and Socialism Models on Autopilot
To date many climate predictions have proved to be as unreal as Minnie Mouse. Remember Al Gore’s and the IPCC’s predictions? Remember how sea level rise on an ice-free planet would inundate all coasts? Remember the associations with extinction as embodied in an “existential threat”? And every time some heat wave or cold spell, some hurricane or tornado, or some drought or flood occurs, the alarmists look to the models, the representations for confirmation that the models were the reality. Under the tyranny of models no amount of pointing out that the climate systems of the planet are more than a product of atmospheric composition dissuades the believers that they might be taking representation for reality, simulacrum for reality, just as no amount of pointing to the many failed models convinces any climate alarmist that his faith in those models is unwarranted.
And the same can be said for almost all modern peoples. Everyone everywhere can be programmed by models even when models model nothing real, such as the socialist model of economy, a model that time after time has proved to impoverish rather than uplift a people. But regardless of representations that reflect the lives of those who have lived under socialist, communist, or fascist societies, the Left and the Left-leaning cling to their models. They are on autopilot.
Like so many who see the Climate Minnie Mouse as real, modern democrats have accepted the wholesale disruption of fossil fuel use in America as a panacea in itself. In obedience to the model, they have chosen to impoverish the country while other countries power their economies. And among the disruptions they have willingly accepted is the abrupt transition to electric cars.
In the nineteenth century another term associated with automobiles was electromobile. Yes, some 124 years ago there were EVs. But the superiority in ease of use led to the internal combustion engine’s dominance. Not now, however. The model that says carbon dioxide will kill us all has generated an artificial demand for electric cars whose mileage doesn’t match that of gasoline powered cars, whose energy must come from some abundant source, and whose pollutants are every bit the equal of poisons that gasoline-powered cars empty into the environment. Can anyone say “lithium and heavy metals and rare earths in landfills and ground water”?
But Hollywood style, Disney style, CGI style, a large segment of population has taken the model of a booming fossil-fuel-free economy as the reality, and increasingly more politicians have accepted this simulacrum of a reality that really doesn’t exist. It’s a model of a model they believe is real, and to support the model they will use any particular, such as an individual storm or an unchallenged assertion that the Great Barrier Reef will soon die.
Control
Who is the driver? Or should I ask, “What is the driver?” Baudrillard discusses the Left’s obsession with the “evils” of capitalism (except when the Left profits). He writes that capitalism, which the Left sees as an evil, is, in fact, an unthinking “monstrous unprincipled enterprise, nothing more” (15). But true to their sense of superiority, the Leftists under the guise of being “the enlightened” seek to control capitalism by imposing constraints and bending its knee to their various social contracts. And as recent times attest, those controls amount to full control by the few over the many in the name of equity. It’s the runaway car of capitalism, wildly driving through the streets without their control that they fear and claim has a purpose to oppress, whereas in their responses, they seek total control under whatever cause of the day they support: BLM, Defund the Police, Equal Pay for All, Free College, Free Food, Free Houses, Free Whatever, all in the name of the ideal equity and all designed to destroy the unbridled freedoms associated with a chaotic capitalist society that generated the unprecedented wealth of the modern world. They want us all in a self-driving car of their design with a pre-programmed route and destination—and no questions, mind you.
And the modus operandi is always that “we know better” than you. “We have ‘science’ and economic theory to back us even though our science and our economic theory can’t be questioned or checked without serious consequences to the questioner, doubter, denier, and fact-checker. The models are everything. They are reality.” Minnie Mouse is real because she moves. Minnie is real because we say she is real. The ideal has become the real.
So, now American society is on autopilot, driven by models of models, driven by phantasmagorical ideas. We’re living in Disneyland and Disney World. We’re living in a CGI film. And the mainstream media, the embedded Leftists in the government, and the social media denizens have put themselves and the rest of us into a self-driving car over which we have no control and whose destination we can surmise won’t be as productive, healthful, or free as the American Dream that has been associated with abundant energy since advent of coal mining, the discovery of petroleum and natural gas reserves, and the inventions of the steam engine and the internal combustion engine. Instead, the model is some “ideal” that exists in the minds of those elites who seek to control us by taking our wealth and redistributing it as they see fit (e.g., $500 million thrown into Solyndra).
How Did We Let Them Fool Us?
Think reality TV. Or, rather, I should use an interrogative: Do you think reality TV with its producers, directors, editors, sound mixers, casting directors, publicists, advertisers, etc., is reality. Are the characters playing themselves or parodying themselves? What should we think when reality catches up with TV reality as it did with Todd and Julie Chrisley, both sentenced to prison after a long-running series about their perfect lives? Regardless of reality TV’s fictions, many fans of such shows wish to emulate those on the screen, little girls, for example, who want to be “just like Kim Kardashian." And that desire to emulate, to imitate, extends beyond getting plastic surgery. Disney now has biological men with mustaches playing Disney princesses for little girls wanting to be princesses. And that same blurring of reality has become an agenda of some educators and a cause célèbre that embroils people in unresolvable debate and episodes of targeted “cancellation” with accusations and labels like “homophobic,” “transphobic,” “xenophobic,” “supremacist,” and “anti-science.” When make-believe is reality, no previous forms of logical discourse apply. You accept a position you don’t believe, or you suffer ostracism.
Our models of models are often far removed from reality. In fact, like many Disney simulacra, they refer to nothing real. That’s a problem for us. Our brains, having evolved to face “the real” over hundreds of thousands of years to support survival of the species are now faced with “the unreal.” As Leda Cosmides and John Tooby write, “Modern environments differ importantly from ancestral ones, particularly when it comes to social behavior. We no longer live in small, face-to-face societies, in seminomadic [sic.] bands of 25–200 men, women, and children, many of whom [sic.] were close relatives. Yet our cognitive programs were designed for that social world.”
Now we all live in not only a more populous environment, but we also live in one that has removed “reality” from daily survival: I don’t farm or raise cattle, but I have eaten well; I don’t sleep with a fire at the cave entrance to ward off wolves and bears. My life and yours differ significantly from the lives of those nomadic and semi-nomadic people that gave rise to our brains. And the selection of men as hunters and women as gatherers no longer applies to modern urban life.
Just by living and reproducing in challenging environments over thousands of years, our hunter-gatherer ancestors unknowingly shaped our brains. They evolved our ability to adapt to a real environment. My brain and yours still harbor the adaptive nature we need to survive in a hostile world. We attend to an animal more readily than an inanimate object in our field of view, for example. Your brain still contains an ability to adapt to that hostile world filled with threatening real beasts from spiders and snakes to bears and lions.
For a contrast, think of how briefly a Disney World of models with and without referents has existed. After millions of years of brain evolution, most of them under “real” conditions, we have entered a relatively recent world of simulacra. Even if one goes back to the first sculptures of gargoyles or farther back to those of satyrs and centaurs which have no real referents, the time for evolutionary change in neural networks has been short by an order of magnitude when we look at 200,000 years or more of human evolution—and that doesn’t take into account the preceding millions of years of hominid evolution.
And to draw a short comparison: The cave art at Lascaux represented for the artists the actual objects and beings they tried to draw. Our art can be “abstract.” We don’t need physical or actual referents or antecedents; we make up our referents if we choose. We model models in the modern world of Disney-like lifestyle. We simulate simulacra.
Baudrillard notes that not far from the Lascaux Cave there now lies a replica cave, a museum that has copies of the Lascaux art. Yep, that’s what we’ve become. Who needs the original when we have the imitation? Las Vegas has an Eiffel Tower, a Statue of Liberty, a Pyramid; one half of EPCOT replicates an Aztec Pyramid, a bazaar in Morocco, the Eiffel Tower, and the bell tower in St. Mark’s Square in Venice among other models of buildings. Who needs the reality when we have the ideal? We have models with actual referents; we have museums filled with imitations, such as Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum’s and Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry’s “trip into a coal mine.” We don’t need the “real thing” because we have a model of it.
In this context of modeling models, we find the Leftists. They want us to live according to ideals that have nowhere and at no time been proved to be either useful or uplifting. They dream of a world without carbon dioxide when most life on the planet craves it. No doubt they would do away with photosynthesis if they did not also include a population of vegans. Certainly, they now want us to do away with cheap abundant energy unless we are Chinese or Indian or any other population attempting to acquire the same wealth and lifestyle Americans have represented for more than a century.
Who needs capitalism’s wealth when we have socialism’s ideals in spite of the latter’s history of impoverishment, enslavement, murder, and even genocide? If one judges by recent surveys (many online), he or she will find that the model of ideal socialism has attracted America’s youth. Yet that model is based on nothing “solid,” nothing historical.
Terrorism of the Mind
Toward the end of his book, Baudrillard addresses a key procedure adopted by those who would impose their models on the rest of us, a procedure that applies very well to climate alarmism. He writes, “If every strategy today is that of mental terror and of deterrence tied to the suspension and the eternal simulation of catastrophe, the only means of mitigating this scenario would be to make the catastrophe arrive, to produce or to reproduce a real catastrophe. To which nature is at times given…” (57).
Have you noticed that one of the chief mechanisms that Democrats use to control the populace is fear? He writes, “Closer to us, this is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposing tone invisible violence of security” (57). The Left imprisons by offering “security,” and it controls by suggesting that such security is threatened: “The Republicans want to take away your Social Security and your health care.” That’s exactly what happened during the lockdowns, the mandated vaccinations, and the masks. They offered security under terroristic threats. In following the Left’s mandates, the masses made themselves prisoners to the “ideal.”
And that’s what happens under socialism’s vehicle. The populace merely rides in a fully auto car which now has assumed a life of its own.
Takeaway
We are besieged by models of worlds that do not exist. The process started with the rise of civilization in the last ten millennia forcing us to adapt our brains to those models as “realities” of our world. The problem for us lies in the nature of brains that evolved more to survive real-world situations than to survive models of the real world, or models of models and models with no real-world referents. Add to this need to adapt to an unreal world the pressure imposed by tyrannical Leftists’ minds that seek to control through adherence to ideals, and one can see the dilemma we all face: Obey and accept the models, or disobey and risk retribution by those in control.
*Annual Review of Psychology, 2013 (January). Vol. 64:201-229. Evolutionary Psychology: New Perspectives on Cognition and Motivation. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131628 Online at https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131628 Accessed ten years after its publication, 2023 and still available for your perusal.
**Sheila Fabia Glaser, Translator, Simulacra and Simulation. 1994. Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press. Original French version, 1981, published by Editions Galilee.
The answer surprised me: “Yes.”
I asked why.
The reasoning seemed sound. “They move.”
They are, of course, auto-mobiles, the key part of the word being auto, “self.” And although we adults know that they are “not alive” though capable of “self propulsion,” we recognize the difference between their inorganic nature and our organic one and the necessity of a force of some kind to imbue an object with motion.
With regard to my question, note that I am not some Skinnerian experimenter, so my asking one child one question doesn’t constitute a “scientific inquiry” about the human brain and perception or about any system in the brain, such as the limbic system. But that question I posed decades ago now resurfaces in the context of an article by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “evolutionary psychologists” at the University of California at Santa Barbara, * a book by Jean Baudrillard **, and my 11-month-old great granddaughter’s first trip to Disney World.
Not-So-Auto Automobiles: A Context for Our Simulated Lives
As children riding in cars, we gradually recognize that some human is in control of the movement. Eventually, we recognize the complexity of the processes involved in the context of adults taking the wheel. When we move from the back to the front seat, we observe hands on steering wheel, maybe on gear shift, and, if we can see over the transmission hump, feet working accelerator and brake, and in stick shifts, the clutch.
Wow! These hunks of metal require a great deal of human attention. Who thought to name them “automobiles” way back in the nineteenth century? Didn’t people also drive those first cars?
Maybe it’s from the perspective of the sidewalk that we learn about the difference between a hunk of metal moving itself voluntarily and a hunk of metal under the control or out of control of a human. Somehow we come to the realization that inorganic objects don’t move without some force moving them and that they don’t stop without a counter force or resistance, such as friction applied by road and brakes, uphill’s downhill pull of gravity, or a solid object like a utility pole, wall, or other car. And although motion is often a part of life, we learn to distinguish the reality of what it means to be alive from the concept of motion.
In this fledgling era of self-driving cars, the distinction between auto and controlled might be even more difficult to distinguish for a young mind. If I remember writing this in a couple of years, I might ask that same question about cars and life to my great granddaughter. Again, my asking will lead to a mere anecdote and not some research in evolutionary or developmental psychology worth publication.
But the answer that a three- or four-year old might be typical of how a young brain sees the world, particularly how it might associate moving with living or moving as a representative parameter of living. And it might also be indicative of how we come to relate objects to objects and objects to ideas as representations of “real things,” even representations of life.
Art as Representational of Idea
Sculptures and paintings represent the real world, don’t they? But what of a Jackson Pollock painting, such as “One: Number 31, 1950” hanging in MoMA? What does it represent? Or what of a Barbara Hepworth’s “Mother and Child” and “Pierced Form” sculptures with twists and holes? Are we looking at representations of ideas and feelings and not actual objects upon which we can stub a toe in the dark? Think of Picasso’s “Guernica,” called by some the best of anti-war art. What does it represent? The pain caused by war? If I go to the doctor with a pain, I might have to rate it on a scale from 1 to 10. But what if on some medical form I am asked to “paint” my pain? Should I hand in a picture of Picasso’s picture? Should I paint in light gray, gray, dark gray, charcoal, or black, using shading to represent pain’s intensity?
Adults can comprehend “pain caused by war” as a “reality.” They can see the relationship between the art and “something real.” But that “seeing” the reality of a chaotic phenomenon like war requires either direct or indirect experience. I can read about destruction, injury, and death caused by a specific war, and I can see the connection between a work of art created to represent those products of war and the war that caused them. I understand that representation can occur between symbol and simulacrum and something I know in my “real world.” The Statue of Liberty doesn’t represent a woman; it represents liberty, an intangible, but nevertheless a “real” intangible.
Disney
Among the topics Baudrillard discusses in Simulacra and Simulation is Disneyland (read Disney World, also). During my granddaughter’s first visit to Disney World, her mother carried her to see Minnie Mouse. As Minnie waved to the approaching child, the baby waved in return, and upon getting close, reached out to touch Minnie’s plastic nose. She obviously recognized Minnie from the Disney Channel’s programming, that recognition evidenced by her beginning to wave and point as she waited her turn.
But what did she think? I assume she will never remember the incident because our memories don’t go back to 11 months of age. At least, mine don’t, and I haven’t met anyone who can actually remember the specifics of the first year of life. But I do know that she appeared to recognize Minnie even though she had only seen her simulacrum on TV, a big TV, but nonetheless, a TV, and therefore a two-dimensional simulacrum. In Disney World she encountered a three-dimensional Minnie who moved and returned her “hello” wave. Was Minnie as “alive” for her as the car was for my talking toddler all those years ago?
My great granddaughter was in full recognition mode. And Minnie was “larger than life,” waving, and putting out a big white gloved three-fingered hand to touch this little human’s outstretched arms and pointing finger. The question I wish I could ask is one that adults could ask about monsters in the closet or under the bed. “Is Minnie Mouse alive?” has a corollary in a question that could be posed to almost any child who grows up in a home that has a Christmas tree and cookies laid out on Christmas Eve: “Is Santa real?” Had anyone asked me that question when I was four, I would have answered, “Yes.”
Art as Nonrepresentational
As Baudrillard points out, a Disney character like Minnie ISN’T A REPRESENTATION OF REALITY, unless one counts art that represents art as such. In fact, Disneyland and Disney World represent a world that doesn’t exist, but a world that seems very real to those who go to the parks. When one enters the parks, he encounters “a play of illusion and phantasms” (12). And simulated experiences abound: Mission Space gives one the feeling of weightlessness and space travel; Test Track gives one the feeling of race car driver; Soarin’ and Avatar’s Flight of Passage give one the feeling of flying over this world and over a fictional world. And throughout the parks there are rides that fool the brain by the subtle manipulation of moveable seating, lighting effects, and tracked cars. Disney World’s and Disneyland’s thrill rides are representations of extreme movements that we imagine occur in the “real world.” In Disney’s rides one can experience Einstein’s equivalence principle: Acceleration is not different from gravity. That begs a question from me: Is a model the equivalent to a real-world phenomenon?
Can we assume that adults can distinguish representations of the “unreal” from the representations of the “real” just as we can distinguish between an object that moves and a living being that moves? Baudrillard wrote his book at the beginning of a new era of movie-making. In the 1980s the advent of computer generated imagery (CGI) led to representations that appear to be “real” and indistinguishable from actual actors. Directors can now film whole scenes knowing that CGI editors can eliminate certain realities like wires and microphones and insert “human figures” doing the impossible, as in Spiderman’s leaping from building to building. We adults know that such representations represent no real-world phenomena. But Baudrillard makes another point, and this one is a serious assault on our supposed “adult” view of the world.
“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation” (12).
I’ll restate: We have put the cart before the horse. We have “models” of reality, and we interpret them as reality. And we are so convinced that our models are real that we prefer them over what is truly real. And now we live according to models imposed by those who control entertainment, the media, and government. If you doubt this, I invite you to revisit the history of the recent pandemic, when all of the above forced Americans and Europeans into obeying intrusive restrictions on individual freedom, like making people wear masks, getting vaccinated, closing their businesses, following arrows on the floors of grocery stores, and restricting their travel. Sold by the idea that they knew best, the “authorities” mandated their ideal rules—though many of them believed themselves to be above restriction (Thank you, Gov. Gavin Newsom for enjoying a meal at an expensive restaurant and Speaker Nancy Pelosi for getting your hair done at a salon while the rest of America hoped the bare grocery shelves would soon be refilled and the beauty salons would reopen for the ordinary citizen). The “authorities” and their “minions” had models of the ideal protective world to follow, and they made everyone save themselves follow those models. Baudrillard cites this form of control as “the invisible violence of security” (57).
Climate and Socialism Models on Autopilot
To date many climate predictions have proved to be as unreal as Minnie Mouse. Remember Al Gore’s and the IPCC’s predictions? Remember how sea level rise on an ice-free planet would inundate all coasts? Remember the associations with extinction as embodied in an “existential threat”? And every time some heat wave or cold spell, some hurricane or tornado, or some drought or flood occurs, the alarmists look to the models, the representations for confirmation that the models were the reality. Under the tyranny of models no amount of pointing out that the climate systems of the planet are more than a product of atmospheric composition dissuades the believers that they might be taking representation for reality, simulacrum for reality, just as no amount of pointing to the many failed models convinces any climate alarmist that his faith in those models is unwarranted.
And the same can be said for almost all modern peoples. Everyone everywhere can be programmed by models even when models model nothing real, such as the socialist model of economy, a model that time after time has proved to impoverish rather than uplift a people. But regardless of representations that reflect the lives of those who have lived under socialist, communist, or fascist societies, the Left and the Left-leaning cling to their models. They are on autopilot.
Like so many who see the Climate Minnie Mouse as real, modern democrats have accepted the wholesale disruption of fossil fuel use in America as a panacea in itself. In obedience to the model, they have chosen to impoverish the country while other countries power their economies. And among the disruptions they have willingly accepted is the abrupt transition to electric cars.
In the nineteenth century another term associated with automobiles was electromobile. Yes, some 124 years ago there were EVs. But the superiority in ease of use led to the internal combustion engine’s dominance. Not now, however. The model that says carbon dioxide will kill us all has generated an artificial demand for electric cars whose mileage doesn’t match that of gasoline powered cars, whose energy must come from some abundant source, and whose pollutants are every bit the equal of poisons that gasoline-powered cars empty into the environment. Can anyone say “lithium and heavy metals and rare earths in landfills and ground water”?
But Hollywood style, Disney style, CGI style, a large segment of population has taken the model of a booming fossil-fuel-free economy as the reality, and increasingly more politicians have accepted this simulacrum of a reality that really doesn’t exist. It’s a model of a model they believe is real, and to support the model they will use any particular, such as an individual storm or an unchallenged assertion that the Great Barrier Reef will soon die.
Control
Who is the driver? Or should I ask, “What is the driver?” Baudrillard discusses the Left’s obsession with the “evils” of capitalism (except when the Left profits). He writes that capitalism, which the Left sees as an evil, is, in fact, an unthinking “monstrous unprincipled enterprise, nothing more” (15). But true to their sense of superiority, the Leftists under the guise of being “the enlightened” seek to control capitalism by imposing constraints and bending its knee to their various social contracts. And as recent times attest, those controls amount to full control by the few over the many in the name of equity. It’s the runaway car of capitalism, wildly driving through the streets without their control that they fear and claim has a purpose to oppress, whereas in their responses, they seek total control under whatever cause of the day they support: BLM, Defund the Police, Equal Pay for All, Free College, Free Food, Free Houses, Free Whatever, all in the name of the ideal equity and all designed to destroy the unbridled freedoms associated with a chaotic capitalist society that generated the unprecedented wealth of the modern world. They want us all in a self-driving car of their design with a pre-programmed route and destination—and no questions, mind you.
And the modus operandi is always that “we know better” than you. “We have ‘science’ and economic theory to back us even though our science and our economic theory can’t be questioned or checked without serious consequences to the questioner, doubter, denier, and fact-checker. The models are everything. They are reality.” Minnie Mouse is real because she moves. Minnie is real because we say she is real. The ideal has become the real.
So, now American society is on autopilot, driven by models of models, driven by phantasmagorical ideas. We’re living in Disneyland and Disney World. We’re living in a CGI film. And the mainstream media, the embedded Leftists in the government, and the social media denizens have put themselves and the rest of us into a self-driving car over which we have no control and whose destination we can surmise won’t be as productive, healthful, or free as the American Dream that has been associated with abundant energy since advent of coal mining, the discovery of petroleum and natural gas reserves, and the inventions of the steam engine and the internal combustion engine. Instead, the model is some “ideal” that exists in the minds of those elites who seek to control us by taking our wealth and redistributing it as they see fit (e.g., $500 million thrown into Solyndra).
How Did We Let Them Fool Us?
Think reality TV. Or, rather, I should use an interrogative: Do you think reality TV with its producers, directors, editors, sound mixers, casting directors, publicists, advertisers, etc., is reality. Are the characters playing themselves or parodying themselves? What should we think when reality catches up with TV reality as it did with Todd and Julie Chrisley, both sentenced to prison after a long-running series about their perfect lives? Regardless of reality TV’s fictions, many fans of such shows wish to emulate those on the screen, little girls, for example, who want to be “just like Kim Kardashian." And that desire to emulate, to imitate, extends beyond getting plastic surgery. Disney now has biological men with mustaches playing Disney princesses for little girls wanting to be princesses. And that same blurring of reality has become an agenda of some educators and a cause célèbre that embroils people in unresolvable debate and episodes of targeted “cancellation” with accusations and labels like “homophobic,” “transphobic,” “xenophobic,” “supremacist,” and “anti-science.” When make-believe is reality, no previous forms of logical discourse apply. You accept a position you don’t believe, or you suffer ostracism.
Our models of models are often far removed from reality. In fact, like many Disney simulacra, they refer to nothing real. That’s a problem for us. Our brains, having evolved to face “the real” over hundreds of thousands of years to support survival of the species are now faced with “the unreal.” As Leda Cosmides and John Tooby write, “Modern environments differ importantly from ancestral ones, particularly when it comes to social behavior. We no longer live in small, face-to-face societies, in seminomadic [sic.] bands of 25–200 men, women, and children, many of whom [sic.] were close relatives. Yet our cognitive programs were designed for that social world.”
Now we all live in not only a more populous environment, but we also live in one that has removed “reality” from daily survival: I don’t farm or raise cattle, but I have eaten well; I don’t sleep with a fire at the cave entrance to ward off wolves and bears. My life and yours differ significantly from the lives of those nomadic and semi-nomadic people that gave rise to our brains. And the selection of men as hunters and women as gatherers no longer applies to modern urban life.
Just by living and reproducing in challenging environments over thousands of years, our hunter-gatherer ancestors unknowingly shaped our brains. They evolved our ability to adapt to a real environment. My brain and yours still harbor the adaptive nature we need to survive in a hostile world. We attend to an animal more readily than an inanimate object in our field of view, for example. Your brain still contains an ability to adapt to that hostile world filled with threatening real beasts from spiders and snakes to bears and lions.
For a contrast, think of how briefly a Disney World of models with and without referents has existed. After millions of years of brain evolution, most of them under “real” conditions, we have entered a relatively recent world of simulacra. Even if one goes back to the first sculptures of gargoyles or farther back to those of satyrs and centaurs which have no real referents, the time for evolutionary change in neural networks has been short by an order of magnitude when we look at 200,000 years or more of human evolution—and that doesn’t take into account the preceding millions of years of hominid evolution.
And to draw a short comparison: The cave art at Lascaux represented for the artists the actual objects and beings they tried to draw. Our art can be “abstract.” We don’t need physical or actual referents or antecedents; we make up our referents if we choose. We model models in the modern world of Disney-like lifestyle. We simulate simulacra.
Baudrillard notes that not far from the Lascaux Cave there now lies a replica cave, a museum that has copies of the Lascaux art. Yep, that’s what we’ve become. Who needs the original when we have the imitation? Las Vegas has an Eiffel Tower, a Statue of Liberty, a Pyramid; one half of EPCOT replicates an Aztec Pyramid, a bazaar in Morocco, the Eiffel Tower, and the bell tower in St. Mark’s Square in Venice among other models of buildings. Who needs the reality when we have the ideal? We have models with actual referents; we have museums filled with imitations, such as Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum’s and Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry’s “trip into a coal mine.” We don’t need the “real thing” because we have a model of it.
In this context of modeling models, we find the Leftists. They want us to live according to ideals that have nowhere and at no time been proved to be either useful or uplifting. They dream of a world without carbon dioxide when most life on the planet craves it. No doubt they would do away with photosynthesis if they did not also include a population of vegans. Certainly, they now want us to do away with cheap abundant energy unless we are Chinese or Indian or any other population attempting to acquire the same wealth and lifestyle Americans have represented for more than a century.
Who needs capitalism’s wealth when we have socialism’s ideals in spite of the latter’s history of impoverishment, enslavement, murder, and even genocide? If one judges by recent surveys (many online), he or she will find that the model of ideal socialism has attracted America’s youth. Yet that model is based on nothing “solid,” nothing historical.
Terrorism of the Mind
Toward the end of his book, Baudrillard addresses a key procedure adopted by those who would impose their models on the rest of us, a procedure that applies very well to climate alarmism. He writes, “If every strategy today is that of mental terror and of deterrence tied to the suspension and the eternal simulation of catastrophe, the only means of mitigating this scenario would be to make the catastrophe arrive, to produce or to reproduce a real catastrophe. To which nature is at times given…” (57).
Have you noticed that one of the chief mechanisms that Democrats use to control the populace is fear? He writes, “Closer to us, this is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposing tone invisible violence of security” (57). The Left imprisons by offering “security,” and it controls by suggesting that such security is threatened: “The Republicans want to take away your Social Security and your health care.” That’s exactly what happened during the lockdowns, the mandated vaccinations, and the masks. They offered security under terroristic threats. In following the Left’s mandates, the masses made themselves prisoners to the “ideal.”
And that’s what happens under socialism’s vehicle. The populace merely rides in a fully auto car which now has assumed a life of its own.
Takeaway
We are besieged by models of worlds that do not exist. The process started with the rise of civilization in the last ten millennia forcing us to adapt our brains to those models as “realities” of our world. The problem for us lies in the nature of brains that evolved more to survive real-world situations than to survive models of the real world, or models of models and models with no real-world referents. Add to this need to adapt to an unreal world the pressure imposed by tyrannical Leftists’ minds that seek to control through adherence to ideals, and one can see the dilemma we all face: Obey and accept the models, or disobey and risk retribution by those in control.
*Annual Review of Psychology, 2013 (January). Vol. 64:201-229. Evolutionary Psychology: New Perspectives on Cognition and Motivation. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131628 Online at https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131628 Accessed ten years after its publication, 2023 and still available for your perusal.
**Sheila Fabia Glaser, Translator, Simulacra and Simulation. 1994. Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press. Original French version, 1981, published by Editions Galilee.
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