A Grasp For Free Will
“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. This moment and the 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 reason my grandfather 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 and despair. I seek philosophy as a method to help me perceive the world as it truly is and the metaphor that Plato describes as a process by which we can free ourselves from this illusion.
Many philosophers have created ideas that the real world is an illusion, and the Matrix trilogy contains references to the people who have attacked this concept from many different angles. Although the films are meant to stand on their own and create their own set of philosophical questions, the directors took some advice from a variety of different works from real philosophers. Four philosophical references that can be compared to the Matrix trilogy are Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Herman & Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, John de Graaf’s Affluenza, and Emmanuel Kant’s What is Enlightenment? The films slightly 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. This thought experiment is a theory concerning the human perception of reality and what is fake. Plato claimed that what we learned through our senses is no more than opinion and that, in order to have a “true” understanding of reality, we must gain it through philosophical reasoning. A brief overview of the story is that Plato imagines a cave in which several people have been kept prisoners their entire lives. These people are bound by chains in such a way that they can look only straight ahead and cannot move their necks at all. They can only see a few shapes as the shadows cast in front of them, but this is all that they have ever known so they don’t view it as abnormal. Therefore, because these images are all they’ve ever seen, they believe these images constitute reality. One day, a prisoner escapes the bonds and looks behind him to see what he thought was the real world, but it was actually an elaborate set of shadows. He is freed from the cave altogether, sees the world for the first time, and has a hard time adapting to this newfound knowledge of reality. Now fully aware of true reality, he returned to the cave to try to teach others what he found out, but the other prisoner's reaction represented that people are scared of knowing philosophical truths and have a difficult time trusting philosophers. In the matrix, this metaphor is too close to perfect when he sees the real world for the first time with the help of the red pill. Everything that Neo thought was real was only an illusion created by the machines—much like the shadows on the cave walls that were cast by the fire. 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 the tyranny of the machines who control them.
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 in modern society. A well-educated modern citizen knows that the different news conglomerates in America such as CNN, FOX, and MSNBC will skew the information to attract certain audiences. It describes a so-called propaganda model which shows how information is filtered out by various factors by allowing the news to be dominated by those working as wealthy elites. The media as a whole in fact maintains our broken and rapidly changing 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 in 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 2) advertising 3) sourcing 4) flak and 5) anticommunist 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 centralized government and falling into a “democracy” trap.
Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf highlights our world as one of over-consumption of material goods, and then further argues that it is a contagious disease that needs to be eradicated. The average person is chasing this hollow ideology of success, and how it will translate into a happy lifestyle for them and their families. The book offers specific case studies and examples noting the large amounts of money families will spend on material goods with little interest in savings and accumulated credit card debt. Although this book acts as a critic of modern globalization, it provides some novice solutions to how we could cure this disease. One example that intrigued me was of the Gross Domestic Happiness Index or Gross National Happiness Index (GNH). GNH is distinguishable from Gross Domestic Product by valuing the collective happiness of a population as the goal of successful governance and traditional moral values as expressed in the 9 domains of happiness and 4 building blocks of GNH. The building blocks of GNH are 1) sustainable and equitable socio-economic development; 2) environmental conservation; 3) preservation and promotion of culture; and 4) good governance. All of these combined for a country can give an index of actually how happy the citizens in that country are. I think one of the most powerful messages from de Graaf in this book is that of complacency. By treating our current mass consumerism in the United States as a disease, it is easier to convince the public that we need to change the way we measure success. The other philosophers compared to in this paper don’t address this as well as de Graaf, but I think that there is still more work to be done about what type of approach we can take to solve it. De Graaf does an excellent job at raising awareness of what the problem is, but a mediocre comparison on what steps we can take as a society to change our behavior.
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