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Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
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2007 March 30
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Please go to the new Coffee Coaster site implemented more gracefully in Wordpress. This page: http://brianrwright.com/CoffeeCoasterBlog/?p=1374 |
Keanu Reeves ... Neo
Laurence Fishburne ... Morpheus
Carrie-Anne Moss ... Trinity
Hugo Weaving ... Agent Smith
Gloria Foster ... Oracle
Joe Pantoliano ... Cypher
"As long as the Matrix exists, the human race will never be free." — Morpheus
This review is the third of four commentaries that suggest a general approach to healing our world. The book I just reviewed, The Secret behind Secret Societies, discusses the conspiracy of power that underlies the current machinery of the Western global-corporate empire.
This controlling central power (let's call it the Beast) is the fundamental ailment we are in sore need of healing from. The movie The Matrix is a metaphor of our own heroic struggle for liberty against the Beast, and provides a hopeful message that vigorously stirs the blood of freedom people.
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The time is approximately 200 years from now, planet Earth. Early in the 21st century, humans achieve functional artificial intelligence (AI) which instead of leading to a comfortable human-machine Singularity[1] results in an earth-razing cataclysm. Machines (computers) 1: Humans 0.
The machine uber-intelligence (MUI) that takes over is analogous to our "Beast."
In a licentious twist of any physics I'm familiar with, the MUI needs energy, so it clones, incubates, and grows humans in vast fields of sealed chambers to take advantage of their electrical potential. Humans in name only: their consciousness is channeled via a sophisticated neural network set up by the MUI to resemble Earth of 1999, i.e. the Matrix.[2]In case you're the one person who hasn't seen the movie yet, I won't spoil the ending, except to say it's terrific.
To me the movie strikes parallels to our real world and our struggle against the Beast[3]. The Matrix itself is the epitome of our quasi-Orwellian, TV-mind-controlled nation:"The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. When you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters, the very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand most of these people are not ready to be unplugged, and many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it." — Morpheus
How different is this from America or the world?True conservatives and true liberals are libertarians.
Each of these pressure groups believes it has a birthright to the central power. That's why they hate each other so. The option of not having a central power (or having a very small one) has been brainwashed away by, you guessed it, the central power—the Beast."Are you trying to tell me that I can dodge bullets?"
"No, Neo, I'm trying to tell you when you're ready, you won't have to."
"I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of change.... I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world... without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible."
Right arm, brother![1] Please refer to my column on Ray Kurzweil's Fantastic Voyage for the life-extension argument. He has also written on the subject of what he regards as the imminent coalescence of human intelligence and AI into a planetary-wide form of conscious organism: the Singularity.
[2] The French theorist of hyperreality, Jean Baudrillard, died March 6, in Paris. He inspired some of the Wachowski brothers' imagination of these artificial realities. (The illegal-stash-holding book Neo pulls from his shelf early in the movie is Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation.)
[3] This groundbreaking creation of the Wachowski brothers, particularly this first movie of their trilogy, has profound allegories for various belief systems and worldviews. For example, here's a Christian interpretation. I prefer the secular-humanist, realist perspective because I find supernatural fantasy unworthy of the Matrix's main metaphors... not to mention the whole point of the movie is to defy authority over one's mind.
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