All of [the] activities here have a surreptitious end-of-the-world feel to them:... these joggers sleepwalking in the mist like shadow's who have escaped from Plato's cave
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the unsettling nature of modern existence and the obscured reality that people face.
Jean Baudrillard uses the metaphor of joggers 'sleepwalking in the mist' to illustrate how individuals navigate their lives without true awareness or understanding, similar to the prisoners in Plato's cave who perceive only shadows of reality. This suggests that contemporary activities can feel futile or aimless, as they mask a deeper existential dread connected to the end of the world.
In practice
In a discussion about modern life and its challenges, this quote could highlight the need for deeper awareness.
The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one side won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.
Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
This false distance is present everywhere: in spy films, in Godard, in modern advertising, which uses it continually as a cultural allusion. It is not really clear in the end whether this 'cool' smile is the smile of humour or that of commercial complicity. This is also the case with pop, and its smile ultimately encapsulates all its ambiguity: it is not the smile of critical distance, but the smile of collusion
There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.
the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone- remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygenic design- but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness.
Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. In other countries, the business of laughing is left to the viewers. Here, their laughter is put on the screen, integrated into the show. It is the screen that is laughing and having a good time. You are simply left alone with your consternation.
The great and rare mystics of the past . . . were, in fact, ahead of their time, and are still ahead of ours. In other words, they most definitely are not figures of the past. They are figures of the future.
After the war people said, 'If you can plan for war, why can't you plan for peace?' When I was 17, I had a letter from the government saying, 'Dear Mr. Benn, will you turn up when you're 17 1/2? We'll give you free food, free clothes, free training, free accommodation, and two shillings, ten pence a day to just kill Germans.' People said, well, if you can have full employment to kill people, why in God's name couldn't you have full employment and good schools, good hospitals, good houses?
Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?
Is privacy about government security agents decrypting your e-mail and then kicking down the front door with their jackboots? Or is it about telemarketers interrupting your supper with cold calls? It depends. Mainly, of course, it depends on whether you live in a totalitarian or a free society.
And in England there has always been something deeply pro-Arab, of course, not among all Englishmen, and anti-Israeli, in the establishment. They abstained in the 1947 UN partition resolution... They maintained an arms embargo against us in the 1950s... They always worked against us. They think the Arabs are the underdogs.
A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians.
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