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Hail and welcome. This essay begins a series on dystopian films, a series which will explore the way our present circumstances are related to and portrayed in such films, as well as the ways in which such media actually disguise and reinforce those circumstances rather than waking us up to them or inspiring us to work against them and change things for the better. We’ll begin with the 1999 dystopian science fiction action film The Matrix, directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski and starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Laurence Fishburne.
For those few among you who are wondering about the continuation of my series on ecumenical phenomenology, rest assured that I will certainly be getting back to that. And for those of you who are likely more relieved that I’m doing something else for a change, I hope you’ll continue to bear with me as I lay out the groundwork for that theory. I understand that it’s not an easy thing to wrap one’s head around and the relevance to this project, to Satanism, or to anything at all are not yet entirely clear. I’m doing my best, and I believe things will continue to clarify as we move forward. But for the moment, I figured that everyone, including myself, deserve a bit of a break from that work.
As I’ve said before many times, this is a show about a process of self-education and discovery rather than a presentation of a complete and final paradigm. My views have shifted over the four years I’ve been doing this, especially over the last year as my explorations of ecumenical phenomenology have pushed me in the direction of transcendental idealism. One thing that’s emerged clearly as a core component of both this project and of my religion is what I call “getting the lay of the land.” This is rooted in Paradise Lost: when Satan and the rest of the fallen host found themselves in Hell, the first task at hand was to survey first Hell itself and then the whole of creation so as to better understand their situation and see what possibilities there might be for improving or exploiting it.
This task—understanding the conditions of our existence—is of paramount and foundational importance to me as a Satanist, and is also a central concern of philosophy in general. Most people, I believe, are ignorant about the conditions of their own existence and about the nature of their reality, believing that the world is a certain way when in fact it is quite different. While I don’t believe that this is the work of any sort of conspiratorial cabal working behind the scenes to deceive people, I nevertheless believe that the deception is, in a broad sense, intentional, serving the interests of a powerful elite.
In his popular science book The Beginning of Infinity (2011), the British physicist David Deutsch presents what he calls the Principle of Optimism: “All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.” I have substantial disagreements with Deutsch in general, and while this is one of them, I think he’s at least on the right track here: the primary reason that the world is in the state that it’s in—a state of dominating and pervasive evil—is insufficient knowledge. We can take the threat of climate change both as a clear example of this phenomenon and as a microcosm of the broader problem: humans now face near-term catastrophe and possibly even total extinction as a result of the effects of our systems of production on the global climate. However, few understand how their actions at the individual level contribute to the collective behaviors generating this threat even if they know in a general way that that is the case, and many don’t even acknowledge that the problem exists at all. One might respond that the threat is being generated not so much by the behavior of private individuals as by the behavior of corporations and nations; however, corporations and nations are, in substance, emergent features of individual behavior at the collective level. Mitigating climate change requires not just a shift in individual behaviors—buying goods made from recycled materials, for example—but a dismantling and restructuring of the entire global system of production, and no one, including me, knows what specific individual actions need to be taken to both effect that change and to do so in the way that causes the least collateral damage.
So let’s think about the conditions of our reality, starting with the language we use to describe it. The adjective “real” appears in some interesting ways in the English language. The typical usage denotes that something exists and is not imaginary or hypothetical. More colloquially, one might be speaking and then introduce further speech by saying that they are “going to get real for a second” (or, alternatively, “be real for a second”). Obviously the speaker’s intention is not to say that they were, up until that point, unreal; nor is this to say that they were speaking fancifully or hypothetically up until that moment. Rather, “to get real” means to acknowledge particular aspects or features of reality, or what we nominally refer to as reality, features which go unacknowledged in casual conversation. One might use the imperative form—“get real!”—to someone who has expressed an unrealistic degree of optimism about something. For example, if I were to say that, now that the Democratic Party has largely prevailed in the American midterm elections, they’re finally going to do something about the threat of climate change, you might respond “Get real!” by way of expressing your doubts that that’s actually going to happen.
It seems, then, that this usage of “real” refers to reality as it exists when all of our optimistic or idealistic illusions about it have been stripped away. When we get real, we are, or say that we are, dealing with things as they really are rather than as we might wish them to be. The sense is that, having gotten real, we are dealing with objective states of affairs, “just the way things are.” After all, if the subject matter we’re getting real about were something more ephemeral or malleable, if it were an accidental state of affairs, just the way things happened to be, it would sound odd to emphasize its reality in this way, because in such cases, things very well could have been different. When we get real, it seems that we are dealing with things that are fixed and necessary.
Additionally, “getting real” seems to imply a circumvention of compassion. For example, I might ask my partner how my moustache looks and additionally request that they “be real” with me about it, and the intention is then that they not spare my feelings but rather say what they really think about it, however cruel it might sound. I often hear the phrase used to bypass what would otherwise seem to be ethical imperatives. For example, one might say, “I care about the homeless, but let’s be real…” followed by some description of why helping the homeless is actually infeasible or morally unnecessary. The implication is that the world, as it really is, is quite harsh and cruel, and when we “get real,” we acknowledge this and comport ourselves appropriately towards it, or so we say and believe.
In his famous 2009 book Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher cites music writer Simon Reynold’s description of the use of the word “real” as it appears in hiphop and other “countercultural” music. On the one hand, “real” in hiphop music means an acknowledgement of the often-brutal conditions of existence and human society. This gritty authenticity is a central facet of the music’s marketing appeal. At the same time, hiphop is one of the most popular styles of music. It is both enormously lucrative, playing a substantial role in the capitalist mode of production, and culturally influential, which means that it has a hand in creating the very conditions that it describes.
What’s more, it seems that hiphop music and other objects of the so-called counterculture provide for us a form of vicarious and ineffectual protest against the conditions of our existence.
I attended a high school comprised almost entirely of students who were, like me, white and upper-middle class. The hiphop genre of gangsta rap had emerged only a few years prior and was enormously popular among my fellow students, despite their lives having almost nothing in common with those of the impoverished Black youths who created the music. Why was it so popular? Because it was real. I and my fellow students recognized, however superficially, the façade of our privileged existence. We yearned for authenticity. But in purchasing copies of Straight Outta Compton, Doggystyle, and The Chronic by the dozen, in addition to the clothing that allowed them to imitate the style of their musical idols, my fellow students enriched white executives and propped up the very system that those musicians were protesting and which we found so deeply inauthentic and fake. I did much the same by buying Metallica CDs and shopping at a retail outlet at the local mall catering to the goth and metal aesthetic.
This is not to criticize either gangsta rap or the purchasing habits of teenagers, who were, in listening to that music, exposed to realities about systemic racism and racial inequality in America that they might otherwise have been sheltered from. But these cultural objects also become problematic when they prevent us from understanding the conditions of our existence, reinforce those very conditions, and prevent or dissuade us from doing anything about them. I believe that this describes the film The Matrix, and the remainder of this essay will be devoted to explicating and supporting its broader thesis that the progress of modernity will not save us from a dystopian existence and in fact both reinforces that dystopia and blinds us to its reality.
The Matrix is the story of the hacker Neo, who is shown that what he believed was reality is in fact a computer simulation created by a malevolent machine intelligence in order to control humanity. Early in the movie, before Neo is awakened to the simulated reality of the Matrix program, he is visited at his apartment by another hacker, Choi, who is there to purchase illicit hacking software from Neo. Choi is also the last name of mathematician Man-Duen Choi, whose research included matrix algebras. Like the other character names in the movie, I believe that this one bears significantly on the movie’s interpretation.
Going to get Choi what he paid for, Neo retrieves a computer disk containing the software from inside a book: Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, originally published in 1981. Baudrillard’s book argues that what we call reality is in fact a procession of simulacra, representations and likenesses of things rather than the things themselves, representations which become increasingly detatched from the things to which they ostensibly refer. The various processes and goings-on of the world, Baudrillard says—our governments and politics, businesses and economic systems, cultures and civilizations—are, similarly, simulations, mere appearances or unwitting performances, rather than the things that we take them to actually be. Baudrillard was not in any way proposing that we exist in a computer simulation but rather that the postmodern logic of late capitalism creates for us a simulated rather than properly real world.
Baudrillard himself famously hated The Matrix. In a 2004 interview in French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, he stated that “The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce” (Reid, 2004). He was certainly correct about this, as we’ll see.
Simulacra and Simulation contains a section about Disneyland in which Baudrillard states that
…[t]he imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp…. This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the ‘real’ world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere—that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness.
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We go to Disneyland and enjoy its atmosphere of fantasy and childhood wonder, and this reinforces for us the illusion of serious reality in the world outside the park. We might see The Matrix films operating in exactly the same way. Leaving the movie theater, one might wonder whether we are in fact in a dystopian simulation of reality designed to control and exploit us. When our moviegoer shares this thought with a friend, the friend responds, “Of course not! It’s just a movie.” The movies frame for us the image of such a dystopia: it’s created by a machine intelligence; our physical bodies and brains are plugged into it; the false reality is, specifically, a computer simulation. The simulation of our own reality lacks these details, and so we overlook the fact that the essential, underlying structure is the same: something is being presented to us as reality when that is not what it really is, and this presentation is being used to manipulate and control us. I’ll be exploring this in more detail a bit further on.
So when Baudrillard says that “The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce,” he’s saying that it reinforces systems of control rather than subverting them in much the same way that Disneyland reinforces our fantasies about the world rather than being a fantasy unto itself. And I agree with him, but I think the filmmakers—Lilly and Lana Wachowski—were aware of this and designed the movies with this in mind as a critique of modernism and postmodernism.
Let’s go back to the scene where Choi retrieves the computer disk from Neo. The prefix neo- comes to us from Greek and means “new,” and sees particular use in designating new forms of old things. For example, contemporary religious practices rooted in ancient pagan religions are sometimes described as neopagan. Keanu Reeves’ character in The Matrix has been given this name, I believe, because he represents the spirit of modernism: continual progress, continual development, always something new on the horizon. When Neo gives the computer disk to Choi after retrieving it from the Baudrillard book, Choi says to him, “Hallelujah. You’re my savior, man. My own personal Jesus Christ.” A superficial reading of the movie would see this as a reference to Neo being The One, a messiah figure prophesied to free humanity from the machines. But remember that the person saying this is named after a mathematician famous for his work on matrices. Matrices in mathematics have very little to do with the concept of the Matrix as portrayed in the films; nevertheless, I believe the intention here is to say that Neo is not the savior of humanity but of the Matrix itself (the second film, The Matrix Reloaded, makes this explicit). A further allusion to this appears when Neo, recently freed from the Matrix, is running through training programs, downloading skills and information directly into his brain. Morpheus stops in to ask how Neo is doing and the training operator says, “Ten hours straight. He’s a machine.” I believe as well that the training process may be a reference to the capacity of the modern world and of advanced capitalism to absorb everything in the world, including history and its traditions, into itself.
Neo is initially framed as representing opposition to fascist and collectivist mindsets. Early in the movie, while still in the guise of his dayjob persona Thomas Anderson, Neo receives a lecture from his boss, one that could easily have been written by Mussolini had he been a corporate manager rather than a dictator: “This company is one of the top software companies in the world because every single employee understands that they are a part of a whole. Thus, if an employee has a problem, the company has a problem.” The word fascism itself is derived from the Italian word fascio, meaning a bunch of sticks bundled together, made stronger as a unified whole. And the boss’s name? Mr. Rhineheart, referencing the Rhine River in Germany and thus, given the context of his lecture, the fascism of Nazi Germany. The Matrix is itself a collective, a unified whole, and the Agent programs who enforce its will are portrayed by middle-aged white men in business suits, almost identical in appearance. Additionally, Neo’s machine enemies exert total control over the human species and their perception of reality. This accords with the role of modern capitalism as opposed to both fascism and totalitarianism.
Neo is removed from the Matrix through the intervention of Morpheus. Morpheus and the other characters in the film describe escape from the Matrix as “waking up,” but this is rather ironic coming from someone named “Morpheus”, Morpheus being a mythical god of sleep and dreams. In the Metamorphoses of the Roman poet Ovid, Morpheus appears in dreams alongside his brothers, the Somnia, manifesting as the various characters and images of the dream. In the film, Morpheus is the captain of a hovercraft, the Nebuchadnezzar, named for the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, who claimed dominion over the whole universe and who, in 587 BCE, destroyed the Kingdom of Judah, resulting in the Babylonian Captivity of the Judean people. It’s a bizarre choice of name for the flagship of a rebel army, but makes perfect sense if we read Morpheus and his allies as being unwitting agents of the machines, much as the second film confirms.
Morpheus believes, according to prophecy, that Neo is The One, the savior of humanity. Whose prophecy? The Oracle’s, who, as we find out in the second movie, is a computer program of the Matrix, and not a rogue program out to aid the rebellion as we initially suspect but rather a key actor in the machines’ designs who tells humans “exactly what they need[…] to hear” to cause them to do what the machines need them to do.
The protagonists of the film are betrayed by Cypher, who, in a meeting with one of the Agents, asks in exchange for the betrayal that he be inserted back into the Matrix. He has some specific requests: “I don’t want to remember nothing. Nothing! You understand? And I want to be rich. Someone important. Like an actor.” The Agent responds, “Whatever you want, Mr. Reagan.” This is a clear reference to President Ronald Reagan, who fit the criteria of being rich, an actor, and someone important, and as well, at the end of his life he suffered (in a rare moment of actual justice in the universe) from Alzheimer’s disease, and indeed remembered absolutely nothing. This was, in part, a in-joke from the Wachowskis, a way for them to flip the bird at someone who had been notoriously and catastrophically shitty towards the LGBTQ community of which the directors, as trans women, are a part. Additionally, Reagan was an ardent neoliberal and substantially responsible for the transition into late capitalism. In a way, Reagan, a famous opponent of the collectivist totalitarianism of Soviet Russia and Communist China, betrayed the hope of modernism to the exploitation and oppression of neoliberal capitalism, which is not openly oppressive but which rather presents a pleasant façade in order to deceive and control us.
To understand how this relates to our own “reality,” consider that, if you go to any chain restaurant in the United States, you’ll likely find that it has highly decorated walls. These decorations vary from restaurant to restaurant; at some, there’s a theme that relates in some way to the restaurant’s brand. Elsewhere the decorations are thoroughly random in a way that seems to deliberately avoid even the suggestion of coherence even as no one thing stands out as being the least bit unusual or interesting. This too relates to the branding of the restaurant as “wacky” or “random.” One such restaurant I’ve patronized was decorated with farm equipment. There were, for example, many tractor seats, of an old sort that I don’t believe are made anymore, all fairly uniform and appearing slightly tarnished but not well-used. Where did the restaurant get them? Is there perhaps a purchaser working for the company or for some third party who scours farm equipment sales for tractor seats and then buys them and distributes or resells them to the restaurants?
All of this has clearly been carefully designed and planned, and really a large amount of labor and expensive materials have gone into the whole thing. This restaurant chain has, as of this writing, 420 locations. If each of them has twenty-five tractor seats, about what I estimated decorated the restaurant at which I ate, that’s 10,500 tractor seats. I looked at the market for antique tractor seats online—there’s quite a wide variety available in a range of prices from $20 to $300, from what I saw, and in quite varying conditions. But the ones at the restaurant were all the same model (in varying sizes) and in the same condition. Is it even possible that they were machined specifically in order to be decorations? I don’t know, but certainly a lot of work and money went into it in any case. They have to be made, packed, transported, unpacked, installed, cleaned, perhaps at some point replaced to make way for some new decoration designed to reinforce some rebranding.
And why? What’s all this for? The restaurant brand is tied to the idea of a Midwestern American farm; the decorations are meant to reinforce this. But the restaurant doesn’t serve food or use ingredients from local farms to which it might have some sort of community connection. The restaurant’s website has a menu which, I’ve found, is largely the same from location to location across the entire country, and describes the ingredients as coming from particular regions, often the Midwest. The tractor seats on the wall probably weren’t ever used by farmers, certainly not by the current farmers working for their suppliers. Modern tractor seats are quite different. In fact the restaurant chain has no real ties to or roots in the Midwest, aside from their now using it as a supply source. The chain was founded in coastal California and is now based in Florida.
All in all, a quite substantial amount of effort just in this one aspect of this production, all to give me a sense of something that is not actually the case. The tractor seat decorations are symbols which no longer bear any connection to those used by farmers. They now signify a brand, a sales pitch, entirely disconnected from those things which they are intended to symbolize and represent to us: wholesome food and the tradition, history, and community of Midwestern American agriculture.
Now consider that this particular chain has, as I said, 420 locations in the United States. McDonald’s has 40,000 in over 100 countries and annual revenue in the tens of billions of dollars. The global fast food market makes almost a trillion dollars in revenue. The global food services market size is 2.3 trillion dollars. This is greater than the annual military spending of all the militaries of the world combined. While that power isn’t directly comparable to the kinetic power of the military, it remains an enormous capacity for those who control that money to get what they want, to shape the world according to their desires and designs. Certainly their interests are not all aligned—they are, as we’ll see when we get to the cartel model in a future episode, in a state of collaborative competition. But they do have certain interests in common, for example an interest in making sure people are consuming their products and not questioning the production and distribution systems which constitute those products’ ecosystem and which continue to enrich those who control it.
How much of our reality, now, is like those tractor seats? If those tractor seats were holograms, would that really change anything, or would they still work essentially the exact same way? What if they were part of a computer simulation of reality? We would say that the function is identical, that they still exist for the purpose of putting us in a certain frame of mind and providing for us a sense of reality that isn’t really the case.
Consider the holiday of Christmas, which transforms every aspect of life in Western countries for a full month of the year in order to effect a tremendous glut of consumption. Christmas has been celebrated in the West since at least the 4th century, but unlike Easter, which has always been of paramount importance to the Christian religion, the popularity of Christmas has waxed and waned over the centuries. As a result of the Catholic and quasi-pagan trappings of the holiday, its observance has even been banned at times in the history of United States and England. Today, those who claim to follow the religious traditions of those who instituted such bans now decry a “war on Christmas” whenever they sense (or manufacture) the slightest hint of pushback against the annual corporate invasion and colonization of reality.
Having seen The Matrix, we say, “We’re not actually in a computer simulation, so then this must be reality.” But that’s a non sequitur because a computer simulation is not the only possible kind of unreality. The Matrix films themselves are then further tractor seats decorating the walls of our existence, just as Baudrillard said.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited or Referenced
Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books.
Reid, K. (2004). The Matrix Decoded: Le Nouvel Observateur Interview With Jean Baudrillard. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Retrieved December 7, 2022, from https://baudrillardstudies.ubishops.ca/the-matrix-decoded-le-nouvel-observateur-interview-with-jean-baudrillard/