I want to address the postmodern notion of hyperreality in relation to the current Covid-19 panic. Hyperreality occurs when consciousness is no longer able to distinguish a simulation from reality. What is real, and what is fictional blend together seamlessly so one cannot ascertain where reality ends and fiction begins, and vice versa. Since physical reality and virtual reality -- and perhaps human intelligence and artificial intelligence -- become mixed up, people often find themselves actually preferring the virtual and artificial to the real.
The Covid-19 panic plague of 2020 is real, of course, to some degree. Sometimes people do die from the illness, and some people with the illness get very sick. One can do the numbers and see some effect on world health during this outbreak. Moreover, there is some evidence to suggest that if everybody were to wear a mask, the incidence of transmission might fall by some not clearly defined percent. (It would be great to have real numbers!) So there are elements of the real in the Covid Panic of 2020. People die, people get sick, some are sick enough to go to the hospital, and universal mask-wearing might lower the incidence of transmission. This is reality.
Now let us move to the virtual, the artificial and the fictional. While decisions in previous outbreaks were made in the context of the other affairs of humanity, e.g., people marrying, people dying, people going to school, people running businesses, people running for public office, the situation this time is very different. Very early on draconian measures were adopted by governments throughout the world to combat this "threat," measures that often limited the freedom of individuals to deal with the "threat" in their own way. Routine medical care was shut down for millions of people as clinics and hospitals waited for the hordes of infected patients to come. But, in general, the apocalyptic run on hospitals never materialized. The education and play of children was curtailed even though they were at very low risk. Businesses were locked down by governments arbitrarily in the name of the public good. A new morality developed. "Do you wear a mask?" If yes, you care about people. If no, you don't.
Never before in human history has an outbreak been hyped like this. People began to fear, and they even begin to hate those who don't fear. The actual threat of the illness is not at all commensurate with the response, it seems. But this cognitive dissonance does not affect most people, because most simply live the hyperreality of the Covid plague, a reality where one must do whatever is possible to save human life.
The French social philosopher Jean Baudrillard introduced the phenomenon of hyperreality. Consider Walt Disney productions -- at least in its heyday. Clearly, Disney movies are simulations of the real. But Disney's emphasis on dreams and childhood became, says Baudrillard, the American dream itself. The "outside world" of which the Disney world simulates is now merely a simulacrum. The symbolism and signification of the Disney world does not track reality, but becomes the preferred world in which people live. Once this happens, the outside world is made the simulacrum; it itself becomes a mere simulation of the world of dreams and childhood.
This is what has happened. The Covid 19 panic driven by the media and cable news has circled the globe and the hyperreality of a "Covid Pague" has replaced for many what is really happening "out there." The narrative of the virus and its devastating effects is preferred by many to the much more mundane world of a new virus which can be deadly at times. Lock downs, moral shaming and pride, and protecting the public replace the much more mundane story of what is happening on the ground. In our hyperreal land, the President has the power evidently to cause the virus or stop it.
You can live the hyperreal if you want to, folks. It is supported by the media and clearly presupposed by many of our politicians. It is, after all, rather exciting to have a hyperreal war rather than a real one. Not many die in the former, and yet one still can "live the war." It is also more exciting to live a hyperreal plague than the mundane real one. After all, in reality the Covid 19 virus is likely to finish at less than 1/150 times as deadly as the 1918-19 flu worldwide. Over and against the commonplace, it is stimulating to "live the plague," to think and act in all ways as if it were extremely deadly. Living the plague makes it much easier to change the world profoundly in the face of "humanity's greatest menace."
Baudrillard simply has this nailed. I hope you see it. Please don't nail the messenger.
