Quote by Jean Baudrillard

“All this follows a kind of dizzying whirl, as though this growing abstraction, this rise of an integral hyperreality, were itself a response to a hypersensitivity to certain final conditions. But what final conditions? Reality will have been only a fleeting solution then. Indeed, it merely succeeded others, such as the religious illusion in all its forms. This truth, this rationality, this objective reality - which we took in exchange for religious values, imagining that we had moved definitively beyond them - is only the disenchanted heir to those same religious values. It does not seem ever genuinely to have gained the upper hand, as it happens, nor does it appear that the transcendent solution is entirely past and gone or that God is dead, even though we now deal only with his metastases. Perhaps that solution was merely eclipsed and it is emerging from its eclipse in reaction to this very intensification of reality, to the weight of an ever more real, ever more secular world in which there is no possibility of redemption. Reality too is a hinterworld and a substitutive illusion, and in fact we live in this 'real' world as in a hinterworld. It is merely that we have succeeded in negotiating it in a way that does without heaven and hell (though not without debt and guilt, for which we are now answerable to ourselves). Have we gained or lost on the deal? There is no answer. We have exchanged one illusion for another, and it turns out that the material, objective illusion, the illusion of reality, is as fragile as the illusion of God and no longer protects us, once the euphoria of science and the Enlightenment is past, from the fundamental illusion of the world and its absence of truth. In fact, this secular, desacralized reality has slowly become a useless function, the fiction of which we are desperately attempting to rescue (as once we attempted to rescue the existence of God), but which, deep down, we do not know how to rid ourselves of.”

Quote by Jean Baudrillard