Simulation, Fetishism and World Domination

Abstract

According to Jean Baudrillard, in a totally functional world people become irrational and subjective, given to projecting their fantasies of power into the efficiency of the system, a state of ‘spectacular alienation’. I argue that Americans as a society have accommodated themselves to such a system to the detriment of their ability to make sense in their public discourse. Baudrillard finds pathology in the system of objects as it determines social relations. In one symptom, people may obsess over a fetish object. For American society, the magical mechanical object is the gun. I show evidence for this weapons fetish in American fiction, cinema, television and serious journalism. Then, using Baudrillard and other analysts, I show how the American obsession with the superior functionality of weapons joins its myth of exceptionality and preference for simulation over reality to create a profound American dream state that protects a very deep sleep.