EXISTENCE AS SIMULACRA
If you ever go to Greece, the land of gyros and bankruptcy, you’ll likely be confronted with countless white statues of muscular dudes with their little cocks out and slim thick chicks all fighting and killing and serving as the sexual awakening for many a Grecian boy and girl. It’s insane. Can you imagine if we had naked statues of American heroes all throughout America? If the Statue of Liberty, in all her thickness, was stark naked in that filthy New York lake, we’d have to ban all teenagers and perverts (most men) from coming to her dome so that they can come to her dome. “The New Colossus” would have a whole different meaning. That lamp-lit golden door would be the town pump of the northern hemisphere. But what is the Statue of Liberty anyway? Why is the Green Giant’s wife standing all day with a torch that doesn’t even work? Shouldn’t she be eating green beans or something?
As it turns out, she’s meant to represent freedom, which is another word for liberty. Obviously, liberty is not literally a green old lady a Frenchman pawns off to you as a thanks for giving him a couple francs; that’s called prostitution, and it’s illegal. Liberty is a term for something abstract, a state of mind or being that can only be represented in metaphorical terms. It’s like those Rorschach tests that are paintings of your parents fighting or your friends making fun of your legs because they look all hairless and girly in the locker room even though you’re 16 and should be a damn man with gorilla legs already, resulting in a twisted self view of your body and sexuality that does decades long damage to your self-esteem and makes you unable to get your rocks off without doing some sick fetishistic shit in bed — or so my therapist says. Most ideas can’t really be spelled out, and this was spelled out by Plato, one of the guys you often see in statue form throughout Athens. Plato was a Greek philosopher, which is Greek for “thinking all day.” And boy was he quite the thinker. Plato came up with a bunch of different ideas, many of which are still influential today. One you may be familiar with is the “Platonic relationship.” While today we call it “the friendzone,” it nevertheless has stood the test of time as a way for women to always push me aside so they can go after the jocks who throw me into lockers when they see how shiny and hair-free my legs are. I imagine he came up with this to explain away why no buxom Greek ladies would bother with him despite the fact that he was so good at thinking. I bet that bastard Diogenes and his homeless charisma (Greek for “rizz”) got Plato sidelined. That wine casket was probably damp as a pool every night, and not because he had just poured all the wine out.
A more important idea of Plato’s, and the subject of today, is the Platonic Ideal. While the book on the Ideal is about 5,000 pages, it’s probably ideal for both of us if I just explain it in a sentence or two. Basically, Plato argued that everything that exists physically is only an imitation of the ideal thing, which is the actual essence of the thing. Take a gas station hot dog for example. What does a gas station hot dog consist of? You probably have a list of ingredients, textures, tastes, and diseases that it may consist of. If you are one of those people who can see the apple in your mind, you can also probably picture the ideal gas station hot dog. But that ideal one doesn’t really exist. You would never encounter such a hot dog in even the nicest of gas stations, no matter how well the little machine rolls it around in the damp heat all day. This applies even to Plato himself. Famously, Plato once said that a man is simply defined as a featherless biped. Diogenes, rightfully thinking this is the stupidest fucking thing he’d ever heard, came to Plato’s lecture the next day on the meaning of life and threw a defeathered chicken at Plato, exclaiming, “Behold, a man!”, causing him to become the laughingstock of Athens and permanent incel despite his treatise explaining why the only logical thing for all women to do was have sex with him. This event had an incredibly widespread effect, as it prevented Plato from revealing the meaning of life and later became the inspiration for al-Zaidi to throw a shoe at Bush the Lesser. But, in a sense, they were both on the right track. The ideal of what a human is can only be loosely defined since it can’t materialize outside of our mind, and all definitions are approximate. Not even Plato himself, despite his big brain and his perfectly wrapped toga, was an ideal human. He probably didn’t even have a nose ring or a BBL.
This ties in perfectly to those chicken nuggets that are shaped like dinosaurs. Did you ever have these as a kid? If you are unfortunate enough to be in your mid-20s, you probably ate these at some point with a little red 40 infused ketchup on a teflon covered Zoopal that you washed down with some Dr. Pib because your parents were too cheap to spring for Dr Pepper in your McDonalds Shrek mug that was painted with a layer of gorgeous cadmium paint by child workers in southeast Asia that Ronald worked to the bone himself until wokeness reached the Far East and they started banning kids from working in factories and making them go learn about calculus and play League of Legends instead, which may be a fate worse than working in a sweatshop twelve hours a day. Many people have testified that one game of bot lane with someone’s autofilled discord kitten is worse than a whole week of making iPhones for pennies an hour. Surprisingly, the chickens these nuggets are made of are actually the evolutionary descendents of dinosaurs, the very thing they have now taken the shape of. While it may be cruel of us to remind them of the glory that once was by slaughtering and mashing them into the shape of their past form, it perfectly matches the nature of existence itself for, you see, these simple nuggets are little nuggets of gold because they are a near perfect example of simulacra, an idea which underpins the very nature of existence.
The idea of the simulacrum is a sort of restatement of the Platonic Ideal as a concept. It was invented by some French guy whose name I can’t be bothered to google because all he did, as most of the French do, is steal an idea from someone else and pretend it’s their own. This is why they are so adamant about French being regulated by the Académie Française; if every new thing has an original French word, you can trick some of the more dull ones of our species (Europeans) into thinking they came up with it. Instead of focusing on the metaphysical ideal like Plato, the idea of a simulacra focuses on things imitating other things. A simple example is a cross. If you aren’t a JW, you may be aware that any Christian church you go into will have a big cross right behind the altar the priest does his whole shebang at every Sunday. In fact, you may even see a lot of people wearing crosses across their necks in case they forget what the one that’s in the church they go to on Christmas looks like. This shape is so important to them because it’s the shape of the piece of wood Jesus got nailed to as punishment for being annoying. Unfortunately for all those guys who did the nailing, Jesus was actually God and had come to tell everyone that he was God and that he’s going to usher in a new era of holiness and virtue on this sodden Earth. But, like Diogenes and his chicken, those Roman bastards stopped him before he could do it. That’s why the world we live on is hell and gas station hot dogs taste so bad. The crosses you see today are a reminder to Christians of all this, despite the fact that this is not the actual cross that was used for the crucifixion. These are all a representation, a simulacra, of the cross that Jesus died on.
Now, this raises the question of are copies of the cross just as holy, and are dinosaur chicken nuggets just as dinosaury as the original dinosaurs? While we all agree that these things are both holy and wholly delicious, they are not equal to the real thing. What follows, then, is that everything exists in the physical world only as simulacra. All of existence is an approximation or imitation of the things we imagine in our minds. There isn’t anything whose physical form is a truly accurate representation of the way we envision it in our minds or is the “original” one that sets the standard. For things that are man made, I’m not even sure if the ideal can be envisioned. What does the ideal car look like? If you asked someone 200 years ago, they’d ask you what a car was — a most unhelpful answer. But if you asked someone around 100 years ago what the ideal car was, they’d probably describe a Model T that’s lifted or has an extended cab. And while they were close in that the ideal F-350 is lifted with an extended cab, what they imagine is nothing compared to a modern car today. The environment they lived in essentially made it impossible for them to envision a Toyota Corolla. It simply is too far removed from the world of people like Jay Gatsby and his lot.
The one-two punch of the Platonic Ideal and simulacrum reveals that both a thing and its true essence can’t exist in physical reality, and that the non ideal versions that exist, either naturally or through our creation, are often cheap imitations of cheap imitations. What the hell? The only things that are real are the things that aren’t even real. It’s almost like The Truman Show (1998). When Jim was walking around in that fake world created by that fake Steve Jobs, who are we to say if that world wasn’t real? That world and its actors were imitations of the regular world and its regular people. In fact, Seahaven was so meticulously designed that it in fact was closer to what we imagine society should be than the real one outside the dome. Does the fact that Seahaven was a more accurate approximation make it more real than the real world?
I don’t think anyone would agree with this, especially considering the movie was a metaphor about how fake the whole thing was and how you should never trust men who wear turtlenecks. So what even is real then? We strive for the ideal that can’t be reached and, if we were to reach it, we would say it’s unreal because it’s unrealistic. Oftentimes, the strange and unique nature of existence is what makes it so magical and endearing. We have an idea of what should be, not what is, and we create a sort of kintsugi that we love because of its non-ideal nature.
What this ultimately brings up is if this non-ideal world we live in is what we actually desire or if we have conditioned ourselves into being ok with it. And I don’t mean things like war or famine. These things by their nature are non-ideal, and the ideal would be for them to not exist. I mean the things that are positive in life, like beauty, family, sex, and getting high. Would we actually like it more if our family was perfect in some Truman-esque way or good sex didn’t require a closet full of doohickeys and several hours of degradation? Maybe. But what about reading this? When I write or make music or anything for that matter, I’m doing it for the ideal self. No one besides me can totally comprehend exactly what I’m trying to convey here, and it’s especially the case with all the bullshit and eclectic range of tone and references I use to get my point across. The “you” I refer to doesn’t exist. You don’t exist. I’m writing to no one, no matter how many people read these words. Even if no one reads them (as is likely), the result would be the same if a million people read them. Is it more fun that way? I’ll let you decide.