Our creature comforts are too nice, too necessary (at least we believe) to give up, and we’ve proved over and over again that we’re unwilling to do so, even if it makes the world safer or fairer for other people. We let technology companies cross lines all the time and barely raise a fuss while we continue to scroll through our feeds. We already choose to ignore the writing on the wall as global tech companies like Facebook freely admit to controlling our behavior via social media. If that freaks you out, it might be helpful to note that we’re well on our way to a machine-made world, even without sentient robots. They seem happy to live in the world made for them. While we’re meant to look down on those who still live in the Matrix, never questioning it, and blissfully ignorant of their servitude, we might also consider that their emotional experiences are real ones, even if their physical experiences are not. It’s a good thing his life wasn’t all that glamorous back in the Matrix or he might have gone looking for Morpheus’ spare stash of blue pills. He’s pretty much conscripted by Morpheus into the most dangerous job possible using a combination of guilt and intimidation.
#Blue pill red pill matrix free
I’m not saying it’s better to be controlled by an algorithm, but only that we shouldn’t so readily fool ourselves into thinking that we can escape it into some utopia.Īnd what of the lies we tell ourselves about what it means to be truly free? Neo manages to escape the great manipulation that the Matrix uses to placate its slimy human power sources, but as the “chosen one,” he’s not free to live his own authentic life.
Unfortunately, life outside the Matrix isn’t glamorous or even fun, and humans have all the same problems they did before – blind faith, denial, anger, love, lust, bitterness, and greed.
The Matrix wants us to imagine the terrifying possibility of living in a false world where we’re being controlled by machines and juxtaposes this with a world where people are free, real, authentic. In general, the film is designed to make us think about free will, fate, the depths of oppression, the irony of creation that later dominates its inventor, and the power (and pain) of knowledge. There are plenty of pop philosophy books that have the deeper meanings covered in case you want to talk about Plato’s Cave Allegory, Descartes, etc.
Neo, of course, takes the red pill and (20-year-old spoiler alert) becomes the hero. Neither choice is all that great, especially when the real world involves living on a bedraggled ship, eating gruel, and being chased by “agents” who are out to obliterate the resistance before it can free more minds from the Matrix. He gives Neo the choice to take a red pill and become part of the resistance or take the blue pill and forget he ever knew there was a real world out there so he can rejoin the rest of humanity in serving as an organic power source for the machines. He’s recruited to join the “real world” by Morpheus, the leader of the human resistance against their AI overlords. Thomas Anderson is a computer programmer by day and hacker called Neo by night. This raises the question: did we take the blue pill?
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