Excellent. As an life-long entrepreneur, I agree that this is true: "Breaking this pattern requires “democratic asceticism”—choosing to engage with political reality at human scale even when media narratives pull you toward grander, more abstract concerns.”
The problem most people have is the regulations, the controls, the edicts, the fiat, all come from on high, from the federal governments or the international unions, like the EU.
The solution you suggest requires decentralization, maybe thousands of small states, where groups of people can successfully repair mistakes.
A real enemy is centralization. Under the kind of large, powerful, expensive governments that exist today, nothing ever really changes.
** Once governments are allowed to do more than protect lives and property, they will try to do everything except protect lives and property. **
And once they reach a certain size, they seem to take on a life of their own, no long representing people or helping people but instead, representing themselves and helping politicians retain control and helping toe make bureaucracy permanent.
Witness what happened when Musk tried DOGE. He had the intellect, the reputation, and the political momentum to really effect change but he was no match for the US's large, powerful, expensive government.
15-plus years of meditation have given me a daily 1/2 hour break from the mind, which means a clean break from the menu and the meal. This renders a distinct distance from both before re-engaging. Learning to meditate is learning to let go of all.
Spend time with a child and they quickly remind you of the wonder and awe of just being present in the world. Watching my granddaughter lost in the enjoyment of picking raspberries and examining each one for but a moment at it moves from plant to mouth and results in an audible hmmmm or yummm as she experiences the simultaneously sweet and tart flavors of a truly ripe berry.
Your essay, Lily, has reminded me of two books from my past; 'The Society of the Spectacle' by Guy Debord and 'The Revolution of Everyday Life' by Raoul Vaneigem. I had low-budget translations in the 70s which I lost during one of my house-moves. You have prompted me to seek out new copies as I remember they addressed similar themes.......Thanks for this post Lily.
“This requires what we might call “simulation literacy”—the ability to recognize how artificial environments work on you and to resist their most manipulative aspects. Not total withdrawal, but conscious engagement.”
Love that statement of how we all need to develop our discernment filters so we can see what is , i.e.: reality vs. what they want us to believe is “reality as produced by them for us to consume”
This is why Donald Trump is such a successful politician. He understands that people have been conditioned to react to simulated outrages just as much as to real ones. So, he offers up simulated outrages by the metric ass-load, and sits back while those who oppose him go to town. Finally, they become so distracted and so worn out from all that protest over simulations that they no longer have the energy to argue against the actual, real policies he’s enacting.
Absolutely. The Matrix is probably the most famous fictional exploration of Baudrillard's ideas. But The Matrix actually only scratches the surface of what he was getting at. The movie treats simulation as a problem with a solution (take the red pill, escape the Matrix), whereas Baudrillard argued we can't escape because there might not be any "real" reality to escape to. The Matrix has a clear distinction between fake (the simulation) and real (the post-apocalyptic world), but Baudrillard suggested that distinction itself might be meaningless.
I have a theory that the feeling of living in a simulation arises from something I call dialectic balkanization. To maintain the illusion of autonomy and sovereignty, we’re placed in a highly virtualized environment where everything is forced into a thesis–antithesis framing.
This framing is largely unnatural—it’s not how most of us experience reality—but it’s necessary to uphold the illusion. That illusion depends on perpetual fractiousness. Reality is not absent, only occluded—and that this occlusion is deliberate, structural, and rhetorically maintained.
We interact with unethical systems through adhesion, not genuine consent. The visible signs of those institutions—media, policy, corporate messaging—don’t align with lived experience, and this dissonance generates a constant psychological tension. Because any engagement with a system alters it, we unwittingly participate in synthesizing this false reality.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a Platonic truth outside these systems. The real persists, even if it’s obscured. In fact, the disquiet you feel is the signal in the noise—the evidence of an ascendant existence.
There’s no such thing as the unreal—there is only what is true and what is false, or more precisely, what is true and what is constructed to obscure the truth.
We live in deliberate distortions of the real, imposed through coercive structures that manufacture contradiction in order to fracture coherence. That is something radically different. It’s a false arrangement of the real, dressed up as neutral or natural. It has no ontology of its own. It’s parasitic.
That is not “simulation”, that is illusion—an epistemological prison, camouflaged as discourse.
This whole notion of the “unreal”—the simulation — is purely a deception of framing. It isn’t a metaphysical category, it’s a rhetorical trick. And frankly, you can’t trust the French not to be hyperbolic—it’s part of their pantomime of mystique.
(And yes, that was meant to evoke Marcel Marceau—illusion through allusion.)
Hannah Arendt & Jean Baudrillard explored and displayed for our consideration and reflection -- BRAVO! I've heard Corbett mention Simulacra & Simulation a number of times as well. Guess it's time to read it since we're living (or feigning a representational version of life) in it. Appreciate the thought candy (or is it nutritional masquerading as something sweet and in truth empty calories?)!
"The menu becomes more important than the meal."
That's one of the best lines I have ever read; it encapsulates the entire issue.
Great piece, Lily...
Bernardo Kastrup writes of a similar thing in Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell, when he writes, the map does not produce the territory.
Excellent. As an life-long entrepreneur, I agree that this is true: "Breaking this pattern requires “democratic asceticism”—choosing to engage with political reality at human scale even when media narratives pull you toward grander, more abstract concerns.”
The problem most people have is the regulations, the controls, the edicts, the fiat, all come from on high, from the federal governments or the international unions, like the EU.
The solution you suggest requires decentralization, maybe thousands of small states, where groups of people can successfully repair mistakes.
A real enemy is centralization. Under the kind of large, powerful, expensive governments that exist today, nothing ever really changes.
** Once governments are allowed to do more than protect lives and property, they will try to do everything except protect lives and property. **
And once they reach a certain size, they seem to take on a life of their own, no long representing people or helping people but instead, representing themselves and helping politicians retain control and helping toe make bureaucracy permanent.
Witness what happened when Musk tried DOGE. He had the intellect, the reputation, and the political momentum to really effect change but he was no match for the US's large, powerful, expensive government.
“The apples gleam like they've been waxed (they have).” Gloriously coated in Apeel.
15-plus years of meditation have given me a daily 1/2 hour break from the mind, which means a clean break from the menu and the meal. This renders a distinct distance from both before re-engaging. Learning to meditate is learning to let go of all.
Spend time with a child and they quickly remind you of the wonder and awe of just being present in the world. Watching my granddaughter lost in the enjoyment of picking raspberries and examining each one for but a moment at it moves from plant to mouth and results in an audible hmmmm or yummm as she experiences the simultaneously sweet and tart flavors of a truly ripe berry.
Your essay, Lily, has reminded me of two books from my past; 'The Society of the Spectacle' by Guy Debord and 'The Revolution of Everyday Life' by Raoul Vaneigem. I had low-budget translations in the 70s which I lost during one of my house-moves. You have prompted me to seek out new copies as I remember they addressed similar themes.......Thanks for this post Lily.
Brilliant stuff Lily! It’s not easy floating on a sea of dullards is it.
Brilliant Lily. If our kids education could address this it would be the beginning of a turnaround but I ain't holding my breathe. Sigh!
Well said! Thank you for this!
This was great. Thanks, Lily.
Oh and please consider collaborating with Joshua Stylman. An interview between the two of you could be pretty awesome.
“This requires what we might call “simulation literacy”—the ability to recognize how artificial environments work on you and to resist their most manipulative aspects. Not total withdrawal, but conscious engagement.”
Love that statement of how we all need to develop our discernment filters so we can see what is , i.e.: reality vs. what they want us to believe is “reality as produced by them for us to consume”
This is why Donald Trump is such a successful politician. He understands that people have been conditioned to react to simulated outrages just as much as to real ones. So, he offers up simulated outrages by the metric ass-load, and sits back while those who oppose him go to town. Finally, they become so distracted and so worn out from all that protest over simulations that they no longer have the energy to argue against the actual, real policies he’s enacting.
Flooding the zone, dude…spot on comment and thanking you!!!
Excellent post. Isn't this the premise of The Matrix?
Absolutely. The Matrix is probably the most famous fictional exploration of Baudrillard's ideas. But The Matrix actually only scratches the surface of what he was getting at. The movie treats simulation as a problem with a solution (take the red pill, escape the Matrix), whereas Baudrillard argued we can't escape because there might not be any "real" reality to escape to. The Matrix has a clear distinction between fake (the simulation) and real (the post-apocalyptic world), but Baudrillard suggested that distinction itself might be meaningless.
I have a theory that the feeling of living in a simulation arises from something I call dialectic balkanization. To maintain the illusion of autonomy and sovereignty, we’re placed in a highly virtualized environment where everything is forced into a thesis–antithesis framing.
This framing is largely unnatural—it’s not how most of us experience reality—but it’s necessary to uphold the illusion. That illusion depends on perpetual fractiousness. Reality is not absent, only occluded—and that this occlusion is deliberate, structural, and rhetorically maintained.
We interact with unethical systems through adhesion, not genuine consent. The visible signs of those institutions—media, policy, corporate messaging—don’t align with lived experience, and this dissonance generates a constant psychological tension. Because any engagement with a system alters it, we unwittingly participate in synthesizing this false reality.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a Platonic truth outside these systems. The real persists, even if it’s obscured. In fact, the disquiet you feel is the signal in the noise—the evidence of an ascendant existence.
There’s no such thing as the unreal—there is only what is true and what is false, or more precisely, what is true and what is constructed to obscure the truth.
We live in deliberate distortions of the real, imposed through coercive structures that manufacture contradiction in order to fracture coherence. That is something radically different. It’s a false arrangement of the real, dressed up as neutral or natural. It has no ontology of its own. It’s parasitic.
That is not “simulation”, that is illusion—an epistemological prison, camouflaged as discourse.
This whole notion of the “unreal”—the simulation — is purely a deception of framing. It isn’t a metaphysical category, it’s a rhetorical trick. And frankly, you can’t trust the French not to be hyperbolic—it’s part of their pantomime of mystique.
(And yes, that was meant to evoke Marcel Marceau—illusion through allusion.)
Hannah Arendt & Jean Baudrillard explored and displayed for our consideration and reflection -- BRAVO! I've heard Corbett mention Simulacra & Simulation a number of times as well. Guess it's time to read it since we're living (or feigning a representational version of life) in it. Appreciate the thought candy (or is it nutritional masquerading as something sweet and in truth empty calories?)!
Your last line nuanced the fact that living a proxy life by proxy "representation" is no kind of life at all, is it?
Anna Harendt did studies on such aspects? Cool
Read Sharyl Atkisson’s Substack about measles with this in mind: “Experts generate reports about problems that exist mainly in other reports.”