Assuming that the average age of the current OWS protester is about 26 years old, then most of them would have been about 14 years old when The Matrix was released in 1999.
In the now famous scene (at left) from that iconic movie, Morpheus, leader of a revolutionary underground, explains the true nature of the Matrix to Thomas Anderson. It is a system of control, a world “pulled over your eyes” to blind you from the awful truth that human beings are nothing more than batteries to power the regime of a race of intelligent machines.
The idea of a “world pulled over your eyes” is nothing new to philosophers, of course. 2000 years before The Matrix, the Greek Philosopher Plato, in his famous dialogue The Republic told a similar story—the Allegory of the Cave. There Plato had his readers imagine a group of people held hostage to appearances, forced to accept a shadow play for reality, and he imagined what might happen if one of them managed to get free, and see past the shadows, and look at the world as it really is. What would we he tell his fellow captives then? And how would they react? I don’t want to spoil it for you, but it doesn’t end well.
The Wachowski siblings tapped the same rich philosophical vein in The Matrix. What is real? But they added an interesting layer to the allegory. Their contribution? The people in the Cave are not just stationary captives ala A Clockwork Orange (another masterpiece of dystopian filmmaking) but they are exploited workers, their production in captivity literally empowers the very system that oppresses them.
Sound like anyone you know? (Or perhaps like 99% of everyone you know?)
