A Comparison of Matrix and The Brave New World

Most societies are made up of rules and systems that are created and made by few people, Intelligences. Individuals exist in society as a part of the whole system supporting its system. Because of the rules that unconsciously impose on individuals persistently, they are bandaged by the rules and thus are unable to see or find out the truth, which can only be found when freed from such bondages. Every society has a group that seeks freedom, rebelling against the group in control of the society. Both Matrix and The Brave New World deal with similar issues in that both depict the control of society by few, whether it is machines or humans, and how such control enslaves and blindfolds humans, preventing them from seeing truths. Both Matrix and The Brave New World depict the future world where people work for the system just as a robot works in a factory assembly line; the world that has a group that tries to search for truth and to be freed from blindfolds; the world where human beings are used as means to the energy production. Matrix is the world in year 2199 where a computer-programmed land is built to grow humans in incubators, thereby enslaving them under machines. They are kept at such state in order that the machines can extract electrical energy from humans without them being conscious of it. Their unconsciousness comes from the fact that machines make them dream or hallucinate fake lives while the machines are drawing their energy. Matrix is anything around the world, such as a perception that imposes on people’s mind. It is a fake world of machines, and humans can never imagine such world to be fake. An interesting point in the movie is that a way in which people sense real totally depends on the mechanical workings of their body; the way they detect certain smell and taste is through the release of certain neurotransmitters by neurons after nerve impulses. Mechanical computers, for example, can then certainly control mechanical workings of the brain. Thus, any entering information can be part of the Matrix. The human lives in 2199 are computer-programmed lives, and agents of the Matrix are the ones who create endless computer programs to control people. The main character Neo is the only one who is able to see and travel through the world of dreams programmed by machines. As Morpheus predicted, Neo was the savior of the world enslaved by machines; he was the one to step outside of the fake world and see the need to free humans from the bondages. In the "real" world wonderland, Neo witnessed encapsulated human beings connected to the machines for energy and fuel extraction. Morpheus believes that Neo is the only one who can save the world by unplugging programs, which means breaking the machine rules and being free from the Matrix. Neo lives in the two worlds; one as Thomas Anderson, a program writer in a renounced company and in another life he was named Neo, a computer hacker who tries to search for Matrix, an indefinable and perplexing thing that drives him crazy everyday. Neo finally meets Morhpeus and his members including Trinity, Tank Switch and others who the only survivors freed from the machines. They reside in a ship trying to decode the programs that disguise people. A computer program "Kung Hu" loaded in Neo’s mind teaches him to be freed from all anxiety and fear that prevent people from being free. Agents who knew that Neo was the destroyer of their world, Matrix, keep following him and try to eliminate him. One agent named Smith seeks hard to make Neo a slave of Matrix, but as Morpheus firmly believed from the beginning, Neo turns out to be the true savior. Unlike the movie Matrix that takes place in the future of 2199, the novel "The Brave New World" bases the time frame between World War I and World War II, during the industrialization. The Brave New World bases the time frame London's future 600 years from now. Huxley predicts the future society to be composed of few High Castes called Alpha Plus control the Low Caste called Gammas, Delta, and Epsilons. People in the brave new world are born in incubators of laboratory. Low Castes are born solely for the factory workers, and High Castes consider them as inhuman beings trained and cultivated solely for energy sources of machines owned by few manufactures. Low Castes made by few High Castes are designed to get electric shocks whenever they see nature or books so that they can distance themselves from nature and books, from intelligence that can lead to the seeking of truth. Instead, Low Castes are encouraged to watch sport games so that they could buy apparatus or not able to travel to see the nature. People have no freedom, and they are all part of a system that makes everything a whole- "Everybody is belonged to everybody". Also, People have eternal lives; they never grow old. They also used "Soma," a pill that Huxley called "Christianity without tear" which would forget anger, depression, or worry. Like Neo in Matrix, John who was the only one born from the mother’s womb, live in two lives. One life is lived as a free man in a savage world, far from London, in the Indian village in Mexico, and the other life was in the Brave New World as a descendant of High Caste. John was born between the D.H.C., Alpha Plus, and Linda, who was abducted by Indians and stayed in Indian village, the savage world. With John, she moves to London, a place which John calls "the brave new world." John is unable to adjust to the London’s life where people are controlled by others, unable to feel and see the truth. Like the savior group in Matrix, the brave new world has several people who tried to free people from the controlled bondage, the society, and its rules. Bernard Marx, an Alpha-Plus, a psychologist, bristles at the social pressures for conformity and longs for the intense felling of rebelling, but he is not able to rebel against authority. Another one is Helmholtz Watson, Bernard’s friend, later a friend of John, who longs to become a poet, also tries to rebel against conformity that deprives the freedom of lives. Although Helmholtz is a more courageous and intellectual character than Bernard, he does not practice rebelling vigorously like John. Both Bernard and Helmholtz are exiled to an Island due to the rebelling. Linda, a woman of promiscuous sexuality, falls in love with John and tries to allure John, who resists "Soma" and tries, not confirm the society. After debating with Mustapha Mond - the world controller as well as an intellectually and politically powerful man who believed that the maker of the rules could break them as well John escapes to a remote lighthouse as a refuge from society. John tries to find out a true human being saying, "I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin and I ‘m claiming the right to be unhappy" (240). Despite the effort of searching for a true human being, John fails to survive because he spends a night with Lenina who gave "Soma" to John. Both Matrix and the Brave New World as Sci-Fi stories criticized the new technologies and its civilization that prevent people from the right to know the truth, the right to be free from bondages, the right to see the truth, the right to feel true emotion, as well as the right to control their own fate. While the movie Matrix, AI, the artificial intelligence, or computer programs control society and its people, the novel in The Brave New World, the High Castes, little intelligence, control society and its people. Consequently, people in both world, imprisoned in society where they no longer control their own fate. Another difference between the two novels is that whereas Neo in Matrix is able to control his own fate by being freed from bondages, the character John in The Brave New World fails to rebel against the bondages, social rules and confirmations.