Hyperreality and Marriage

The contemporary world is insane

The contemporary world is insane. This is because it is not real; nothing in it is real. It has declared autonomy from reality, it has not killed God it has simply refused to acknowledge Him. 

We no longer inhabit reality, we have constructed our own hyperreality above it and we never glance down. We are no longer rooted, and most of us are fooled into thinking that no such things as “roots” exist in the first place. That they have never existed, just a lie of history, a mistake by our oh so foolish forefathers. (“look at how dumb they were in the past, isn’t it so quaint!”)

We’re the idiots, not our ancestors. They had common sense because they were still bound to the Earth. Now that we float in hyperreal space, disconnected from nature and its Author, we find common sense is not so common. In its place we find a stultified narrative, capable only of perverting all it touches.

What am I going on about? What is hyperreality? As loathe as I am to do this, I’m afraid I will have to use a diagram to illustrate this (no, it will not be on the test).

This theory of the hyperreal is divided into 4 stages: First, reality is reality, obvious enough, you get it. Second, there is a disfiguring of such a reality, think of it like sin, a privation of reality, something is missing now. Third stage, the image of a reality masks its absence: e.g. someone pretending to be virtuous in order to Mask his complete lack of virtue. Finally, in the fourth stage, the image (the one we experience) has absolutely no connection to reality itself: someone who mutilates children for their demonic ideology and claims that as a virtue (just a hypothetical).

I hope you have started to see how this applies to the contemporary world. When I say we are insane I did not go far enough, we are schizophrenic; we see a fire where there is water and a road where there is a cliff. 

I will take only one example to illustrate this. There are infinite ones I could choose of course, but I leave the rest as an exercise to the reader in their spare time.

Let’s talk about modern marriage, or rather modern “marriage.”

First stage: I can do no better than the catechism here, marriage is a sacramental “lifelong partnership of the whole of life, of mutual and exclusive fidelity, established by mutual consent between one man and one woman, and ordered towards the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring.” Pretty basic if you’re Catholic you understand so I won’t bore you further.

Second Stage: marriage is no longer a sacrament. It’s kind of still ordered around the production of children and their good as well as that of the spouse. But sacramental? Get real, we’re not some kind of crazy fundamentalists! We’re all Rational™ here! If Heaven is up there, why can’t I see it why my telescope?

Third Stage: Well, you see marriage is about just being with someone you love. What is love? Uhhh, well, its like when you really like someone... what’s sacrifice? Kids? Well, they can happen but its not really about them, they’re just an afterthought you know.

Fourth Stage: marriage is when a man sodomizes another man, bigot.

Bulgakov's Behemoth