Increasingly, in the last two decades of his long career in comedy, the now deceased American comic, George Carlin, used to make a point of mentioning in interviews, and even in his act, that he had a problem with groups of people. He seemed to mean “partisan groups of people” by this remark, even possibly insinuating that groups, by their very nature, were liable to become partisan at all times. In making this point, Carlin would often be sure to remind his audience that he was not being misanthropic by having this attitude. He would often say that if he met individual people he would get on with them fine and without any problems at all. But, according to him, it was when they got together and organised themselves into groups that the trouble would start. This had caused Carlin to back off from society and to treat it, vicariously, as a show put on for his entertainment. He had, he said, ceased to care about outcomes and was now just hoping to be entertained by the destructive behaviour of groups of his fellow human beings and all it was to him was a particularly garish show.
I understand where George Carlin was coming from and, increasingly, as I think about the world we live in and the human beings that populate it, I see no reason to hope for any particular outcome. I won’t say that I go so far as to see it as a show either but, I think, I have learned the wisdom that Carlin learned which is that you can’t fool yourself into hoping for anything in particular from such a species as ours. This has nothing to do with being hopeful or pessimistic or, indeed, even with wanting any particular outcome one way or another in the first place. It just doesn’t seem very appropriate to me to set an entire species a goal and then want them to achieve it. This doesn’t seem remotely true or authentic to life as it actually is to me. In fact, what it does seem like is control and, as a convinced anarchist, control is never a good thing. Control is an authoritarian thing, a huge red flag to any anarchist.
Of course, control is the norm, as in the vision conjured up by the Wachowskis in their series of films set in “the matrix”. The matrix is a technological prison, the result of a war against sentient machines, but it has much to teach simple human beings in our world too. One issue that I think about a lot is the one that the character Morpheus addresses when it is suggested that all those imprisoned in the matrix, human beings grown from birth in pods whose bodies act as batteries powering the very system which enslaves them, should simply be released. Wouldn’t this both free the people and cripple the matrix at the same time? Morpheus’ answer is one that we should think about for a very long time for he explains that most people simply don’t want to be unplugged and that, after a certain time, they just become too used to their surroundings to be unplugged from them anyway. They become dependent on that which enslaves them and they have no idea that its a matrix which they live their whole lives within.
This, I think, is very much the situation in our world right now, in the world in which I observe the social media back and forth of millions of people all plugged into a matrix of their own. They watch TV, they read newspapers, they respond to mainstream media, they follow the latest “trending topics”, they are entirely led by the nose through the “bread and circuses” by a capitalist media who tell them what to talk about and what’s good to think in a never-ending scroll of life. But do you know what’s almost entirely lacking from these places? Original thought or even thought that the people have had themselves without being told what to think about or what to react to by somebody else. Everything today is about adding to a hashtag or repeating the same old topics and if you have your own thoughts or do your own thinking its probably not going to be about such things. Because its going to be about you and your own thoughts on what matters to you or your life. It might even have some emotional authenticity or some meaningfulness rather than being the utterly shallow and vapid stuff the mainstream regurgitates on a loop to never let go of your attention as it constantly massages your in-built prejudices.
And the point is the point Morpheus made: many people, most people, simply don’t want to be unplugged from this matrix - even if they ever did. They aren’t equipped to think for themselves, to imagine alternatives or to have an original idea. They can’t think outside the box for they do not even realise they are in one. They have been grown as talking bobbleheads who constantly yack about today’s talking points. And nothing else. They are on the merry-go-round of talk shows, newspapers and social media and they don’t want to get off. And why would they when they have been groomed to be addicted to these things? In that case, very much as in The Matrix itself, it is only very few people indeed who would ever have even the intuition that things could be another way or who could survive being introduced to it for the first time after a life of being force fed a narrative of what it was even possible to think about or discuss. And, by the by, such a situation does not encourage thinking for yourself, questioning, imagining, having ideas. There’s a good reason for this, too, for it might take you outside the controlled bounds of what’s thought acceptable and decent to this mainstream. You might start having rogue ideas or even simply other ideas and that’s very dangerous in a world based on control - not least to the controllers and the media they use to control it. So becoming unplugged from such controlling media might then be seen to be the most revolutionary and potentially dangerous act you could undertake… which is why people like Morpheus, Trinity and Neo are being hunted down in the first place for they are outside the matrix and so free to think what they like and even to act upon it.
Now the matrix, as we learn more fully and intricately in the sequels to the original film, is actually a grand construction for the purposes of misdirection. The reason for building it was to fool as many human beings as possible into accepting what was being fed into their minds so that they would function normally completely under the control of their overlords and in a completely docile way. Docility, of course, was absolutely vital for their control and we know that this was not always the case in various former iterations of the matrix where human beings refused to accept what they were being told - and either refused to take part or actively resisted it. This resulted in many deaths and, as the character The Architect says in the second film, “whole crops were lost”. The matrix is a system of control and its genius is entirely in not being recognised for what it is. What is the best means of control? The means you do not even recognise as control or that, even if you do, you cannot unplug yourself from. An example of the latter in The Matrix is Cypher. He knows what the matrix is, he even discusses it with agents of the system, but he prefers imprisoned ignorance to taking responsibility for his own life in the harsh reality outside it. Cypher is a powerful metaphor for many millions of people in our own world, even many millions who label themselves as concerned about the world, but who find themselves joined at the hip to this world and its system of control and cannot see any other way to live but by that system. Cypher just doesn’t want to face up to the harshness [and responsibility] of reality outside of the system [think capitalism, leaders, the authoritarianism of doing as you are told] so he will plug himself into whatever it is that fills his day and blinds him to it instead. He welcomes the misdirection because it at least doesn’t cause him any real trouble or require anything more of him but to play the role others have assigned to him. He becomes willingly docile in this respect, even to the point of betraying others to achieve it. I know you can think of those in our world who do exactly the same as this.
Yet I see another disturbing analogy to this in the many people who interact with various forms of media who label themselves as politically concerned. Some, of course, the conservatives, right wingers and fascists, use such media on purpose. They are dishonest actors who will lie, deceive and misdirect entirely to get what they want. They are goal-focused and their only goal is to win, to control and to possess the power. In this they partly act as willing agents of the matrix. They are people who have been grown and, in some cases, turned to become agents of the grand system of misdirection. They are those who want this system to dominate and they play their part in it. If you remember back to the films, anybody in the system can at any time become an agent of the system and, as Morpheus teaches Neo in one of his training sessions, “Anyone who is not one of us, is one of them.” We who are unplugged from this matrix should take note of this for, if we ever step back inside it, getting wrapped up in social media discussions or news stories this matrix has itself generated, we soon realise how completely controlled and misdirected many who think themselves on the side of right have become. They do not realise they have become Pavlov’s dogs trained to respond to the slightest stimulus and to react in predictable ways to a whole set of cues and, more to the point, they don’t realise they’ve been disabled from meaningful action - which is always physical action in the real world - by being locked into a never-ending conversation they can never win - because the point is it plays out forever: the conversation is itself control. Remember back to the matrix constructed in the film: it is destroyed not by being plugged into it but by unplugging and taking actions to destroy it and its control. It cannot be destroyed from within. It has enslaved too many people and too many have been turned into those who will willingly keep others enslaved or destroy them instead. Or maybe just keep them talking and so misdirected and distracted.
One thing we should notice about its control, however, is that it is necessarily quite sophisticated. The matrix does not stop you having your own thoughts. It doesn’t stop you imagining freedom or rebellion. In fact, these even play a part in its construction as The Architect informs us. In the same way, our own matrix does not deny us the choice The Architect informs Neo it became vital to include in the iteration of the matrix from which he himself was released and which The Oracle, another agent of the system, encouraged him to pursue. The point, however, was that even this choice was a function of the enslaving control the matrix was built to serve. The machines who controlled the human population had realised that people need to at least think they are free and have the choice to not do, as well as do, what they are told. If given this choice, they learned, people could become better controlled, better coerced, even if, in fact, they were just as controlled and coerced in reality as they always had been.
This is very much the case today. The controlling system of authoritarian capitalism will tell you that you have a choice and, in theory, abstractly, you do have a choice. But take any action to pursue a choice undesired by these same authoritarian capitalists [such as riots or protests because black lives matter, for example] and action will be taken against you even as it is against people who become too socialist in Latin or South America or if a Sanders appears in US political discourse or a Corbyn does in British political discourse. The matrix doesn’t mind you talking and complaining all day, every day, about these things by means of the various media companies. In fact, it encourages you to - because while you are doing this, and I see this all the time on social media, you are not doing anything to dismantle the matrix and the system of control which it constitutes [even, by the way, as you out yourselves to the powers that be]. In fact, you are actively helping it perform its controlling function by doing so every bit as much as Neo, up to a certain point, was doing so by carrying out the function of “The One” which, lest we forget, was itself a function of the matrix and its system of control.
This is another lesson to be learned. Every system of control may have those few people it cannot reach or control but this is OK if they never actually defeat the system but are themselves impotent against it. This then acts as a further reinforcing narrative for the system’s truth that it is in control and that there is no prospect of its destruction. And this is then something else to discuss eternally whilst still under its endless control. So long as you never learn the lesson that you should be trying to destroy the very system that you have come to rely on for your own survival - its making you dependent upon the very thing which is your real enemy being entirely part of the plan all along - then why should the system care what you discuss, dream about or imagine whilst still firmly under its control? Such things are actually part of its means of control so long as you don’t try to unplug, once and for all, and then see your real enemy.
In the films, of course, the matrix only comes under real threat once various characters, both “good” and “bad”, rebel from their assigned roles. Agent Smith no longer wants to be an agent of the system and, instead, becomes a threat to it. Neo, likewise, rejects his role as a further [but unknowing] agent of the same system and prefers to make his own choices rather than the coerced ones he had been making up until this point because he had been manipulated into buying into the story that the game of freeing Zion was one that had real stakes. Zion, we learn, is also just another means of control in which those few people who escape the matrix are habitually wiped out so that the cycle can begin again. Here is where we learn that a measure of rebellion is always acceptable to the powers that be for it justifies the mass of authoritarian forces which maintain it as it is and serves to keep the vast mass of unrebellious people under control. Seeing what happens to those who rebel is always a good lesson for everyone else to learn but this, again, is misdirection and its always about learning what the system wants you to learn from this perspective. The last thing the system wants is to lose the upper hand and it will allow pretty much anything which allows it to maintain its advantage and its control. So even at the end of the third matrix film, when Zion is saved and the machines have had to concede to working with Neo in order to defeat Smith, the matrix itself remains intact even at the cost of The Architect agreeing to free all those from it who want to be. But that still leaves untold millions of seemingly willing [or just uninformed] slaves, the many sentinels who are its police in the real world and the agents who patrol its digital pathways enforcing order. The matrix is itself still there as are both The Oracle and The Architect, its “mother” and “father”. Real freedom will only exist when all these do not but even the apparent self-sacrifice of Neo has not achieved that. All he has achieved is, at most, a concession with no promise that things won’t just go back to how they used to be once more.
There is so much that could be learned from this analogy and from going through it in much more detail than I have imagined here in this short essay. Yet the broad outlines are, I hope, clear and the rest of the thinking is up to you for we must each emerge from within the shadow of the matrix by taking responsibility for ourselves, our own lives and our own thoughts. We all need to become self-educating people. For we are all here, in our real world, under a system of control every bit as much as real as the one imagined in The Matrix. These systems of control have the same aims and use many of the same techniques. Their job is to control us, even without us realising we are being controlled if they can, whilst keeping us docile, sleepy, compliant, playing the roles others have decided we will play. In this, us having our own opinions and views, a feeling of free will, is vital for they can be used to keep us locked in interminable conversations that threaten nothing because we have been willingly coopted into eternal impotence. Instead of seeing our true enemy and physically working to disrupt and destroy it [the apparatus of authoritarian capitalist control], we are misdirected into endless talk and other impotent actions such as social media. This utilises the passion we feel but simultaneously disarms it - a very insidious but effective form of control. If there are some few who wake up [the song played at the end of the first film], the forces of control will send their authoritarian sentinels into battle to destroy them. This will both quell the uprising and serve as a warning to the rest. Control is all the system wants. It will do anything to maintain it.
So, of course, this control, and the system that wants it, is the real enemy. Its not the trending topics on your social media. Its not the shenanigans going on in your favourite political party. Its not the latest injustice. Its not the raft of conspiracy theories tossed out to confuse and engage you. All these intersectional issues are just distractions at the end of the day, fragments randomly distributed to catch and hold your attention in a permanent scroll which misdirects your attention from the fact you are a slave, that you are not free, that you cannot really make your own choices but only the ones you have been allowed to make. This is not because some mad billionaire wants to secretly put a chip in your head. It is because, done right, the system billionaires are a part of will not need to put a chip in your head or physically connect you to a matrix because you will already be under control by other means. When you accept that there are states and governments and leaders and police and rich and poor and economic systems and that you can only have something if you pay someone for it - and, if you don’t have money you may just have to accept starving or having no home or dying for lack of medical care you cannot afford - then you are already under control for none of these things are given and all of them are impositions upon life itself. The system would hate you to realise this and do something about it - such as finding alternative ways to live - for that is what really threatens it and what can really destroy it. So anything that is not that realisation is fine as far as the system is concerned for anything else will not ultimately or fundamentally change it.
That is the realisation we all finally need to have if we want to escape the systems of control and experience real freedom for the first time. And to refuse to be misdirected by all the media that now surrounds us as a very deliberate and purposeful fog.
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