https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-order_simulacra

Last link I posted before I fell asleep deals with Post-Modernism. A difficult to fully understand concept. Layers of Meta bullshit.
Being insane makes this easier. Not a joke. There is good reason for it as it deals with reality and representation.
This "idea" or set of "ideas" has been applied to much of society and many people work within it though they don't know so.
There are no jokes here just slow creeping terror and varying layers of hell.

Let's discuss "map–territory relation" or -the relationship between an object and a representation of that object,
as in the relation between a geographical territory and a map of it.-
What does this mean more plainly?

A map is a representation of a territory.
A map is not the territory itself.

Mind bending shit, but taken further as Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski remarked "the word is not the thing".
The word can describe the thing, it can represent the thing, but it is not the thing itself.
Just because you say it or feel it does not make it true.
it does not make it real.
That -an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself.-
If you're thinking, "well, yes, of course" good for you.

Now comes the encroaching terror as, assuming you haven't already, you notice that this obvious fact is not the way the world works.

-Korzybski held that many people do confuse maps with territories, that is, confuse models of reality with reality itself.-
"The map is not the territory."
-The expression first appeared in print in a paper that Alfred Korzybski gave at a meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1931.-

Remember when NORLANS did something in society other than get college women to flash tits and drown?
Not many people do.

The original idea this was based upon was from a mathematician.
-In Science and Sanity, Korzybski acknowledges his debt to mathematician Eric Temple Bell, whose epigram "the map is not the thing mapped" was published in Numerology.-
-A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.-
-The Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte illustrated the concept of "perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves"-

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DAGK0V6UAAAzBRY.jpg
"This is not a pipe"

Get it? Got it? Good.
And now we accelerate the concept.

- Exoteric concepts are concepts which can be fully conveyed using descriptors and language constructs, such as mathematics.
Esoteric concepts are concepts which cannot be fully conveyed except by direct experience.-
-For example, a person who has never tasted an apple will never fully understand through language what the taste of an apple is.
Only through direct experience (eating an apple) can that experience be fully understood.-
-made the point humorously with his description of a fictional map that had "the scale of a mile to the mile".
A character notes some practical difficulties with such a map and states that
//make note of this,going to get so much dumber.
"we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."-
-The University of Cambridge economist Joan Robinson (1962) emphasized the disutility of 1:1 maps and other overly detailed models:
"A model which took account of all the variation of reality would be of no more use than a map at the scale of one to one."-
-storyline in his comic Labyrinthe: a map can never guarantee that one will find the way out,
because the accumulation of events can change the way one looks at reality.-

You should know where this is going by now.
Imagine creating a map that was not a representation of a territory, but your ideal image of what a territory should look like.
Now imagine thinking that if you did this enough, the territory itself would soon began to reform itself in reality according to your map.
Well, you probably think it would be silly then, to go around, following that map as if it were accurate in anyway whatsoever.
Doubly silly when the person starts complaining, and bemoaning that their map is inaccurate and that the territory must reshape to them.
Now understand that this society has been running, well over half a century now, on this very mode of thinking.
Nothing has changed, and they will continue to do this until either everyone dies,
or they are killed, not assassinated, because the society rejects the way of thinking.
Until then nothing will change this.
Reality becomes muted under layers of projections of ideal versions of reality, but reality does not go away and it becomes more agitated
the more of these are piled on because they are false, they are not representations and eventually, reality makes itself known.

Dog on fire, drinking coffee.
"This is fine."

What does that have to do with the link now we return to it.
Simulacra and Simulation, a treatise by a Frenchman, Jean Baudrillard.
Examining -the relationships among reality, symbols, and society.-
-Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original to begin with, or that no longer have an original.
Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.-
-The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.-
-Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs,
and that human experience is of a simulation of reality. -

//no, this isn't matrix shit

-Moreover, these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality, nor even deceptive mediations of reality;
they are not based in a reality nor do they hide a reality,
they simply hide that nothing like reality is relevant to our current understanding of our lives.-

Where do this go, this is the understanding of "Societal Constructs" as being niches and holes people are put into.
This is not the idea that if you pretend reality is a social construct it will become nothing but one.
The difference between a constructed and false view of the world and the world.

-Baudrillard believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the
constructs of society that all meaning was being rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable.-

"Everyone is everyone"

The deconstructionists are nothing but subversive builders of a false reality, while they pretend to be it's savors.

-The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct,
that a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order".-
-The second stage is perversion of reality,
this is where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance—
it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us,
but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.-
-The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality,
where the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original.
Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place
and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to.

//That's where the meaning becomes lost because everything becomes everything.

Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.--

//Why, as a mother fucker with a psychosis does post-modernism scare me so much this is why:

-The fourth stage is pure simulacrum,
in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever.
Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims.

//self-referential constructions of false realities.

This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense,

//Clarification: having or showing unaffected simplicity of nature or absence of artificiality; unsophisticated; ingenuous.
because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are
expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms.
Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.-
//You just don't understand your own privilege in society, what you're feeling is just white fragility.
//reactionary. whitelash. etc etc.
These are hyper real terms.

short segue:

-inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality-

further clarification of definitions:
Recall "Simulation" as defined in the text.
-is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.-
The perceived representation of reality and the reality.
The inability to distinguish these things from each other.
You have privilege even though you are poor, destitute or otherwise oppressed in some way because you must because otherwise
certain peoples succeeding more than others must break the imitation of reality, the false "signs" that are equality. They  fall apart.
Self-referencing pseudo realities.
The "profound truth" of equality that a society of equal outcome represents.
Society is not equal therefore the representation must be "perverted" or "distorted" by something.
Racism, white privilege.
This builds.
It self-references.
It never acknowledges that it's "Truth" never actually existed.
Equality is a societal construct to make everyone the same.
Reality is muted.
But it remains, semi perceived in representations of reality.
Statistics.
History.
Day to day life.
Recall:

"where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense"

We was

"Blacks invented everything"

And every single fucking movie, show, whatever, where reality is distorted to fit an agenda

Why?

Recall again:

They do not need to even pretend to be real

-because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial
that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms.-
Why do the terms white fragility, whitelash, angry white guy etc etc exist?

Recall:

-Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.-

"You just don't know that truth is myth.
My myths are Truth."

Europeans wrote a lot of history, therefore all history as written should be assumed false and isntead the total opposite assumed truth.
We call it Afrocentrism.
-Proponents of Afrocentrism support the claim that the contributions of various African people have been downplayed or
discredited as part of the legacy of colonialism and slavery's pathology of "writing Africans out of history"-
"Legacy of Colonialism."
"Slavery's Pathology."
Self-referencing constructions.

The word is not the thing.

-third order are symbols that have become without referents, that is, symbols with no real object to represent but pretends to be
a faithful copy of an original.
Simply put, a third-order simulacra are symbols in themselves taken for reality and further layer of symbolism is added. -
layers muting reality.
-This occurs when the symbol is taken to be more important or authoritative of the original entity,
authenticity has been replaced by copy (thus reality is replaced by a substitute).-
-The consequence of the propagation of second-order simulacra is that, within the affected context, nothing is "real,"
though those engaged in the illusion are incapable of seeing it.
Instead of having experiences, people observe spectacles, via real or metaphorical
control screens. Instead of the real, we have simulation and simulacra, the hyperreal.-
-The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of
culture and media that construct perceived reality,
the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence is and are rendered legible; -

Did you remember what I said to note? About the 1-1 map?

-a short story by Borges in which a king requests a map (i.e. a symbol) to be produced so detailed that
it ends up coming into one-to-one correspondence with the territory (i.e. the real area the map is to represent);
this references the philosophical concept of map–territory relation.

//here is the important part for why I said note it

Baudrillard argues that in the postmodern epoch, the territory ceases to exist, and there is nothing left but the map;
or indeed, the very concepts of the map and the territory have become indistinguishable,
the distinction which once existed between them having been erased.-

Now the layers of hell.

-Among the many issues associated with the propagation of second-order simulacra to the third-order is what Baudrillard considers
the termination of history.-
-The method of this termination comes through the lack of oppositional elements in society, with the mass having become
"the silent majority,"
an imploded concept which absorbs images passively, becoming itself a media overwritten by those who speak for it
(i.e. the people are symbolically represented by governing agents and market statistic, marginalizing the people themselves).
- For Baudrillard this is the natural result of an ethic of unity in which actually agonistic
opposites are taken to be essentially the same. -

//Read this carefully.
//This is how they protect what they do. By claiming what you're attacking, is something else entirely.
//Thus, protecting what they do by rallying the forces of something else, who have been made to believe, this relates to them.

-For example,
Baudrillard contends that moral universalism (human rights, equality) is equated with globalization,
which is not concerned with immutable values but with mediums of exchange and equalisation such as the global market and mass media.-

//This is how you get these idiots defending the very thing killing what they claim to want to protect.
Everything has become everything.
So they now believe the murderer the surgeon.
Everything has "ulterior motives" now because they equate them all as the same things.
You want the "surveillance", "mass media" society in which a systematic control of the population takes place
through symbols representing things they have no relation to, to rally them into doing whatever they want them to?
You want muh bourgeoisie, convincing muh proletariat to defend their interests?
This is it.
Take the concept of the upper class manipulating the middle and lower into defending their own destruction "basic lefty thinking"
now meta it by one whole layer
That concept is now part of the control.
There you go.
Does that mean it isn't happening?

No.

It means that concept is known and has been itself, assimilated into the structure.
Despite what some might think, to the mind, contradiction does not stand out and prove a thing false.
It just clouds it further.

"The supreme luxury of the society of technical necessity will be to grant the bonus of useless revolt and of an acquiescent smile. —Jacques Ellul"

Now imma go play video games.
Okay bye.