Will you lose yourself in the Metaverse? Have you lost yourself already?

Before I’d written it, the title of this article was “The Hyperreal of the Human Psyche.” Not as catchy, right? Probably not as telling either. 

I knew I’d be writing this post about Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal and Jung’s concept of modern psychology. If you’re not familiar with either, don’t worry; I’m going to dive into each in a minute. It only dawned on me after writing the piece, though, that we may soon be immersed in an era (or, rather, a digital time and place) in which our psychology will slip away from us faster than it ever has in modernity. In other words, Baudrillard and Jung would most certainly be looking at our coming immersion into VR and the metaverse with horror and fascination.

And that, of course, is a problem.

It’s a problem because the human psyche already became notoriously slippery when we entered the industrialized world, with its hyper-connected communications and modern media “landscape.” It’s hard to stay connected with the Self when we’re spending all our attention on being connected to the conceptual modern world, Jung would say. And if that was so hard before, now, as we begin to mix in virtual reality and the “metaverse”, it’s starting to look to me like most of us may as well start kissing “ourselves” goodbye entirely. Because, as Baudrillard would say, the simulation comes to feel more real than reality itself. 

Where it started: Baudrillard + Jung

Some years ago I read through Jean Baudrillard’s Selected Writings. I can’t claim to have understood all of it. Topics on semiotics, the study of signs and symbols and their interpretation, can be hard to follow, possibly by their very nature. But the semiotician Baudrillard’s notion of the hyperreal was (mostly) clear to me. And though it has been years since I picked up the book, thoughts of the hyperreal flooded me yesterday as I was reading Carl Jung’s The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the Individual in Modern Society.

Any article on the topics of the hyperreal and Jungian psychology are probably bound to slip into annoying complexity. But I hope to write something understandable on a topic that I find pretty damn interesting and relevant. So let me take a little time with the set up before jumping in.

First, what is “hyperreality”?

Here’s a definition from a wikipedia page on the topic: The postmodern semiotic concept of "hyperreality" was contentiously coined by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard defined "hyperreality" as "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality"; hyperreality is a representation, a sign, without an original referent.

Side track: What is a “sign” and a “referent”?

To define the terms more bluntly than semioticians would probably like:

• “Sign” = The word(s), symbols, schema, or expression used to point to some object 

• “Referent” = the object to which the sign is referring

In other words, the word “tree” is not a tree itself. Instead, the word “tree” (the sign) points to the object of a tree (the referent). The object could be a literal tree or the idea of a tree. For example, “A tree is growing out of your left ear” is clearly conjuring your idea of a tree, but it’s not pointing to a literal tree out your window. But, again, the “sign” of the word “tree” can do both: point to something literal, or point to your idea of that literal thing.

(Baudrillard rooted his ideas of semiotics in economic theory. He wrote first of the process of exchange values and realized that the sign-to-referent process is similar to (or the same as) that of economic exchange. You give me this, I give you that in equal value. Signs and referents live in that kind of “exchange value” relationships.)

Back to hyperreality.

With his notion of hyperreality, Baudrillard is basically saying: In our modern world of communication and model-building, we’ve managed to separate the notion of the sign from the notion of the referent. And as a result, you can have a sign (or a “simulacra” or a “simulation”) that creates a world completely disconnected from the world of objective reality. You can manipulate signs to point to things that don’t exist in reality at all, and in doing so can falsify reality itself. An exchange with reality doesn’t even have to take place.

And frequently, when we use signs to point to things that don’t exist in reality at all (for example, coming upon an upside-down-growing tree in a virtual landscape), those signs and their conjured “referents” can often feel more real than a real thing itself. This according to Baudrillard. When this happens, when the simulation becomes more real to us than reality itself, we are experiencing the “hyperreal.” The concept of the “real” holds more sway for us than reality itself. In doing so and in return, it can fool our vision of reality.

Disneyland is leaking out.

Backing up from this idea of the hyperreal is a metaphor that I think is both easy to understand, that helps set the stage for the hyperreal, and which draws the closer connection to Jung (which, I promise, I’m getting to).

The hyperreal exists where simulations exist. That’s where the hyperreal begins: “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality"; hyperreality is a representation, a sign, without an original referent. Simulations are models.

And what better simulation do we have than Disneyland? With its fake main street, its fake frontierland, its image of the history of America, its simulation of the spirit of America. But an interesting thing happens with Baudrillard’s Disneyland. Not only does the fake Disneyland world come to feel more real than the reality of what’s outside of it—Disneyland leaks out; the map reverses itself; so we start to see the real world of the “outside” as Disney-fied. Baudrillard writes:

“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.”

And, “[Disneyland] is meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the “real” world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particular among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness.” 

Further, “...Disneyland [is] an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the artificial perimeter...”

The Fake turns the Real into fake when the map reverses itself.

WTF does this have to do with Jung?

Baudrillard and semiotics are difficult to understand, but I hope the stage is set. Let’s move forward to what this has to do with Jung.

First, here’s some context on what Jung is writing about at the moment the connection is made.

“The Undiscovered Self” is a call for the “individual” to know thyself. In response to mid-20th Century fascism, the cold war, and communist dictatorship, Jung urges the individual not to be absorbed and lost into the masses. The individual is the primary carrier of consciousness, and, as such, the individual needs to have the integrity and dignity of self-ownership, self-awareness, decision-making power, spirituality, and profoundly honest self-investigation. Jung writes that the “State,” mostly referring to the communist state but also to any state that would effectively usurp the individual, is too rational. The State disconnects people from their personal abstractness and spirit (as well as from their personal and intimate relationship to whatever “god” might equate to for them). Jung has a lot of fascinating things to say about the failure of religion that I won’t get into here. But, suffice to say that Jung’s take is that religion has become more like a “creed,” a role-play, more like a sign than a referent in Baudrillard’s terms, and so it usurps the individual just as much as the State does. Religion no longer encourages freedom via spiritual exploration; it seeks to rule in the manner of the State.

Going deeper. At this point in the book, Jung speaks about how people are so estranged from themselves and their instincts that they can’t help but become neurotic. If the consciousness is like the rational, above-ground world of “form,” like the State or role-played religion, then the unconscious is the abstract, internal world of instincts, which would be closely tied to Spirit, and which religion has failed. I’ll just rewrite his words here, since he put it best:

“Nothing estranges man more from the ground plan of his instincts than his learning capacity… It, more than anything else, is responsible for the altered conditions of our existence and the need for new adaptations which civilization brings. It is also the source of numerous psychic disturbances and difficulties occasioned by man’s progressive alienation from his instinctual foundation, i.e., by his uprootedness and identification with his conscious knowledge of himself, by his concern with consciousness at the expense of unconsciousness…”

He goes on to write, and this is where the connection lies: “His consciousness therefore orients itself chiefly by observing and investigating the world around him, and it is to its peculiarities that he must adapt his psychic and technical resources. This task is so exacting, and its fulfillment so advantageous, that he forgets himself in the process, losing sight of his instinctual nature and putting his own conception of himself in place of his real being. In this way he slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual world where the products of his conscious activity progressively replace reality.

This, as far as I’m concerned, is the hyperreality of the psyche. The acting of forgetting the self is separation from the “referent,” and putting one’s own conception of self in place of their real being is the separation of the “sign” (aka simulation/simulacra) from the true self.

When Jung writes the word “concept” in the phrase above, I take it to mean the idea of something that may or may not actually be “real,” and, in fact, probably isn’t truly real. You see yourself from the rational outside as an idea of you. The “idea” of you is a simulation, untethered to the reality of you. In this way, it is just like the hyperreal version of your psyche. And as Jung probably rightly asserts, this leads to a split personality, which is the source of a huge amount of neuroticism in our world. 

It’s up to the individual to own and investigate their own experience. We should all be diving deep into ourselves to connect the conscious with the unconscious, to understand how our instincts drive us, and to find the abstract parts of us that are more closely tied to our spirit and even “god.” Only then can we be whole and authentic.

Bringing it home

Immersing ourselves in virtual reality will only further separate us from our “real being.” As Jung might put it: spending all our resources on operating in the simulation will only cause us to slip (further) imperceptibly into a purely conceptual world, where the products of our conscious activity progressively replace reality.

I wonder: Why are so many of us so excited to slip into the world of VR? Maybe it’s because, as Jung says, we’ve already given ourselves up to the concepts of us anyway. Why worry about losing reality to the simulation when we’ve already lost our authentic selves to some false notion of ourselves anyway?

And when I say “Bringing it home,” I mean bringing it home. The human experience is within the world of reality. It’s where our instincts lie. It’s where our connections to ourselves, each other, and nature lie. The further we remove ourselves from it, the more fucked up and neurotic we’re going to feel.

If there’s enough “good” on offer in the virtual world, and if we can use it in service to humanity rather than to its distraction, then it doesn’t need to go away. But we may all do better to keep ourselves profoundly rooted in Reality, which is our first, authentic, healthy home.

With this, as with anything else, I’m always open to learning more and adjusting my thinking. So if you happen to read this and feel strongly that I should hear a different perspective, please feel free to email me!