We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and smug in “the social,” our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.

Baudrillard is diagnosing a late-modern drift from collective, historically charged commitments toward a domesticated, media-saturated comfort. The comparison to cats suggests a self-contained, opportunistic dependence: we live off systems we neither fully see nor challenge, while cultivating a posture of detached ease. “The social” appears as a managed, sanitized sphere—polite participation without real stakes—where political or existential passions are replaced by lifestyle and consumption. Television’s “peaceful parade” stands for the soothing flow of images that substitutes for experience and action, encouraging half-attentive spectatorship rather than engagement with conflict, history, or responsibility.