The Matrix was not Supposed to be a Blueprint for a New World

I believe that I have mentioned a number of times in the past that I was not particularly impressed by the trilogy of films written and directed by the Wochowski Brothers as they were known at the time – they have since become the Wochowski Sisters – produced by Joel Silver, and starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and Carrie-Anne Moss that began with The Matrix in 1999. It is not that I have anything against them, per se. I just did not find them at all interesting. In fact, having allowed friends to talk me into going with them to see all three instalments, there was not a single one in which I was able to make it to the end credits without dozing off in the theatre.

Having said that, I did manage to pick up on one detail of the motion picture franchise’s storyline that I am increasingly becoming convinced that many other people somehow missed. At the beginning of the story, the main character Neo portrayed by Reeves, is, like most other human characters in these movies, living out his life within the computer-generated virtual reality to which the title of the series refers, completely unaware that it is a simulation – until the events of the first film unfold. Now, the detail to which I refer is simply this – the simulated reality, the Matrix, is not a good thing. The choice represented by the “blue pill” – to remain in the Matrix blissfully unaware that it is not reality – is the wrong choice. The choice represented by the “red pill” – awaking from the Matrix and discovering reality – is the right choice. The filmmakers were not throwing this idea of people spending their lives trapped in a virtual reality out as a suggestion of something we might want to try and make happen.

I am being somewhat facetious and sarcastic, or course, in saying that other people missed this point. However, consider some of the trends of the past couple of decades that as recently as last winter a sizeable number of people decried but which have been accelerated over the last four months.

When I was growing up, parents would scold their children for watching too much television instead of going outside and playing, doing their homework, or reading a book, and would often actually lay the law down, shut the television off, and send the kids outside. Furthermore, they would try to prevent their daughters from spending hours talking to their friends on the telephone, which in those days was something stationary inside the house rather than something that you carried around with you everywhere. In those days, parents were far more likely to have the latter problem with their daughters than with their sons, and nobody was afraid to mention this even though feminism was already entering into its third wave, way worse than the first and second. I won’t belabor the point that nowadays people are scared to death of talking about behavioural differences between the sexes because that belongs to an entirely different set of unwholesome trends than the one being discussed here, but I will note that if the transition to cellular phone technology has eliminated this distinction between the sexes it was not in the positive direction of girls wasting less time on the phone but in the negative direction of boys spending way more time on it. Since phones now double as television sets – with instant access to far more content than was available on the broadcast stations of three to four decades ago – anyone today seeking to emulate the examples of good parenting just described, would have a much, much, harder time of it.

I wonder what anyone would have said back then if you were to have told them that within a few short decades everyone would have their own portable phone which they would all bring to family meals, with which they would feel free to engage in electronic text conversations with distant friends, and sometimes even the person across the table from them?

I don’t know if they would have believed you or not, but I suspect they would have had a few words to say about the utter rudeness of such behaviour.

When I was a teenager/young adult, young men and women who were unattached and wished to change that had a number of options. These were somewhat more limited for those who had a traditional moral upbringing which they still honoured and obeyed, but they all involved going someplace and meeting someone in person. It could be Church-sponsored events and groups for those of stricter morals, bars and clubs for the less strict, get-togethers with mutual friends trying to set you up for either group, or any number of such possibilities. Today, online dating is where it is at, with plenty of dating sites and cellphone apps to choose from. The closest thing to this back then was the “personals” in the advertisement section of the newspaper.

Granted, for those who preferred to by-pass relationships of this sort altogether and substitute the vicarious sexual experience of others, pornography was available back then as it always has been, but obtaining it involved going to some shady theatre, or the back room of a video or magazine store, rather than simply downloading it on your computer or phone. This, however, opens up yet another line of complaint about our cultural downward spiral that is extraneous to the present discussion.

I grew up on a farm in rural Manitoba, and a concern that was somewhat regularly voiced in the local newspaper, had to do with locals driving into the city – where I lived this would have meant Brandon more often than Winnipeg – to do shopping that could have been done locally. Stated positively, of course, this was the idea that we should support our local communities, and the businesses within them. The positive formulation of this remains more or less the same. The negative concerns have grown however. With the advent of the internet, it is no longer merely the competition of larger businesses in the big city that smaller, local, rural businesses have to worry about, or, even the competition of the multinational chains that threaten local businesses rural and urban, but the competition of online megabusinesses.

There have been on-air religious programs for as long as the media of radio and television have been around, but these were regarded as parachurch ministries that were supplemental to going to Church not substitutes for it. Many of these were explicitly aimed at evangelizing the unchurched. A television or radio preacher who actually encouraged his audience to think of themselves and him in the traditional pastor-flock relationship would have been regarded as bordering on the cultic, if not crossing the line. In the eighties this sort of ministry was coming into a bit of disrepute due to excessive fundraising tactics and scandals on the part of some prominent televangelists – when I was eleven country and western comic artist Ray Stevens released his recording of the song “Would Jesus Wear a Rolex (On His Television Show)” written by Margaret Archer with legendary guitarist Chet Atkins and it just missed the country Top 40.

What all of these trends have in common is that they all involve moving things – playing outside with other kids, conversing with friends and family, becoming romantically involved with someone, making purchases, hearing hymns and a sermon – from the circle of real social interaction into that of the artificial space generated by electronic technology. There are plenty of other such examples, and all of these trends have been accelerating since the governments of the world decided to follow the World Health Organization’s lockdown model for dealing with the Chinese bat flu.

In mandating social distancing and severe limits on group sizes, our governments essentially ordered us to move all social interaction onto the internet. Companies that operate online have swallowed up a much larger share of the market than they ever had before. Amazon has made out like a bandit, to give one obvious example. Churches were all forced to become the internet age equivalent of televangelists and the governments have left them closed longer than practically anything else.

I found all of these trends appalling long before the lockdown, and this dangerous social experiment has done nothing to change my mind. They are moving us quickly in the direction of a virtual reality experience, different, of course, than the one depicted in The Matrix, but arguably just as bad.

Apart from the story of the Ring of Gyges, the best known narrative in Plato’s dialogue Politeia, is his Allegory of the Cave. It is the story of men, who all their lives have been chained in a fixed position to a bench in a cave, watching shadows on the wall in front of them, cast by people walking before the fire behind them, one of whom, having been set free, realizes for the first time what the images he has been seeing are. Ironically, the reality into which Neo awakes in The Matrix, is what the shadows represent in Plato’s allegory, for the point he was trying to illustrate is that the universal ideas contained in things – for example, the idea of dog which makes a dog a dog despite the fact that specific dogs differ from each other – being permanent and unchanging, unlike their material representatives, are the real reality. Or, perhaps it is not so ironic after all. By Plato’s reasoning, the simulated world of The Matrix could only fit into his Allegory of the Cave as something even less real than the shadows on the wall – perhaps their dim reflection in a mirror.

This is the direction in which we have been moving. The dim reflection of shadows in a mirror.

I’m sure you are as thrilled about that as I am.