Simulacra and Simulations

After reading this piece once I was first confused as to where he was going with his point. So I had to re-read it and then kind of got what he was trying to say. The first passage that was interesting to me was when he said"Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" this amazes me so someone can think they are sick and try to stimulate the sickness and make some of the symptoms come to life even though they really are not sick. But then he started to talk about how if every sickness was only stimulated then the medicine loses its purpose. So I ask myself then is everybody faking sick? I think not this why I started to get confused.

When Hyperreal and Imaginary came to topic he started to compare the parking lot of Disney Land to a concentration camp! This shocked me, making the comparison to such an extreme. As I read further into the text he began to say the Disney Land is only to mask the real world with an imaginary one so that we forget the REAL way of life and reality. So if i understand right if we go to this park we are going to be "hypnotized" by the imaginary world and totally forget reality itself? I don't think so or at least that hasn't happened to me...yet.

Watergate comes up next, he goes into the fact that it is like his comparison with Disney Land. He goes into talk about how a scandal can form how we want reality to work or how it should work. I was a little confused by this point, he saying that by scandals and journalists they set up how moral something is. Or how by having these it allows us to function?

Now just to make you more confused or angry he says "Of the same order as the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the impossibility of staging an illusion.Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible. It is the whole political problem of the parody. It is the whole political problem of the parody, of hypersimulation or offensive simulation, which is posed here." So now he is saying that there is no longer any real about the universe there is only a "hyper-real" ok so there is no longer a real world it hyper real so what we are doing right now isn't real? the things we say aren't real?

After reading this article I realized that may people had different views of how everything is set up for the world to work.