That Which Pretends to Pretend

Baudrillard didn’t mourn the loss of the real—he questioned whether it had ever been needed. In Simulacra and Simulation, he maps a progression in which signs first reflect reality, then distort it, then conceal that reality is gone, and finally circulate with no anchor at all. At the final stage, the simulacrum doesn’t hide the truth—it becomes truth. The copy doesn’t mimic the real. It generates a reality of its own.

Disneyland, he argues, isn’t just a fantasy land. It functions as a decoy—drawing attention to its artificiality to convince us that the rest of society is still grounded. But the rest of society is not. Politics, culture, media—they operate as simulations, governed by images referencing other images. The spectacle of the real becomes more important than the real itself. We aren’t surrounded by illusions—we live inside systems that no longer require originals.

Baudrillard’s provocation was not that truth has been buried, but that we have adapted to its absence without noticing. The simulation isn’t a veil—it’s a habitat. What once would have been seen as fraud is now the baseline. The danger is not that we mistake the mask for the face. It’s that the mask remains long after the face has ceased to matter.

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