We are all trapped by the matrix of our own minds
You wake up in your bed, and believe whatever you want to believe.
‘You wake up in your bed, and believe whatever you want to believe’
- The Matrix
A few years ago, when seventeen-year-old me was sitting in his A-level politics classroom, my tutor at the time made an observation which I thought was insignificant at the time, completely irrelevant to the workings of politics and the vague notion of the social contract which undergirded it.
Yet since that very day, his personal examination he shared with us began to grow inside my mind as time went on, eventually scratching against the inside of my very skull.
What he said is simultaneously the most simplified and thorough understanding of how we conduct our lives within the present day. His argument was thus (and I paraphrase here): a national culture has completely eroded away. The largest library man has ever constructed is present in every living room, every kitchen, and every room of the house, its shelves an endless column of TV shows, films, and games, all stacked side by side as if they were soldiers marching forward to battle. Top of the Pops is no longer viewed by fifty million people on a Saturday night; nobody watches the same soaps anymore – if they watch soaps at all.
A wave beginning with the advent of hand-held technology grew to an unstoppable tsunami when social media became mainstream, and now we are living the reality which my former politics tutor sounded the alarm on. I thought nothing of his warnings at the time. ‘If someone’s watching Britain’s Got Talent and something else is watching Game of Thrones, how on earth is that going to affect the Chancellor’s Budget, or a General Election’. But this stretched beyond bittering party politics, turning the social contract itself into a fractured desert where one was permitted their own little oasis to become the master of their own reality.
The BBC no longer decides how we spend Saturday mornings, we do. The papers don’t decide what we read and where we extract our information from, we do. The radio doesn’t get to decide what we listen to, we do.
There is still a ‘dominant’ culture, though I hesitate to use the term with any iron-clad certainty. There are general incentives and stigmas within society forced through by a post-modern, end of history motley crew of elitist anywheres, but engaging with the dominant culture itself is only an option instead of necessity.
With the everyday items bestowed upon our very fingertips, we can curate our own reality. We can be highly selective in who we allow to beam information towards us. Allies will be permitted to flood our field of vision and dissidents will be blocked. We can, and do, purposefully pour an endless bottle of our cultural tastes into our own eyeballs without having to pay attention to everything outside of our own manufactured bubble.
In the words of Morpheus: ‘You live in a dream world Neo’, though not one crafted by machines designed to trap you in a simulated reality so you can be harvested like cattle, but a simulated reality you have created for yourself.
Although splintered into an archipelago of pixelated interests, humans retain that tribal nature that sent us soaring to the top of the food pyramid. We can decide for ourselves who is given a blank cheque to brainwash us, what highly cultivated echo chambers to lock ourselves within, what whacky beliefs we are allowed to possess that do not stand up to reality. Now one is free to choose their own matrix, rather than have one be imposed upon them.
A matrix is simply a system, like a machine. It has its moving parts, its code, its rule book, and its purpose. While the Wachowskis have stuck the word under the ‘evil’ umbrella the same way George Lucas did with ‘empire’ and ‘imperial’, the matrix exists, and will always exist, as a system in whatever form it takes.
You wake up in your bed, and believe whatever you want to believe. Step outside your own matrix, and you will bear witness to an unrecognisable, alien land, where the fundamental laws are incompatible with how your mind analyses the world, but this reality exists, even if you close your eyes and believe it doesn’t.
This is akin to Plato’s allegory of the cave, where those who only know shadows on the wall perceive the shadows as real, rather than a trickery of light. As humans we don’t like letting go of our own status quo; what we believe the state of nature is and should be.
After these few years, I can see the danger my former politics tutor was alluding to, and how that poisons the well of politics. The Western world can no longer agree on reality; there is no unifying consensus on which to govern our own affairs, but a galaxy of balkanised tribes who don’t speak to each other except in a state of conflict and do not share the same fundamental forces underpinning the fabric of time and space.
What is a woman? Is everyone I disagree with on the internet a re-incarnation of Adolph Hitler? So do tell me, how do you wish to spend this joyous pride month? What about islamophobia awareness month (yes it’s a thing)? Is the Earth’s crust going to spontaneously combust within a decade or is this all just one big money laundering scam? Did billions succumb to Covid, or is there an ongoing depopulation genocide that will ferry them into the afterlife?
When separate, incompatible narrative exists, impulse and dogma take over on a tide of religious zeal to ‘do the right thing’. Every is the hero in their own mind, because everyone has moulded the physical world around the desires of their own mind, so of course nobody thinks they’re literally Hitler (there are of course exceptions).
Everything is downstream from technology, so there’s no going back to all sixty million plus of us gluing ourselves to Top of the Pops every Saturday, so we have no choice but to brace the storm. A storm forged by the self-imposed matrix we have encased our minds around.