Unreal City Quotes

“Capitalism isn’t merely amoral, it is actively immoral, and it has to conceal its immortality via the simulation of morality. Morality is not part of capitalism. Capitalism is all about serving the self-interest of the individual, and there’s nothing moral about that unless, like Ayn Rand, you insanely proclaim, “Selfishness is virtuous.” Morality is always external to capitalism, something alien to capitalism. Capitalism addresses morality through simulation. It even reifies morality and turns it into commodities. The Vatican sells religious trinkets to the credulous masses. Evangelical Christianity in America is a vast money-making machine. Disneyland and Hollywood simulate a moral order where the good are rewarded and the wicked punished (the opposite of what actually happens in capitalism).”
― Mark Romel, Unreal City: The Strange Disappearance of Reality

“Prisons exist to hide the fact that the entire system is a jail. Shopping malls conceal the reality that the whole of America is a shopping mall. America is a vast shop. It is not a nation. It does not exist these days to land men on the men and do “the difficult thing”. It exists to shop and do the easy thing. The purpose of America is to create maximum profits for the 1% who run America. Everything is designed to serve that end, and everyone goes along with it. One of the 1% is now the President. The middlemen – the politicians – have been cut out. America creates apparent perimeters around explicitly imaginary domains (such as Disneyland), but the truth is that reality no more exists outside the limits than inside the limits. The effect of the “imaginary” is to conceal the loss of the real. The more energy that America devotes to the imaginary – via Disney, Hollywood, “reality” TV (actually unreality TV), video games, virtual reality, social media, “fake news”, post-truth, and so on – the further the real recedes into the distance. Is it possible for America to return to the real now? Would it even know what the real was? How would it recognize it? America has become hyperreal. It’s not real at all. It is “more real than real” and also “less real than real”, the problem being that “more” and “less” would make sense only if there were a reality to serve as a comparison point. That’s exactly what is lacking.”
― Mark Romel, Unreal City: The Strange Disappearance of Reality

“As Nietzsche asked, how much truth can you bear, how much truth can you dare? You have to be tough, bold and brave to go in search of the Truth.”
― Mark Romel, Unreal City: The Strange Disappearance of Reality