Thee Incredible Weirdness of Being
Created | Updated Aug 19, 2004
When a lot of people saw The Matrix, their reaction was that it was a cool, original sci-fi action movie. A few people hated it; these I suspect are culturalists (a word I will explain in a future edition). Others saw it as a window on the truth, and became
convinced that we are all living in a dream world in order to feed a group of despotic machines. Those who were slightly less stoned saw it as a metaphor for something or other, but there was a lot of disagreement as to what. I was somewhere I the middle - I saw it as
more than just another movie, but I had yet to grasp the true significance of it. It was not until much later that I finally realized what the Wachowskis were talking about. I may be wrong, but hey, this is just my interpretation.
The Matrix is a metaphor for modern society and the human mindset. In 'reality,' it consists of TV, radio, the Internet, and various other forms of communication. Communication is a good thing, but the Matrix corrupts it. Instead of getting all kinds of information from many different points of view so that we can make up our minds about what is going on, we are fed images of celebrities and pop culture in an attempt to make us forget about the real problems going on in the world. 2/3 of us are starving in Africa, Asia, and South America, but respected news channels are more interested in telling us about extramarital affairs conducted by famous people, who are very rich and often extremely stupid. The numerous affairs conducted by John Murphy1 every day are for some reason totally ignored. Western civilization is a cultural wasteland, but we are shown images of identical politicians making identical promises that no one expects them to keep. All the richest countries are
waging illegal war on all the poorest, and all the poorest are using terrorism on all the richest, but these events often get less space than a bunch of men kicking a ball around. The people who run the world commit incredibly serious crimes 2, but the headlines only talk about them breaking the speed limit. A news story is devoted to the most powerful man on Earth choking on a pretzel, yet his soldiers kill thousands of civilians every day with impunity. A powerful man is almost impeached from power for having an affair, but no one talks about the other three in his position known to have had affairs because they were in the 'other' party. A ban on tobacco, the most addictive and lethal drug on Earth, is controversial, yet no respected person wants to legalize the relatively harmless and medically proven marijuana. Everyone is upset that a man beats his wife every eighteen seconds, yet no one wonders about the fact that a woman beats her husband every fifteen seconds3. We are shown numerous pictures on what big brand name companies intend for us to wear, but rarely if ever the fact that these clothes come from Korean sweat shops. I will examine these various points in future editions of this column.
The Matrix feeds us huge amounts of meaningless information in order to blind us to the truth. We are merely a source of power and revenue for those in power, by which I mean big business and religeon as well as politicians. Many people allow and even welcome this, and
have unwittingly created a new, invisible, insidious god.
Hindus believe that, after death, if a soul has worked off all their bad karma, they may leave the wheel of existence and become one with Brahma. Similarly, Buddhists believe that if all of someone's bad karma has been worked off, they may either start again or join some
huge cosmic ball of souls. Similar ideas turn up in Taoism, Shintoism, Sikhism and, I suspect, Confucianism. I suspect there are also some forms of esoteric Judaism, Christianity and Islam that allow for this.
In the modern world, it is seen as desirable to integrate into 'The System' - The Matrix. In other words, become one with it, perpetuate it as a single cell in one vast, metaphysical organism. A similar idea to what happens after death in many religions. People see this as life, but I see it as the death of the soul.
Until we meet again, my friend, this is Hussassan, signing off.
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