Only the death toll of #COVID19 is real; everything else about it is fake. This is to twist the words of Jean #Baudrillard. I’ll try to use Baudrillard’s thoughts to reflect a bit further. This is a long #thread for those who wish to think beyond, or simply kill some time

Death is always of the real, wrote Baudrillard, not only in the sense of the random definition around its inescapability, but primarily as it has the monopoly of defying power. Power, which according to Baudrillard is always faked, simulated.

Baudrillard disagrees with #Foucault that power is everywhere; he argues it's nowhere. In a twist of Hegelian dialectics, Baudrillard claims the simulated nature of the master's power, who has no power to begin with, is revealed only by the slave's violent death.

And there's nothing more violent than the deaths we are seeing these days. Nothing more violent than dying in a hospital bed unable to get the necessary equipment to survive, that is if you are able to get a bed at the first place.

No deaths can be more violent than ones that comes as a final verdict of the unseen, the unknown, when everything that everyone knows does not suffice to escape them. And no matter how much we know about COVID-19...

...the entire situation the world is going through right now, is showing we really KNOW NOTHING at all. The behaviour of the human kind right now is becoming an exemplar of what Baudrillard called hyperreality, a reality driven by simulations, by hyper-production of discourse..

...and meanings to the point that no discourse is attached to any meaning. A hyperreality in which events do not produce meanings any more, but it is rather the pre-set meanings that enable the events to happen at the first place.

Today, literally, everybody is reading everything about the pandemic. We're all following the numbers, learning words in Latin, and finally understanding biology classes from primary school. We all know the stats, even the death toll, the procedures and the spread.

We even knowthe different chemicals pharmacology keeps updating us could potentially do good, or harm, we know how many beds the hospitals have. Actually, some politicians in charge of health policies found that out such numbers for the first time, just like the rest of us.

Today everybody is an expert. And no matter how futile our field of expertise is, no matter how simulated and fake the said knowledge is, the whole situation is primarily sad and terrifying because when everybody is an expert, it means nobody really is.

Today we can realise that we know nothing, because we can see that the knowledge we have produced and reproduced has been faked, simulated. But we can only see that when we think of the death toll. Of the violent deaths caused by the weird flu.

Their deaths were violent also because they were primarily the elderly, the week, and primarily the poor. And compared to their death, everything else is surreal, fake. Look at how wrong we were about medicine, which is proven to be more like market-oriented engineering...

...rather than science. As the doctors receive weekly instructions on how to treat patients which are different from each other, we understand how pharmacology is no science but rather a perverted witchery in which commercial interest compete to hyper production and reproduction.

Yet, at the same time, in spite of the fake nature of pharmacology and medicine, we maintain digesting the same chemicals and use the same protocols they tell us to, even if they're changing every day, as indeed they do produce some real effects.

The only real effects that can be produced in the hyperreal.

Look how we’ve been faking, simulating, healthcare and especially health policy. If this global pandemic is not showing us that, I am not sure what else could.

The same goes for international order and liberal institutions, we have been faking them all this time, and it takes a pandemic to realise that. These days, it is not the people that are turning to nations states, but rather it is the nation states turning to people and...

...turning their back to international relations, in their perpetual pursuit for power. Power, which Baudrillard reminds us, would stage its own suicide just to re-appear in the simulated construction of power relations.

Look at how politicians are running countries, simulating fear, denying their own power against the flu in order to extend their reign. Look at the EU and how it almost disappeared against the return of the nation states once a glimpse of the real, the death toll, started rising

And while all such powers, especially the nation states, will be able to use this pandemic to reassert themselves as powers (the EU too) it is important to take a moment to realise the extent to which we have been simulating our social realities.

How we have been fooling ourselves by simulating the social to the point that the very essence of the social, as Baudrillard would say, has escaped the real. Going back to COVID-19, everything we are currently doing, the lockdown, the news and updates, the chatter...

.. and the fear we have, it is all fake, product of simulations. We keep producing and reproducing partial information, news, disinformation, memes, chatter and more chatter, words and signs that no longer connect to the reality.

The deaths, however, the deaths are always of the real. Lives of people are being cut short because of the failure of our simulations. Their deaths, their violent deaths, remain the only signifier of the real, in this entire mess.

The last question that begs asking, however, is whether this pandemic and all the deaths it is causing will be powerful enough to reveal the faked nature of the political system. And I am not talking only about consumerism which is strangely and unsurprisingly surviving the virus

Of course it is, as we are all rushing to order stuff delivered. Of course, it’s stuff we don’t need with the money we don’t have but that’s an old story.
The question that begs asking is whether COVID—19 will be the turning point when we can collectively see...

... the structural problems of power over the existing material wealth and the future orientation of what we bluntly call development. Will we be able to see that all technological and scientific choices and decisions we have made since the end of the last World War...

...all the political and policy choices, have been hyperreal, existing for the sole purpose of reasserting themselves as signs whilst not being connected to anything real.

How many have to die, I wonder, before we understand that the number of hospital beds, for instance, or doctors and nurses, the overall budget given to healthcare, was not driven by reason and true knowledge, but by commercial interest and simulated knowledge.

Hence, it is all fake. The only thing that remains real is the death toll. Each and every death, and all the pain they have caused.

P.S. I will be publishing some more thoughts on simulated power, looking at the EU, very soon.