Red Pill, Blue Pill

“You take the red pill,” said Morpheus, “you wake up tomorrow in your bed, all this was just a dream and you’re back inside the Matrix.” He held up his other hand. “You take the blue pill however…well, then you see how deep the rabbit hole goes.” - The Matrix

 

The brilliant hit movie paints a terrifyingly possible scenario of our world: after a future war with machines (the product of thought) humans have been enslaved and from that point on serve as a source of bio-electrical energy for the machines. We are incubated in massive farms then wired and tubed into huge arrays of coffin-sized containers, to live our entire lives inside a computer program that simulates the world. That program is The Matrix.

 

What is this “Matrix” that has us willing captives in a world of some artificially intelligent mind? Why, it’s our world, here and now. It is a world where, as we know, dominant cultures evolved in support of the belief that we are all individuals, living within various collectives which demand loyalty in some form, in exchange for protection.

 

This perception of individuality is predicated by our sense of identity, a feeling we have of “me and “not me” and we derive our own sense of this identity by comparing and contrasting this self with the others around us. This sense of identity is further reinforced or diminished by our perception of belonging to this or that collective, our status relative to other identities within that collective and our perception of the status of our collective vis-à-vis other collectives. Status means power and power is, by definition, the ability to act. Great power allows those who have it to influence others to act in certain ways, the success of which serves to further feed their status.

 

And this notion of status is certainly not peculiar to humans. Witness the behavior of certain animals, whose dominant males viciously compete for the attentions of the dominant females, who likewise compete to lure the best males. There is no difficulty in observing precisely the same behavior in humanity, with amazingly convoluted expressions and episodes of status-seeking forming the bulk of our recorded history. The fundamental drive to produce the most viable offspring, one might deduce, forms the nucleus of our modern day mania for the varied interesting and often brutal expressions of relative status we individually and collectively pursue, as well as the notion of “property.” Ownership has status.

 

In our own modern civilization, status is most commonly conferred upon those with great amounts of money. Money itself is a convenient fiction which gives fluidity to the exchange of goods and services by assigning an agreed value to them. This allows the plumber to do business with the baker, even though he may not like bread. This fiction only works when we all agree that money has value in and of itself, which is accomplished by what we call “the marketplace.” It becomes easier to see the fictional basis of money during times of great upheaval, uncertainty and conflict, when it becomes suddenly less valuable than the goods and services that we need and prices destabilize and skyrocket.

 

What we call our “survival instinct” manifests itself when an animal feels threatened. In humans as in animals, this instinct kicks in when we perceive a threat to our self, but also like certain animals, our survival instinct comes into play when we perceive a threat to our status, as when someone tries to damage, destroy or take something I feel a right to call “mine.”

 

When this sense of “mine” expands to include not just immediate possessions but also to people, things, situations and outcomes perceived as being “in” the perceiver’s “interest” then, as we can see immediately before us in the world geopolitical sphere, tensions between individuals and collectives escalate.

 

So back to this red pill, the device that keeps us in The Matrix. What is it?

 

Some time way back, two weaker animals came to realize that they could together take down one stronger one and gave birth to the very practical idea of armies. Ants and wolves both hunt in groups, as do humans.

 

The one aspect of the Wachowski Brothers haunting paradigm I would take to task is the betrayal, characterized by the character Cipher (Joe Pantoliano,) as some kind of aberration from some idealized human norm. I feel a sad certainty that the seduction of a comfortably unconscious, mind-centered creation is far preferable to most than the alternative of a real, conscious life in the real world.

 

And this red pill, that keeps us within this Matrix is a simple question, “What do I think?”

 

If my mind settles long enough to frame the answer, it is so often the same. I’m afraid.

 

First world, white, anglo-saxon, middle aged, middle-class man! Of what on this earth should you be afraid?

 

while the blue is, “How do I feel?”