Image: Still from “The Animatrix – World Record”
When I first saw film The Matrix, I was annoyed by it, and particularly by the reactions of the friends who I saw it with who thought it was so mindblowing. At the time I saw it as a pastiche of existing cyberpunk aesthetic cliches with a kind of high school solopsist ‘what if none of this is real maaaaaan?’ attitude. Decades later, I see it differently. The Matrix plunged deeply into the popular psyche and injected a whole vocabulary of memes for thinking about reality and subjectivity that are still vital and viral to this day. On the internet the term ‘red pill’ has taken on charged political meaning with right wing propoagandists using it as a verb to describe indoctrinating people into their reactionary ideology. Captains of industry like Elon Musk argue seriously that the probability that we are in fact living in a simulation is high and presumably act accordingly, shaping contemporary reality.
I don’t have a strong opinion on whether this is true or not, but do subscribe to the notion that reality is apprehended through the senses and that what happens during the process determines our experience of it. I’m agnostic about the existence of a ‘base reality’ as I have, to my knowledge, no equipment to measure it one way or another. There are a few lines of thought about reality and experience I find very useful though. The first is Buddhism, which is the closest I have to personal religion or spiritual practice. I don’t practice in an organized sense but if pressed to define a set of spiritual beliefs I adhere to, that’s it. As a result I practice meditation, attempt to be compassionate and believe that I am ultimately responsible for whether I suffer or not as I encounter reality. We all will encounter obstacles, negative feedback or sources of pain in our life, but studying Buddhist teaching (and living life for 39 years) has lead me to believe that we do have a role in deciding how to respond to those inputs. We can choose to thrash, resist and be miserable, or we can observe, accept and move through the discomfort. This has been a very useful idea for me.
A second thread, that has some relation to the first, but is less of an organized system of thinking is the view that ‘reality is negotiable’. It’s easy for us, particularly in the face of harsh experience to feel crushed by an implacable reality. Reality can feel static and oppressive. But through studying a whole host of dynamic and exceptional people I have come to believe that in fact reality is much more plastic and malleable than it appears. I think this orientation or belief is a pretty critical one in terms of believing that it’s possible to find freedom, peace and happiness in life. If we simply accept the miserable narrative that is frequently thrust upon us by others, or by the system and it’s propagandists, we are trapped. Seth Godin relates a disturbing anecdote about a dog with an invisible fence, the dog wears a shock collar and when it crosses an invisible line, it receives a shock. It learns quickly to stay within the invisible boundaries. Soon, the fence is switched off, but the dog, having been subject to potent operant conditioning, never leaves the bounds. Do we see ourselves here?
In many ways I feel there is a battle in my head between the powerful operant conditioning which we are subjected to by school, family and society via the media and this other belief, the belief in the possibility for a flexible reality. In fact, as we engage with reality we learn that often there is no electric fence there and that to cross certain boundaries actually requires minimal effort, only a different perspective. There was an off-shoot film, or collection of animated shorts, from The Matrix, called the Animatrix. It’s wonderful and many of the world’s best animators and directors were commissioned to provide episodes. One episode is particularly memorable for me in this context, called “World Record”, directed by Takeshi Koike with a screenplay by Yoshiaki Kawajiri. In it a runner is competing in the Olympics and through an effort of will, basically transcends the bounds of apparent reality and temporarily breaks free of the simulation, while setting a running world record. In the sinister narrative of The Matrix, he is captured and suppressed, his memory erased by The Agents, who are the AI police in charge of maintaining thought control. But this image of someone breaking through the bounds of the consensus reality to do extraordinary things is very resonant to me, and I think truer than many people think.
The regard in which I think the story rings false is that the runner breaks out of the matrix through extreme effort. In fact I think that escaping the confining paradigm is not achieved through extreme effort but rather through lateral thinking, and a willingness to not do that which others do. Perhaps we could interpret the physical effort in the story as a metaphor for the emotional effort of defying the social consensus. This is can be hard as almost all of us feel a great deal of fear and anxiety at the threat of breaking social consensus and being ostracized from the group. When I am trying to find a way to move my life to the next plateau, or to change, I often think of this short film. How am I allowing myself to be constrained? What would it look like to break the matrix and defy gravity?
