So what the truth about America anyway?
Jean Baudrillard, a French postmodern theorist and one of the most influential thinkers of the past two decades, would say:
“It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.”
America is utopia made real. America is the giant simulacrum that has started to live its own life leading an existence independent of others, of the rest of the world. America is a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is why it is so powerful, because it managed to persuade itself and others it just is. America is an advertisement – an advertisement for a happy life and a boundless liberty. America is a myth – that’s why its existence is in and of itself illogical and fails to be explained by any rational endeavors or a simple common sense. Its basis is mythological, that’s why it still manages to survive even though all the rational evidence speaks against it as its current state would in case of any other country be unsustainable. America is not real, it is hyperreal. It doesn’t exist in the real world, it only exists as the simulation of the real. Consequentially, its own existence has gotten more real than the reality itself.
If this sounds interesting to you, here’s the link, where you can find out more about the book: http://www.amazon.com/America-Jean-Baudrillard/dp/0860919781
