We vote in hyperreality
1 November 2023
This is the second in a two-part series. Read the fiction piece first for fun, but not a pre-requisite.
Raj is a commentary on various topics. In a meta sense, that is intentional to draw more focus to the core ideas it is supposed to be about. And those ideas are postmodernism’s hyperreality, simulacra and simulation.
If you are already familiar with the lingo, you will understand that my work simulates other popular culture pieces, among whom I would name 12 Monkeys and Cloud Atlas. If you are not, I hope you will find my explanations reasonable and informative. I want to discuss these ideas in the context of 21st-century populist politics. It is pretty tempting to make this an “Isn’t it concerning?” essay, and it may very well sound like that. But from my perspective, it is more of “Isn’t that fascinating?”. In essay form, it is easy to tell you what I want you to think. If I get your attention, that is in return for your mental stimulation. If I inspire you to do more, my appeal is compassion for the world. Concern is free, and hence, that is worthless to me.
So, how do we perceive reality? We learn in primary school that we have five senses - sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Imagine you are walking through a garden enjoying a lemon sorbet. You can see all the colours - the green grass, the white lilies, the red roses. You can hear birds chirping and children playing. You taste your sorbet. It is appropriately sweet and sour. You take off your sandals and step on the grass. You feel the rough grass and soil on your bare sole. You take a deep breath, and you can smell floral fragrances and petrichor.
As you read the previous paragraph, you experienced several aspects of walking through a garden, but you used only one sense. Your eyes. I am trying to be concise, but of course, if you are blind, you used your sense of touch to read this. If you are deaf, you put no meaning to the sound of birds chirping or children playing, but you may have imagined a group of birds moving their beaks and a bunch of kids running around in circles or whatever they do. But for the average reader, you experienced something that involves all of your senses without actually using them in the physical world. It is a crucial characteristic of human communication and experience that your brain fills in the rest from memory.
Let’s talk about art. Art is a medium to communicate ideas and emotions. And that is how media works. All media is a way of packaging reality to be perceived. You can call that a simulation. Since the medium itself is now part of the physical reality, you can package the medium to make new media. That’s a simulacrum.
Now, the media aren’t truthful, whatever that means to you. For example, I could show you a picture of a garden with red grass where the red grass represents bloodshed or violence. You would know that because I rely on the idea that you have seen grass before. So, I am not lying to you. I have purposefully twisted my interpretation of physical reality to express an idea. Our imagination is much larger than reality (Nietzsche wink wink).
Combine both of these ideas. First, media are an arbitrary mix of physical realities, ideas and other media. Second, ideas are represented by twisting physical reality in a way that makes them indistinguishable without an external reference. You end up with a multiplicity of realities. The superset can be called the hyperreality.
We’ve only set the stage. The “concerning” part starts when you think about how ideas and emotions are also building blocks for beliefs. If a Californian stays at my bnb, I would be surprised if they asked for poha for breakfast, but less if they asked for avocado toast. I’ve pieced together an idea of a Californian person’s breakfast preferences based on television.
So, should we only process information we perceive through our five senses? Of course not. We could be living in a matrix, after all (Yep, fantastic movie). We can act on incomplete information by extrapolating from our knowledge and beliefs. For most of it, this is a powerful trait. It is a pillar of intelligence in our species. Call it imagination. Call it guessing. Call it intuition.
However, on the margin, exercising the ability to generalise leads to stereotyping. That is seen as a vice in the 21st century. Biases lead to discrimination, hatred and suffering.
And that’s the point of Raj the Banyan Tree. It is a story about generations of our kind who have never sat under a real tree. Many grew up in a Martian colony and do not know what sunlight through Earth’s atmosphere feels like. To put it more starkly, Raj may not have green leaves. People have traditions and feelings about Raj, and you, the reader, associate with those feelings. You may not agree with them, or you may find them strange, but you have a picture of a lone banyan tree standing on an empty plain ground. You understand the reality of someone hating their neighbours for having a different political opinion than theirs because you often see it around you.
The information revolution did not increase our capacity to experience more reality. It increased our capacity to experience more media. We can form beliefs and emotions about a reality we have little experience of. I am not trying to say that perception before the internet and television did not suffer from this dilution of reality. But the internet and modern-day computers did make it easy to produce more media, and then Boltzmann kicks in to tell you that that’d naturally lead to hyperreality. In other words, the ease of making media makes it statistically more likely that you get more media. Since a tiny percentage of this will pass off as a first copy of reality (so to say), you end up flooded with simulacra.
Do you remember the borewell crisis in India? A few years ago, for 6-12 months, a kid fell into an open borewell almost every week. If I had to estimate the number of kids falling in open borewells per year, I would expect the chart to perhaps show a downtrend. Generally, as the nation grows, safety measures involved in construction improve, and such incidents are reduced. Perhaps I would expect an uptrend because there are more kids and there is more construction. Whatever your hypothesis may be, it is not intuitive that there was such a particular rise in incidents for a short period. A more attractive theory is news cycles. News media loved covering any borewell incident because it brought them attention. As a nation, we were deeply concerned about this issue. Then we forgot. The issue did not cease to exist. If you specifically search for it, you can find recent news about this.
Coincidentally, as I write this, the Israel-Hamas war is a month old. I should not call this a war. The only renowned simulacra book I’ve read is Baudrillard’s “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”. In its tradition, the Gulf War was a war solely in how news media chose to simulate it. On the ground, it was a one-sided display of force. Millions of miles away from the action, we have emotions and opinions about the outcome of this conflict. Do not consider the remark about physical distance literally. I am in Dubai, yet I am far away because I do not have any Palestinian friends or colleagues, nor do I have any Israeli friends or colleagues. I am deeply concerned about the death and despair the conflict brings. I see the sorrow on the news. Concern is free. We will forget this like the other one.
Do we remember when we cast our votes? Do we remember when we voice our opinions? Our politicians remind us. They come to reaffirm our beliefs. But our beliefs are in hyperreality. They are formed out of the media we consume. Is the government in my hometown corrupt? Probably? Sounds fair, yeah. The opposition says they stole funds that were supposed to be used for building a school. Were they supposed to build a school? Probably? Isn’t that what the government does? Oh, also, there used to be a temple here centuries ago, which we will rebuild. Really? There’s archaeological evidence for it, too. What evidence? Archaeological. Keep up. I am going to spell it out for you. Our beliefs are in hyperreality, and that’s where we vote.