Chapter 2
The modern simulacra
I’m serialising my book “The Observing I: A guide to living a more authentic life” on Substack, with a new chapter being released every Wednesday. I’m a big believer that philosophy should be available to the masses, not locked behind paywalls or hidden away in dusty archives. So I’m making my book available here.
This is Chapter 2.
In my 20s, I tore through the writings of a science fiction author called Philip K. Dick. You’ve probably come across him without realising it (he wrote the book that would become Blade Runner, and Total Recall, and Minority Report, amongst many others).
It was set in a dystopian future, like most of his work, and takes place in the United States of Europe and America, where the president is a human looking android under the control of a dictatorial First Lady . What I loved about this book was how it dove into ideas around the blurring of identity and how political manipulation can impact individual thinking within a society.
The word Simulacra means something that replaces reality with it’s representation
Why I mention this book is because it came to mind when I was thinking about the idea of being authentic. I feel a lot of us suffer from blurred identities, and a lot of us show a simulacra to the world rather than our actual self. There’s also something to be said for how our cultural landscape manipulates individual thinking.
The word Simulacra comes from an idea proposed by the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, and I'm going to dive into it briefly so we can see how his concepts are relevant to our perception of the world around us.
Baudrillard talked a lot about reality and representation, and proposed that there are four stages of a simulacra, which he divided into "orders".
In his first order simulacra, there's a very obvious distinction between reality and representation. Think of a piece of artwork, or a map. We can clearly see that they're not reality, but we understand that they represent it.
Then there's second order simulacra. These distort or mask reality, and you'll see this best in movies, where what the movie represents starts to alter our perception whilst we're experiencing the story unfold. Unlike maps or artwork, we're more invested in it, more emotionally engaged.
The realm of the third order simulacra is where it starts to get dangerous. Here, we see things that pretend to be a copy where, in fact, there was never an original in the first place. It's here that the distinction between reality and representation starts to break down. It's also here where what Baudrillard termed hyperreality begins to emerge, a state where the representation of reality becomes more real than the reality that it's meant to depict.
Lastly, there's the fourth order simulacra. In these there is no reality, existing entirely on their own, an isolated representation of a world that never existed. A pure simulacra needing no point of reference.
For me, this idea of the simulacra plays heavily into our notion of the self. Identity is a very fluid construct, built on stories and symbols. It shifts with our experiences, with how we perceive ourselves and the influences that we receive from the external. We even adopt different identities in different situations. How you behave around your parents will be a different “you” to who you are with your work colleagues. What you present to them will be adapted to suit the context or scenario. Your simulacra will change.
Who I am today is not who I was yesterday, nor will I be the same person tomorrow.
That is something that I have to try and bear in mind some- times. The tricky part about understanding our own identity is that we come from this space of the observer, and the observer isn’t naturally adept at observing itself.
This means we don’t necessarily know or see or become aware of the changes in our identity over time. We don’t notice the impact that this has on our behaviours, our perspectives, and our subsequent responses to the world around us. We’re up to our necks in it. An integral part of the make up.
A good way of looking at it is to consider our identity as a mosaic floor. The sort of thing you’d see in an old Roman temple. Thousands of tiny, discrete tiles. Each one individual, but coming together to form a grand picture.
We can think of each tile as representing a facet of who we are, or who we believe ourselves to be. Some of these tiles are going to be inherited.
These will be our nationality, our culture, ethnicity, physical appearance- those external aspects of our identity. Then there are going to be other tiles that are put into the mosaic from our upbringing. Our belief systems, our moral compass, our values. These are going to come from our parents, our friends, our family, and our schooling.
All of these things, they’re going to create a gestalt of concepts and ideas that are going to go towards forming who we are. Then, of course, there are going to be those tiles that we add ourselves. They’re going to come from our personal experiences as we grow.
What we experience in our relationships. The choices that we make and the subsequent outcome of those choices. The things that the Universe throws at us throughout life, both good and bad, and what we learn as we go through them.
The image of this mosaic, it’s not static. As we go through life, some of those tiles are going to change. Some are going to be completely replaced, and new tiles are going to be continually added to the picture.
So imagine you’ve got this constantly changing, shifting image over time. That shifting image is you. That’s your identity.
We also have to be cautious about how we define that identity in the context of the external. This is where things can get interesting. As human beings, we love labels. They help us to understand and define the world. Very often, we’ll lean into labels in order to describe who we are.
For example, we go to a party and we find ourselves in conversation with someone that we’ve met for the first time. We follow the usual rules of social etiquette and ask questions about the other person in order to get a feel for who they are, looking for some connection and common ground between us and them.
Then they’ll ask us questions. They’ll want to find out a bit more about us in return. In this instance, the first place that we tend to go are the labels, the definitions, because that’s the easiest way for us to describe who we are as a person.
We might start by mentioning what we do for a job. That’s one label. Then we might say that we’re a parent. That’s another label.
We might go on to describe some attributes about ourselves.
I like video games, and listening to podcasts, and reading, and this is my favourite movie. In doing this, we’re drawing on external frames of reference to define who we are.
Here’s a thought exercise for you to try before we continue.
If I were to ask you to describe yourself without using labels or interests, what would you say?
Take a moment to think about that. How would you explain the mosaic without referencing it in context with the external?
This is a deeply esoteric exercise, and there’s no expectation of an answer. What I’m trying to do here is to bring your awareness to the fact that we are very quick to attach labels to our identity and, sometimes, those labels don’t come from us - they come from something or someone else.
Part of leaning more into our Observing eye is to understand the labels and stories that are running inside our mind as part of our identity. Which ones come from us, and which have their origin in the external world?
The purpose of doing this is so that we can act and make decisions that are more in line with our own authentic selves. You may find that it’s quite near the surface, or you may discover that it’s buried beneath a thick quagmire of bad experiences and crippling self doubt.
Whilst I mention the “authentic self”, let me be very clear what I mean by that.
Being authentic is not about abandoning all responsibilities to whimsically skip through meadows whilst your world burns around you. It’s not living up to some inspirational quote about freedom of expression. It’s not a blanket to thinly cover your impending midlife crisis.
You are not living inside an Instagram feed. You are not your latest tweet, or the persona you wear in your workplace. These are stories. A simulacrum of ourselves, lacking the substance of the original.
Authenticity is recognising who we are, engaging with what matters to us, and not trying to people-please or adhere to the expectations of others. It’s taking off the costume of who we think we should be, or the mask of “fitting in”, and presenting who we are to the world.
This, however, is far easier said than done.
We live in a world of expectations. Constantly informed of how we should look, how we should behave, and what goals we need to meet in order to be deemed “successful”. Over time, these expectations smother our authentic sense of self and tell us that their version of us will be more liked, more accepted, happier, wealthier, and more productive.
It’s the golden lie of the 21st century. How many people do you know who, despite meeting all the criteria of what we perceive to be success, find themselves existing in a general state of discontentment?
They’ve got a loving family, a nice house, a respectable job, and a nice car. They go on holiday twice a year and manage to get out on the weekends. They have all the things that society says they need, but they’re just not feeling it. Something is off, misaligned somewhere, and they can’t quite put their finger on it.
You might even count yourself amongst that group. I certainly did. Moving through life with the background hum of malaise, and the accompanying confusion that I should be happy because I’ve got all the things that I’m told I need to be happy.
What we must never forget is that we’re living in a capitalist culture, and to keep the wheels of the economy turning, we have to make sure that enough people earn enough money so that they can invest those earnings into products and services. This, in turn, means that the companies who provide those products and services have money to employ people, who in turn will then have enough money to purchase more money and services. Ad infinitum ad nauseam.
That’s why they call it the wheels of economy. Round and round we go in an endless cycle of production and consumption. If we were all entirely content, then there’s a good chance that we wouldn’t necessarily be buying so many products and services.
If we felt our smartphone was enough, for example, and we weren’t attracted by a slightly bigger screen or an array of better cameras so that we can really get the fine grain detail on our latte foam art, then what’s our motivation for buying a new one?
Even in our free time we’ve become consumers. Yet we’re not consuming physical, tangible things. It’s content, and we’re devouring it with an insatiable hunger.
Subscribe to this platform to get the latest movies. Want to listen to as much music as you can handle? Here, there’s a service for that too. How about all the books you could ever conceivably read? Oh, and you like video games. I have just the thing.
That’s not to say that this content isn’t useful, interesting, or entertaining. I’m a consumer of it myself, and I recognise that it’s part of the cultural context in which we exist. What I take umbrage with is how easy it is to become lost in the distraction of it.
An important component of understanding our drives and motivations, those things that foster our authenticity, is that if we spend no time reflecting on them, if there’s no time for quiet contemplation, then it becomes increasingly difficult to know ourselves through the noise.
Taking time for these moments of reflection has become increasingly more challenging. If, like me, you have a couple of devices that will aggressively ping every few minutes, a cat that demands affection, and work emails flying at me like boulders from a trebuchet, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
Our attention is commodified, and everybody wants it. Social media wants us on their ecosystems, brands want us to look at their products, our cat demands to be fed, our boss wants that report by midday, and the children are trying to eat a sandwich made of Lego bricks.
It’s no surprise, then, that our “selves” get lost in this maelstrom of expectations and clamour.
What I don’t want this book to be is a scathing attack on late capitalism, conditioned institutional thinking, or product marketing. What I do want is for these ideas to be present in your awareness, and for you to be mindful of how they might be impacting your values and influencing your thinking.
I also appreciate the deep irony of writing a book about finding your authentic self, and then putting that book up for sale. Rest assured, though, that I won’t be offering you a quick fix solution, I won’t be up-selling you an online course at the end, and there is no accompanying app that you can download.
The book is available to buy from Amazon as a paperback or an e-book, if you want to add it to your book shelf.