I’ve spent what is probably an unhealthy amount of time contemplating the sociopolitical state of affairs in America for the last ten years, and more.  Like a lot of people, I thought that “it can’t happen here”, and was in shock that “it” indeed had happened in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.  Also like a lot of people, I couldn’t help but see the parallels between what was happening in the real world and what happened in the cinematic world of The Matrix.  All you have to do is shift the representational imagery and boom, you have the modern world.

The world of The Matrix is about as meta as you can get.  It’s an interpretation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which is an allegory for becoming an awakened being in a world full of “sleepers”.  Sound familiar?

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is in the Republic, one of several philosophical allegories in that volume.  In this one, people live in a cave where they stare at shadows on a wall, believing that they are real (pod people in the power plant).  The shadows are generated by puppet operators (the AI that runs The Matrix) standing in front of a fire behind a wall that separates them from the shadow watchers.

Sometimes a person realizes the shadows aren’t real and leaves the cave, or at least tries to (see The Animatrix).  They may encounter resistance from the other shadow watchers (Agents).  Leaving the cave represents questioning the reality of what the person is seeing, which may be viewed unfavorably by the others in the cave.

If they successfully escape, they are immediately blinded by the light of the outside world until their eyes adjust and they see the world as it is, becoming awakened as to the true nature of reality.  At this point, one of three things can happen: 1. they stay in the real world and accept it for what it is, 2. the real world drives them insane, or 3. they return to the cave to awaken the others.

In the Allegory, upon returning to the cave, they must once again allow their “vision” to adjust to the mental darkness of the cave without forgetting what the light of the world is really like.  This can be a dangerous process depending on how the shadow-watchers process the information they are given about the world outside the cave.  Some will accept it willingly, while others will not, and of the latter group of people, some will violently resist the suggestion that there is anything other than their Shadow World (Agent vessels).  They may even try to prevent people from leaving the cave because it’s too much of a threat to their Shadow-bound egos.

Plato believed that if too many awakened individuals returned to the cave to awaken the others, the puppeteers would impose a crackdown to maintain the system of control, particularly if their power was dependent on it (repeated destruction of Zion).  This makes sense once you understand that, in the Allegory anyway, the puppeteers were all once shadow watchers themselves who escaped the cave and came back, but not to awaken the others: to maintain the illusion and therefore gain power (the Merovingian).

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave raises some interesting questions, such as how the cave was initially established and how people wind up in it in the first place.  It didn’t take long to think of the answer: we are born in the cave, and it is our life goal to escape it in order to be reacquainted with our Lost Knowledge of the World As It Is and The Face We Had Before the World Was Made.  An escapee from the cave is someone who can tell there’s something wrong with the world they’re being shown, that the shadows are not real, and who makes a conscious effort to leave the cave and see the Real World, not an illusion.

This is the awakening journey of the Buddha presented in Platonic philosophy and modern cyberpunk.  If it isn’t obvious by now, The Matrix is The Cave from Plato’s Allegory, and Neo’s journey is that of someone who knows “there’s something wrong with the world” and escapes The Cave/Matrix when he is awakened by Morpheus and the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar (a Biblical king).  Just as in the Allegory, Neo’s vision must adjust to his new surroundings: 

“Why do my eyes hurt?”

“You’ve never used them before.”

He must also go through a rather traumatic transition from one world to the other when Morpheus demonstrates to him what The Matrix actually is, reflecting the reality that leaving the Cave can be a deeply troubling experience as all of your assumptions about everything are questioned.

In actual real life here in America, this is being played out in sociopolitics.  We are all part of a system of control (The Matrix/Cave) that keeps our minds fed on a steady diet of social media, news, reality shows, and videos (shadows).  We’re not plugged into The Matrix through a brain probe, we carry it around in our pockets and addictively interact with it.  The content we are exposed to is generated by the modern world’s “puppeteers”; the people in charge of how everything runs that affects all aspects of our lives, and they’re very invested in keeping us all “plugged in” during every waking hour.

That is probably the single most effective form of rebellion people in this country can make these days: put your fucking phone down.  Believe me, I know how hard this is.  It took months to unhook all of my phone’s claws out of me.  When I evaluated my apps and realized how few I actually used, I became ruthless in deleting anything and everything that was not relevant to my life.  Then I cleaned up the visual clutter by putting all of my frequently used apps into a single folder.  It was unexpectedly freeing.

After that came the notifications, which actually took longer to purge.  I basically spent a few weeks being annoyed by my phone and shutting off one notification at a time.  Now it mostly serves as a music player and a way to communicate with my family.  I now control  the Matrix jack in my head, not the other way around.

An initial barrier to restricting my phone use came from my sociopolitical anxiety.  I felt a need to stay informed about what was going on in my country.  It severely distressed me, though, to the point that I asked myself one day if there was anything I could do about any of the upsetting things I was reading.  I realized that the answer was “no”, and I suddenly no longer felt obligated to keep up with the news, particularly with my mental health.

At first I felt very anxious about not knowing the news, but over the next few weeks, that anxiety abated, and within a couple of months I realized that I wasn’t walking around with an incessant feeling of doom and dread anymore.  Yes, bad things were still happening in the world, but because they weren’t right up in my face on a daily basis anymore, I could put them in a more manageable perspective that wasn’t so upsetting.

You can see allusions to our country’s silicon addiction in the fourth Matrix movie, when Thomas Anderson is standing in the elevator surrounded by people with their faces in their phones.  The message in the fourth movie is quite a bit more blatant than in the first three, perhaps since not enough of our country got the allegorical message to wake the fuck up.  The reference to “The Suits” and skyrocketing “numbers” clearly shifts the analogy away from a power plant filled with slimy pods to an economic engine hellbent on keeping “the sheeple” right where they are: generating economic fuel for The Machine World.

It’s time to “bite the hand that feeds” and “get up off your knees”, to quote Trent Reznor.  “Put down the silicone obsession” (TOOL), read a book, do a hobby, volunteer for the homeless, go for a walk under the trees, do ANYTHING but look at your phone except for what’s essential.  It will be an adjustment, but it’s a good one, I promise.  Otherwise you really are walking around with the equivalent of a spike in the back of your skull feeding you an illusion.