2. The hunt for man and questions of life and death
The Matrix and “The Matrix” — two opposites · перевод (English) · раздел 3 из 8
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2. The hunt for man and questions of life and death
“The hunt for the man has begun!” — with these words begins the main storyline of the film. This phrase expresses the essence of technocratic civilization: it is anti-human, simply because it destroys the biosphere without which humans cannot live. The anti-human nature of technocratic civilization manifests in different ways, among which is the inadequacy of informational content to the form of its delivery. The western regional civilization, in the second half of the 20th century, has been leading in development of technology, especially in its mass use in all areas of life. As such, the West has also become the leader in dragging humanity down into technocratic catastrophe. Just like it leads in creation of packaging for various products, the West leads in creation and improvement of ways and means of conveying information: TV, radio, mobile telephony, Internet, email, Video-conferences, social networks, etc. have become more and more used in the world as a result of technological superiority of the western civilization and its active global trade policy. Having become the technological leader, the West has done well to impose its views on problems of development of humanity and ways of solving them onto other cultures, including the Russian culture.
But being a developer and producer of effective forms of conveying information, the West cannot suggest any substantially new content that could fill these forms. Western scientists and theologists are afraid of directly and openly admitting this: after accepting the Bible as the true “word of God”, the West has blinded itself in a worldview sense, and became fruitless when it comes to new content; “Conscience — within the limits of the Bible, Bible — within the limits of Knowledge”, said “humorist” M. Zhvanetsky. All past and contemporary worldview developments of the West — various philosophical schools and doctrines of antiquity, including Marxism — determining the future of civilization, cannot take the westerner outside the pen of the Bible. It is possible that, being unconscious of this dead-end, searching for a way out of it, the West has become more attracted to everything Oriental: spiritual practices, yoga practices, Eastern martial art schools, Buddhism, “Islamic fundamentalism” that is actively spreading among the western population, and the like. As the XX century has shown, in adopting the achievements of cultures of other regional civilizations, the West only successfully adopts the forms, generally losing or perverting the content.
And with this background of a seemingly endless biblical swamp, “The Matrix” appears on screens at the end of the XX century — a significant and, in its own way, unusual phenomenon, because it represents a rather successful attempt to break free of biblical answers to vital questions. These answers were formulated several thousand years ago by the znakhar[1] (priest) hierarchy of ancient Egypt in the course of unfolding the Biblical project of enslavement of all of humanity, and establishment of its absolute demonic power based on programming people’s psyche by a false faith-teaching. The discussion of this faith-teaching, at least for the last two thousand years, has been blocked by various declared and undeclared “taboos”, and primarily in the West, which has become the citadel from which were made enslaving lunges at neighboring peoples.
“The Matrix” has broken this “taboo”. Although indirectly, it touches upon problems that are key in resolving the crisis of development of contemporary technocratic anti-human civilization, leading spectators to the questions: what is the meaning of their life on Earth? Why is human culture vicious and is leading it to military or ecological suicide? do people want to continue being hostages and captives of machines created by them, especially after the creation of artificial intelligence? what are the possibilities for survival? what are true relations of humans with God, with Savior, and satan? Such subject matter, meaningful for the lives of people and all of humanity, is an extremely rare occurrence in western cinema. Maybe that’s why the film is so popular around the world, but it’s popularity is peculiar proof of the fact, that the questions mentioned above worry even those, who are not inclined to consciously discuss them in certain lexicon.
At the same time, the film is a product of western, biblical culture, and it speaks about the problem of resolving the crisis of all of humanity in this culture’s symbolic-allegorical artistic language. In the artistic languages of other other cultures (Islamic, Buddhist, Russian, Hindu, etc.), these problems and ways of resolving them would have likely been shown differently. But until these problems are not formulated in certain lexicon, excluding the possibility of ambiguous understanding of the subject matter, their resolution will be suggested to society in bypass of its conscious in a symbolic form through “the most accessible of all arts — film”. With that, the artistic composition will represent a sort-of undeclared compromise between the strive of humans to escape from bondage, and the strive of global znakhars, ruling the biblical project of enslavement of humanity, to keep everyone prisoner of its lies. This applies to “The Matrix”, the allegorical subject matter — the second semantic line — of which are alien to Western biblical civilization and undermine its basis.
The statement that “The Matrix” represents such an unconscious compromise between the strive to freedom and the strive to slave-ownership, is supported by the fact that Morpheus — fighter against the evil “Matrix” — and his followers do not discuss the viciousness of its algorithmics. However, having broken out of the “Matrix” they despise, representatives of the “Zion” system are actually constructing an alternative “matrix”, regardless of whether they understand this or not. The owner of this alternative “matrix” in the film is the Oracle, who “knows everything”. But the essence of the alternative matrix is also left out of discussion, and the life of humanity under this “matrix” are left behind the scenes in a silent, but undetermined and therefore baseless assumption, that everything will be good in the alternative “matrix”.
The fact that this part of the plot is not shown in the foreground does not mean that its vision remains outside the conscious mind of a thinking, attentive spectator. It is possible that, to support certain associations, the character names in the film were chosen in such a way, that the unconscious of the spectator would make their conscious work in a certain way, needed by the script writers and their curators.
As if justifying his name, Morpheus believes that the objective reality and images of it in the human psyche are not interconnected, similar to how it happens in dreams, when the unconscious processes certain information acquired while awake, and the conscious watching the dream — having mostly lost its will — sees images unnatural to the real world that is perceived in an awake state. This is normal for dreams, but in an awake state it is characteristic to a psyche that is more-less engulfed by schizophrenia.
After such a conclusion, any analysis of the film plot’s windings may be perceived as a discussion of schizophrenic and narcotic delusions of the script authors and producers-directors of the film; and the popularity of the thriller may be explained as the psychological illness of all who watched it with interest and pleasure. And even though the society of the global civilization really is morally-psychologically not quite healthy, and for some “The Matrix” — really is a screening of their schizophrenic or narcotic visions or nightmares, nevertheless in the name of continued freeing and healing of social psyche it is necessary to show the connections of the images of “The Matrix” with the objective reality as they really are, and therefore — to uncover the allegorical worldview component of the thriller that makes it so popular.
Two socially useful worldview affirmations may be drawn from the film. They are conveyed in an open form to the average spectator-commoner — in the general case a careless consumer of various pleasures, “bread and circuses”, — first and foremost, the American spectator-consumer:
● you are not mammals — i.e. you are not people, you are not human — you are a virus, “people are a disease, the cancer of this planet, and we (machines with intellect — in the context of the film) are the cure”;
● “SYSTEM FAILURE” — this text appears at the end of the film on a computer display.
If the former affirmation is more or less clear (the global biospherical-ecological crisis is more than obvious), then the latter requires some explanation.
As it is known to anyone who is at least a little familiar with computers, after a system has failed, in the best case the system needs to be restarted, in the worst case the operating system and applications need to be reinstalled from scratch. In other words, the text on the computer display at the end of the film is transparently implying, that the former system of global control of humanity, under the guidance of which a human-like virus-commoner is accustomed to carelessly and insatiably consuming life, after its collapse, will leave (in the near perspective) each person one-on-one with the global problems of humanity and the planet. And these problems have a systemic nature, not a local-personal one.
These two affirmations, stated directly, together represent a hint to the virus-commoner: it’s high time to start thinking about resolving problems created by his parasitism on other members of society and the biosphere of the planet.
Such thoughts may be lead in two mutually-exclusive directions:
● on what, how, and under the guard of what new “Matrix” to continue parasitizing?
● how to stop parasitizing and build an alternative system of relations between everyone and each-other, and Mother-Earth, first and foremost, as a basis for a following, universal development of each human being and humanity as a whole?
Essentially in these implications, about the necessity to answer one of the two questions, is everything positive and good that is stated directly in the film. Which one of the two questions to answer — that is one’s personal choice. Is there sense in searching for answers to these questions, or better to continue carelessly consuming life, and let everyone else search for answers? — this question is also answered by each person himself.
All other positive and good in the film is expressed allegorically and, therefore, many questions need to be answered. But before all else, it is necessary to answer the following question:
Is there something objectively existing in Nature, which is named "Matrix", that is symbolically represented by the machine system, which in the film is a prosthesis of the Biosphere for humanity and the factory of sleepy dreams about ostensibly “real life” of everybody? Or the authors of the film, in light of their schizophrenic worldview, see the world in a painfully perverted way, and the “Matrix” is not an allegory to something real, but the authors’ delirium?
The question of “What is reality?” is asked in the film, but the declared answer to it, stemming from individualism cultivated by the biblical culture, is given in the sense of “solipsism”[2]: only what you perceive is real. Lifting the statement “real is what you perceive” to the rank of a general law of life — is cultivation of one’s own schizophrenia, a campaign to substitute with a psycho’s thoughts the real life that is outside the limits of his perception.
A representative of the species “Homo Sapiens” perceives only a part of the Objective reality. However, to the questions: how is the Objective reality organized? how do the portion perceived by a subject at every point in time, and the Objective reality as a whole, interact? — each spectator is given the opportunity to answer by himself, so as to not fall into schizophrenia or not to lock up inside the world of one’s own mind. At the same time, the capability of the viewer to not notice these questions, and other questions arising from them is, in a way, already an answer to each one of these questions.
But without answering them, it is impossible to answer the two mutually-exclusive questions which are transparently implied in the film:
● either how human-like viruses-consumers can continue to parasitize without the support of some “matrix”, which has collapsed?
● or how to stop parasitising and start living humanely?
Now we return to the fact, that the machine system, fabricating dreams of life of humanity, who supports the machine system energetically (to be a “battery” for the system — is the main purpose of humanity in the film), has been named “The Matrix”. In our times, this word is commonly known as a mathematical term, defined as a two-dimensional table, in the cells of which (at the intersection of every row and column) exist some mathematical objects, including new matrices. The latter defines a matrix in a general sense as a mathematical object, conceptually tied to the multidimensional space of formal parameters. Also, matrices are a means to to give structural organization to sets[3] (of some objects) and establish interrelations between different sets (this has become especially applied in database programming). And in this quality, matrices have the properties of metrological standards, with which elements of structurally ordered sets are correlated.
But all of the above is an understanding of the word “matrix” in a narrow professional sense. The general meaning of the word is much wider. The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives the primary definition of “matrix” as “something within or from which something else originates, develops, or takes form”. And all the meanings of this word, accepted in various domains, are in one or another way tied to this notion — that a matrix (in printing trades, in machining of materials, etc.) is an essence, giving the initial image to something which is created from it, and also giving orderedness to the matter which is modified based on the matrix. That is, the word “matrix” incorporates into itself all meanings about the creation of some image, in accordance with the Predetermination, on the matter of some information carrier.