Baudrillard’s language seems quite religious, so I almost feel that a religious example might relate directly to his claims better. I haven’t really read Baudrillard, but here’s how I’d explain my current understanding:
Stage 1: People pray faithfully in public because they believe in God and follow a religion. Those who witness this prayer experience a window into the transcendent.
Stage 2: People realise that they can gain social status by praying in public, so they pretend to believe. Many people are aware of this, so witnessing an apparently sincere prayer ceases to be the same experience as you don’t know whether it is genuine or not. It still represent the transcendent to some degree, but the experience of witnessing it just isn’t the same.
Stage 3: Enough people have started praying insincerely that almost everyone starts jumping on the bandwagon. Publicly prayer has ceased to be an indicator of religiosity or faith any more, but some particularly naive people still haven’t realised the pretence. People still gain status from this for speaking sufficiently elegantly. People can’t be too obviously fake though or they’ll be punished either by the few still naive enough to buy into it or by those who want to keep up the pretence. While in level 2, the lie was that people claimed to be faithful when they weren’t, in level 3 the lie is the very existence of the congregation of the faithful.
Stage 4: Praying is now seen purely as a social move which operates according to certain rules. It’s no longer necessary in and of itself to convince people that you are real, but part of the game may include punishments for making certain moves. For example, if you swear during your prayer, that might be punished for being inappropriate, even though no-one cares about religion any more, because that’s seen as cheating or breaking the rules of the game. However, you can be obviously fake in ways that don’t violate these rules, as the spirit of the rules has been forgotten. Maybe people pray for vain things like becoming wealthy. Or they go to church one day, then post pictures of them getting smashed the next day on Facebook, which all their church friends see, but none of them care. The naive are too few to matter and if they say anything, people will make fun of them.
I’ll admit that I’ve added something of my own interpretation here, especially in terms of how strongly you have to pretend to be real at the various stage
I love this example, because the stages are decoupled with truth. stage 1 is “everyone is wrong, but has beliefs which make cooperation easier”, and stage 4 is “people have more accurate beliefs, but the social cohesion is weaker”.
Baudrillard’s language seems quite religious, so I almost feel that a religious example might relate directly to his claims better. I haven’t really read Baudrillard, but here’s how I’d explain my current understanding:
Stage 1: People pray faithfully in public because they believe in God and follow a religion. Those who witness this prayer experience a window into the transcendent.
Stage 2: People realise that they can gain social status by praying in public, so they pretend to believe. Many people are aware of this, so witnessing an apparently sincere prayer ceases to be the same experience as you don’t know whether it is genuine or not. It still represent the transcendent to some degree, but the experience of witnessing it just isn’t the same.
Stage 3: Enough people have started praying insincerely that almost everyone starts jumping on the bandwagon. Publicly prayer has ceased to be an indicator of religiosity or faith any more, but some particularly naive people still haven’t realised the pretence. People still gain status from this for speaking sufficiently elegantly. People can’t be too obviously fake though or they’ll be punished either by the few still naive enough to buy into it or by those who want to keep up the pretence. While in level 2, the lie was that people claimed to be faithful when they weren’t, in level 3 the lie is the very existence of the congregation of the faithful.
Stage 4: Praying is now seen purely as a social move which operates according to certain rules. It’s no longer necessary in and of itself to convince people that you are real, but part of the game may include punishments for making certain moves. For example, if you swear during your prayer, that might be punished for being inappropriate, even though no-one cares about religion any more, because that’s seen as cheating or breaking the rules of the game. However, you can be obviously fake in ways that don’t violate these rules, as the spirit of the rules has been forgotten. Maybe people pray for vain things like becoming wealthy. Or they go to church one day, then post pictures of them getting smashed the next day on Facebook, which all their church friends see, but none of them care. The naive are too few to matter and if they say anything, people will make fun of them.
I’ll admit that I’ve added something of my own interpretation here, especially in terms of how strongly you have to pretend to be real at the various stage
I love this example, because the stages are decoupled with truth. stage 1 is “everyone is wrong, but has beliefs which make cooperation easier”, and stage 4 is “people have more accurate beliefs, but the social cohesion is weaker”.
This did help me grok one of the sub-frames, thanks.