Wake Up, Neo – Social Analogies in the Matrix

The Matrix is a great movie, but you already know that. I am not a real fan of action movies, but I love the matrix! The reason for that is simple: I don`t see it as an action movie. Forget about the two sequels, which were obviously forced out of the author’s head due to the success of the first (and the greed of studios); let me talk a little about the things you may have missed in the original film.

The Wachowski brothers have been very cryptic about the metaphors in the movie, and, as far as I know, have never explained exactly their intentions for what the meanings in the Matrix are. Many thinkers saw the richness that lies under the main story and used it as a didactic reference to discuss a wide variety of relevant matters, mostly in the field of philosophy of the mind. I was startled when I first checked this site, which contains articles from real monsters of contemporary philosophy such as Hubert Dreyfus, who, for example, wrote the 1972’s book “What computers can’t do”, besides several other works of great academic importance – very few of which I have read during the NIEC project, but which strucked me very clearly. It is, of course, a highly recommended reading for all those who were fascinated by this masterpiece, but I really believe that they too have missed the greatest and most precious alternative readings in the matrix, which lies in the sociological exploration of it`s universe. I have not yet found another article or book which holds this view of the matrix, but I assume something of this sort must exist because the social metaphors really seem obvious to me.

The film, as I see it, talks about macro an micropolitics, the society of control in which we live, the oppression under which we live our lives, completely clueless about the violence of which we are, at the same time, victims and accomplices. Exploring such an analogy between the universe of Matrix and our own society would probably suffice for a very large book, but let us try to scratch the surface of it here, in this humble tiny blog post.

In the Matrix, the machines have dominated mankind, put them “to sleep” while sharing a kind of “dream” in which they live like citizens of the 1999’s western capitalist society. They are busy with their little silly worries, working, studying in the formal system and trying to achieve a successful life under the terms of capitalism. Stuck in this rat race, the great majority of humans never even question the reality in which they live. This allows the machine to grant it`s control over what is, essentially, it’s main source of energy – generated by the human brain’s activity.

Let us be reasonable: we’re talking about an absolutely genius masterpiece of cinema, so, if the author was just trying to write another history about computers taking over the world, why the hell would the machines use us as source of energy? They’d have a much more efficient source of energy just by using nuclear power! In the Matrix, an important relation we must observe is that the machines cannot exist without the humans. Thus, the machines from the film are a metaphor for THE machine – the social machine (you know, the one in the “rage against the machine” band`s name). It exists in the macropolitical level, it drives our lives in patterns we are unlikely to perceive, and, at the same time, it is driven by us. It exists only as an abstract representation of the result of our collective actions in the micropolitical level. Hard to understand this macro/micro thingy? Skip the next paragraph if you already understand it; if you don`t, cope with me for a small detour in our analysis of the movie and let me create a small analogy of my own to clear things up.

Macropolitics and micropolitics are two ways of seeing the same phenomenon. Think about a hive full of bees- and be ready to bare with me on an biologically inaccurate analogy. Now, a certain unaware dog comes around too close to the hive and the swarm of bees, in order to protect it, attacks the dog which runs away with several injuries. The attack of the swarm is, to our purpose, an analysis of the event from the macropolitical level. It sounds as if the entire hive had felt the threat of the dog almost at the same time and acted on it; on the other hand, if we look closer to this scene, we’d see that it was not the whole swarm that started the attack simultaneously, but one individual bee happened to be crawling in the base of the three where the hive hangs. The dog, a silly puppy, decided to take a good sniff at that curious little winged object, and that one particular bee was alarmed, releasing a signs of pheromones inciting her fellow bees to attack. In this second version of the same story, we can see the event in greater detail and understand how it really took shape, and, from one individual’s action, unchained the attack of other individual bees. This would represent a short micropolitical analysis of the attack. Thus, it may be apropriate to state that the macropolitics are the resultant of all it’s micropolitic agencies, just as a swarm’s behavior is to the individual bee.

In this way, the Matrix itself can be taken as a macropolitical view of the entire system, while the agents clearly represent the micropolitical level of it. Take the wise words of Morpheus:

“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But 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”.

Yes, beyond the innocence of our futile activities in the daily life, we are also the agents of the system. We are the ones who keep it “alive” and fight to avoid it’s decay; we do it so naturally and so frequently that we don`t even realize. Sometimes, we even do it with the best of intentions: we denounce bandits to the police, we take our crazy people to the mental hospital, our drug addicts to the rehab centers, our children to the schools, our homeless to the shelters… in sum, we make sure that everything is where it is supposed to be in the system.

Let`s make it very clear here: I am not saying that we shouldn’t take kids to school or bad-guys to the law. I am just trying to show you that, even when we do the right things, we are still “feeding the machine”, playing our roles in the maintenance of a system which we know has many flaws and is frequently brutal (sometimes horrible – I will write on it in the future). Yet, we need this system to maintain our “reality”, or, to get out of the analogy, our way of life. So, how do we change this invisible prison for our minds into the utopic society of our real dreams? The answer to that question is probably the thing I love the most about this film, and it is showed in the end, when Neo fights the three agents after being shot in the chest several times.

We’ve seen Neo fight agent Smith before in the subway. In that occasion, Neo could already match the agent in strength and speed, managing to kill Smith in the railway. The problem is, once the agent`s body was dead, it quickly assumed another body and came right back to hunt for our hero once again. If everyone is an agent in the system, direct confrontation against such agents is useless. It doesn’t matter how powerful you are, or which big agent you managed to “kill” – killing an agent here here can be understood as, for example, overthrowing a certain government, bankrupting a major company, etc. The system is more stable than that, it adapts itself and it always has substitutes. So, it really doesn’t matter how many anti-Microsoft banners you put in your blog… even if you could ruin many “Microsofts”, impeach ten presidents in a roll and provide amnesty for all political prisoners around the world, the system would survive. Other leaders (presidents, kings, dictators, etc) and other “Microsoft”s would rise and we would still have homeless people, famine in poor countries, wars, etc.

Neo understands that once he becomes able to see the system as it is, represent on the screen by those weird green codes he sees all around. The problem is not beating agent Smith. The problem is to change the codes! But you don’t change the system codes with brute force from the outside. Instead, Neo learns how to use the system in his favor; Neo becomes able to fight with much more efficiency and even stop bullets in mid air! But, eventually, he realizes that there`s only one way to beat the agent once and for all: change it from the inside! That must be the most beautiful  metaphor in the whole movie. It can be applied to a variety of contexts, but I find it most charming when applied to the context of the education: Yes, we are prisioners of the system, and the system needs qualified work-force – thus, we’re sent to the educational system. There we have the opportunity to develop an understanding of how the system works, and then we’re finally able to use it in the benefit of our causes.

The system has places designed for us to take once we’re advanced on our educational process – places that always convey a certain amount of power, usually depending of how useful we are to the system. If you fight against it, it is most probable that you will end up on a place of little power (say, inside a prison for the most extreme cases… the less extreme cases are pretty much harmless to it anyway). But if you play the game, if you embody the agent instead of facing it head-on, chances are that you will find yourself in a position where you can help with changing it.”Humanize” the world in any way you can, and, it is never enough to repeat that EVERY place you can possibly be conveys some power, for as little as that power may be, and it is also important to stress the fact that big social changes always begin in some small level. No matter who you are or where you are placed in the system, there’s ALWAYS something you can do to make it better, even if the improvements you begin now will only reach a macrostructural level in a generation or two. We are the ones who build the machine with everything we do amongst ourselves, and no action is too small to change the world – like the wings of the famous quotation’s butterfly that can generate ciclones. I beg you, make your actions worthy of the world you want to build.

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