Jean Baudrillard's works remind more of poetry than of ordinary philosophical texts. He is incessantly playing with words and making wild metaphors from astronomy, tempting the reader to concentrate more on his language than on his opinions. His style serves to illustrate his thesis that we are leaving reality behind us. Instead we are entering a "hyperreality", where we can hide from the illusion of which we are afraid.

    The foundation of Baudrillard's philosophy is the criticism of traditional, critical scientific thinking, replacing reality with the illusion of truth. We live in an illusion, the radical illusion, where things are exactly what they seem to be. The illusion is the immediate experience one has through the five senses, a subjective experience tainted by feelings and without rationalizations.

Escape from the illusion

    But we can't stand this complex and confused world our intuition tells us we live in, so we have started to build our own, protected world; a world we call reality. Yet it is no more real - or unreal - than the original illusion. The danger, according to Baudrillard, lies in harboring the illusion that this is truth.
   

    What science used to criticize as illusions - sex, dreams, history - have disappeared as a result of this criticism and have been replaced by the illusion of truth. This insight led Baudrillard to reject traditional scientific criticism, instead turning toward a more immediate, human, style.

    Instead of basing his theses on well-defined terms, Baudrillard uses statements, metaphors and opinions about modern phenomena. The terms used should be understood intuitively, through their conventional meaning as well as through their usage; a natural consequence of criticizing traditional scientific method of forcing meaning into existence where there is none.
Science is usually seen as letting the scientist (the subject) study the object through experiments and tests. Baudrillard rejects this method. On another topic he says that intelligence is to change reality, not to break it down and reconstruct it from the parts.
This is the key to his standpoint on research. The subject is not independent from the object, quite the contrary: they both influence each other. The subject influences the object through his studies and maybe, suggests Baudrillard, the object is actually manipulating the subject?

The world tricks us

    Maybe the world plays us a trick by appearing to be so easy to explain with theories and logic?

    He writes: "For reality asks nothing other than to submit itself to hypotheses. And it confirms them all. That, indeed, is its ruse and its vengeance". The subject and the object interact to create meaning that does not exist. The scientist is looking for simplicity and the world, for some unfathomable reason, wishes to satisfy this request.

    Baudrillard's own works show this interaction in practice; how his opinions have consequences for his way of conducting research and thereby his opinions. It is a closed system, giving support to itself. Maybe he is of the opinion that science is this way. Or as he himself would put it, that it is in orbit, without ground contact.

 Go to En web site with many texts on the subject of ilusion and simulation in the modern society.

 
    Before, the illusion Baudrillard insists is real and conventional reality were in synch, but now they are diverging while mixing and becoming hyperreality. The illusion in the form of virtual reality and computer graphics is getting more real while reality is getting more and more unreal, with quantum mechanics, modern economics, inexplicable civil wars and aids.

    The global movement of capital, that is supposed to be more real than the actual experience of the unemployed, no longer has any connection with reality. The concept "economy" is verging on the absurd. Trade only accounts for a minimal part of the movement of capital and stock market values seem totally disconnected from real events.

    The absurd debts of the third world, long supposed to have to lead to a crises, are unreal in the same way. They exist on paper, but have no manifestation in reality, since they are so ridiculously large that the countries have no way of repaying them.

    Go to A critical text on the strictly controlled media coverage of the Gulf War.
Given this background it is possible to understand the mistake the library at the University of Stockholm made putting his book "The Gulf War never took place" under "History, Middle East". This our first war taking place more in the media than in reality, through remotely controlled bombs and camera eyes, is but one example of moving to the virtual reality, the reality of the media, hyperreality.

We create utopia

    Genetic manipulation, plastic surgery, virtual reality and the media attempt to create a new world, a perfect world, a world where logic rules and where we are no longer confronted with illusion.

    Our desire for something else than the original illusion is reflected everywhere in current developments. From the standpoint that the world actually is non-logic, mystic, subjective and romantic, this is an obvious observation.

    But why do we strive to create another world? One reason is fear of the genuinely different. That is why we have invented genetic engineering, hair dye, contact lenses, artificial intelligence and political correctness. We remove actual physical differences, differences in hair color, handicaps, intelligence and ethnic diversity.

    Instead we replace them with "identity" (etymologically: the one, the opposite of pluralism based on difference), an artificial identity, based on fake differences. It not only a physical trend, but an intellectual one as well.

    "Doomed to our own image, our own identity, our own 'look', and having become our own object of care, desire and suffering, we have grown indifferent to everything else. And secretly desperate at that indifference, and envious of every form of passion, originality or destiny. Any passion whatsoever is an affront to the general indifference."

    It is from this perspective that he views today's outbreaks of intolerance, that from a purely logical perspective should not exist in an enlightened society. Racism and sexism stem from fear of the different.

Political apathy

    Baudrillard views today's society in a very pessimistic way. In a comparison with Orwell's "1984", that, like Baudrillard and one of his sources of inspiration, Marshall McLuhan, treated the power of media, he writes: "There is no need to imagine it as a State periscope spying on everyone's private life - the situation as it stands is more efficient than that: it is the certainty that people are no longer speaking to each other."

    "Can one ask questions about the strange fact that, after several revolutions and a century or two of political apprenticeship, ... there are still ... a thousand persons who stand up and twenty million who remain 'passive' -- and not only passive, but who, in perfectly good faith and without even asking themselves why, frankly prefer a football match to a human and political drama?"

    Opinion polls and elections are said to run democracies, since they represent the will of the people. But they, too, are part of hyperreality. They are a simulation - a very negative term for Baudrillard - of people's opinions. Like science they try to pass for the truth.
But there is something positive in the apathy of the masses, since it works in a subversive way. Baudrillard, who started out as a communist, but turned away from Marx with the motivation that his theories do not suit today's reality, writes that the strategy of the masses of apathy is far more advanced than that of for example leftist activists.

    The masses act unpredictably, irrationally. It is a black hole absorbing all forms of manipulation politicians try to force on it. In this way they refuse to accept the reality forced on them.

Radicality

    Baudrillard's way out of this situation is radicality, which is not an easy concept to understand. To a large part it is about using provocative statements for their own value, to shake people out of their apathy and question their concept of reality. But those statements are not false, since they express disbelief in absolute truth.

    This is yet another one of those hard-to-grasp interactions between Baudrillard's theses and his texts making it hard to know whether to take him seriously or not. A large part of what he writes is definitely exaggerated and partly even ironical, but even by writing what he does not mean literally he vents his actual opinions. Maybe this whole interaction is a way to try to express how our reality is dependent on the absolute isolation of the subject from the object of study. You should probably not take Baudrillard's theses literally, but they definitely are worth thinking about.