Analysis of Ancient Allegory Parallel in 'Matrix'

“We must believe in free will because we have no choice.” This event was one of the most profound statements that have ever been spoken to me, and I heard it from my grandfather, Grandpa Bob, days before he passed away. The reason he uttered these words while in the hospital was because of a conversation that triggered a discussion of the concept of determinism. At the time, I was a confused 11-year-old visiting a sick relative and wasn’t educated about the concept of free will. It was explained to me then that some teachers thought there was no way to escape the situations we find ourselves in, and rather all the events that occur had preexisting causes out of our control. In his last few days, he pushed me to believe that myself and my siblings have control over our future through our decisions because determinism led to a life of hopelessness. My understanding of this and readings from our class have led me to believe that the “The Matrix” philosophy coupled with Plato’s allegory of the cave is the most compelling argument for how we can describe a free life. The prisoner in the cave is a metaphor for the process by which humans free themselves from the world of illusion and, with the aid of philosophy, perceive the world as it truly is.

Many philosophers have created ideas that the real world is an illusion, and the Matrix trilogy contains many references to the people who have entertained this idea. Although the films are meant to stand on their own and create their own set of philosophical questions, the Wachowski brothers, the directors of the film series, seek advice from these philosophers. Three philosophical references that can be compared to the Matrix trilogy are Plato’s allegory of the cave, Herman & Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, and the work of John de Graaf. The films refer to and compare the ideas established in the work of these philosophers throughout the series, and I will discuss throughout this paper the similarities and differences with how these different philosophers view freedom.

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Plato, a greek philosopher from over 2,000 years ago, explored the idea that the real world is an illusion in the allegory of the cave in his work, The Republic. The ‘Allegory Of The Cave’ is a theory concerning the human perception of reality and what is fake. Plato claimed that knowledge gained through the human senses is no more than opinion and that, in order to have real knowledge, we must gain it through philosophical reasoning. The brief summary of the story is that Plato imagines a cave in which people have been kept prisoner since birth. These people are bound by chains in such a way that they can look only straight ahead, not behind them or to the side, and have been stuck there their entire lives. On the wall in front of them, they can see flickering shadows in the shape of a variety of figures. Because these images are all they’ve ever seen, they believe these images constitute reality. One day, a prisoner escapes the chains and looks behind him and sees that what he thought was the real world is actually an elaborate set of shadows. He is freed from the cave altogether and sees the world for the first time. Fully aware of true reality, he must return to the cave and try to teach others what he knows, but the other prisoner's reaction to the escapee returning represents that people are scared of knowing philosophical truths and do not trust philosophers. In the matrix, Neo is pulled from a kind of cave in the first Matrix film, when he sees the real world for the first time. Everything he thought was real is only an illusion—much like the shadows on the cave walls. Plato insists that those who free themselves and come to perceive reality has a duty to return and teach others, and this holds true in the Matrix films as well, as Neo takes it upon himself to save humanity from widespread ignorance and acceptance of a false reality.

Manufacturing Consent, by Herman & Chomsky, takes a view of the mass media to ask why only a narrow range of opinions are favored while others are suppressed or ignored. It describes a propaganda model which shows how information is filtered out by various financial and political factors or “elites” by allowing the news agenda to be dominated by those working on behalf of the wealthy and powerful. The media in fact maintain our unequal and unfair society by being biased in how they present information to the public. The democratic systems of governance imposed on the populous trifle human reasoning because governments wish to continually restrict the abstract and innovative thoughts associated with enlightenment. Although these democratic systems wish to prohibit such “dangerous” thought processes, both Herman & Chomsky, and Plato believe that enlightenment is attainable for individuals in specific but contrasting ways. Herman & Chomsky introduce the ideas of “worthy” and “unworthy” victims in Manufacturing Consent to demonstrate the control that the government has over the media. This media bias is politically advantageous to U.S. policy-makers because it calls for U.S. hostility against the victims of enemy states. Herman & Chomsky believe that education is the key to revealing the truths behind these lies “democracy” feeds us. Both Herman and Chomsky believe that the common man is capable of attaining an Enlightened status through rigorous education and attention to the techniques of media persuasion. In the conclusion of Manufacturing Consent, the authors state, “The organization and self-education of groups in the community and workplace, and their networking and activism, continue to be the fundamental elements in steps toward the democratization of our social life and any meaningful social change.” (H&C, 307 PDF). The extent of these educational developments is the key to enlightenment for the masses and thus the gradual change of mainstream media. Plato argues that enlightenment comes in a much different way than education. First, Plato believes that only a select few individuals are able to become enlightened because they are forcibly stripped from the “cave” of illusion by agents of enlightenment and brought into the reality that surrounds them. “He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first, he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves,” (Plato, 2). Secondly, Plato believes that education is not the path to Enlightenment. He argues that the innate capability to learn and adapt to surrounding environments allows for the enlightenment of select individuals because the elites of society wish to gradually expose them to the realities of the world around them in the hope that one day they can return and rule the masses of the cave. These authors have developed varying opinions on the capability and methods by which the common man can attain enlightenment when subjugated to manipulative and powerful “democratic” societies.

The five filters of Manufacturing Consent that lead to the control of the propaganda model are 1) ownership (i.e., media outlets filter information that is incompatible with the interests of their parent companies); 2) advertising (i.e., advertisers pressure the media to filter information that is incompatible with the advertiser's interests); 3) sourcing (i.e., the media are dependent on government and major corporations for news, and these sources filter the information they share); 4) flak (i.e., the government and major corporations are able to pressure media outlets to filter information); and 5) anti-communist ideology (i.e., the media is influenced by dominant ideologies and filters information to align with ideology). Although there is a dispute about the validity of these filters and how they affect society, there has been an agreement among philosophers that there is significant bias in how information is passed to the masses. It is this bias that can develop into a false perception of reality. The similarity to the Matrix can be reflected in how the machines filtered information so that humans were distracted from living a regular life. There is a belief in the Matrix that people do not question their surroundings, and this ideology follows that information has been tainted. Neo questions his surroundings on how the information is delivered, and this leads him to find Morpheus. The scene with the red pill as a mechanism for “opening the mind” is key to understanding what Herman & Chomsky were warning about trusting the government.