disease that threatens almost no one in the Western world is emblematic of the “acute crisis of
simulation” to which Baudrillard often refers (Seduction 48).
In The Intelligence of Evil, Baudrillard deconstructs the pervasive notion of the media as
a benevolent “fourth estate" that protects public interests. Instead of disseminating useful
evidence-based information which would allow citizens to make logical decisions and to
understand the world in which they live more fully, the philosopher contends that media images
are solely designed to be consumed by passive receptacles. As Baudrillard hypothesizes, “the
countless images that come to us from this media sphere are not of the order of
representation, but of decoding and visual consumption. They do not educate us, they inform
us” (77). As a “Post-Marxist” philosopher, Baudrillard posits that controlling the dissemination
of information is now much more important than having a stranglehold over the means of
production in a society in which “all of the basic needs of the masses have been satisfied”
(Messier 25). (Mis-)information is the new “opiate of the masses” that undergirds the current
social order.
In order to explain why there is such little resistance to the fantastical chimeras or far
fetched screenplays devised and endlessly transmitted by the mainstream media through a
plethora of different devices, Baudrillard develops the theory of proliferation. Offering an
operational definition of what the concept of proliferation entails, Baudrillard muses, “by giving
you a little too much one takes away everything [...] the more immersed one becomes in the
accumulation of signs, and the more enclosed one becomes in the endless over-signification of
a real that no longer exists” (Seduction 30-33). The philosopher describes the tragic situation
of the modern subject as being buried under a constant avalanche of banal signs that have no
meaning outside of a code whose only purpose is to promote consumption. Given that these
simulacra have taken over nearly every facet of our lives through our television, computer, and
smart phone screens, Baudrillard maintains that there is “no exit" from the omnipresent
apparatus of simulation (Kellner 128). At home, work, school, in shopping centers, and even
on the street, there is no reprieve from the images that concretize our quotidian (hyper-)reality.
Fully immersed in the ubiquitous realm of signs from all sides in the modern world, concrete
reality in essence ceases to exist. As opposed to thinking logically about the most pressing
issues that confront our society and trying to find possible solutions to these complex
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