“Daniel Boorstin in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America notes that in contemporary culture the fabricated, the inauthentic, and the theatrical have displaced the natural, the genuine, and the spontaneous. Reality has been converted into image and stagecraft. Americans, he writes, increasingly live in a “world where fantasy is more real than reality.”111 “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them,” he writes. “We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience.”
“Daniel Boorstin in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America notes that in contemporary culture the fabricated, the inauthentic, and the theatrical have displaced the natural, the genuine, and the spontaneous. Reality has been converted into image and stagecraft. Americans, he writes, increasingly live in a “world where fantasy is more real than reality.”111
ReplyDelete“We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them,” he writes. “We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience.”
Excerpt From: Chris Hedges. “America.” iBooks.