Having a Matrix Moment
Ritual in the desert of the real.
If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other. -Genesis 11:3
We are entering a period in history when anyone in the world can talk to anyone else on the planet, even if they speak different languages. It doesn't matter if you speak English or Russian or Chinese when Google can translate universally. This newfound ability to communicate across language barriers has not yet unified the world. It has merely made it easier for us to sort ourselves into ideological groups that manufacture reality for us.
Here in the US, these groups into which we've sorted ourselves are in constant conflict. Words and phrases mean different things to different groups. Each one has its own version of reality. These varied realities appear increasingly incompatible with each other. Instead of finding common ground and talking through their differences, most people are simply avoiding members of other groups.
This situation promises to disrupt our social fabric in unpredictable ways, creating new problems and making existing problems worse. And with so much information at our fingertips, it's become very easy to find credible support for any position, as well as comparably credible support for opposing positions. Every side thinks it knows the truth. There may come a time when we no longer understand each other at all no matter how much we talk to each other. On many issues, we're already there.
Having a Matrix Moment
Remember when The Matrix came out in 1999? Using slick special effects, the film told the story of a humanity trapped in computer-generated illusions while its energies were extracted to power the computer systems that kept it enslaved. The character Morpheus revealed this dystopian reality to the main character Neo early on. "Welcome to the desert of the real," said Morpheus, after showing Neo the terrible truth.
This 2018 piece by Aziz Ali Dad describes the origin and meaning of this cryptic phrase:
French sociologist Jean Baudrillard foresaw the implications of the communication revolution on our notions of self, society, knowledge and reality. In early 1991, he wrote a series of three essays – before, during and after the Gulf War. The essays were titled 'The Gulf War will not take place', 'The Gulf War is not really taking place' and 'The Gulf War did not take place'. ... Baudrillard meant to say that the Gulf War wasn't a war because the build-up for war, the waging of a war, and post-war scenarios were more of a simulation or constructed truth in the shape of hyperreal images on our TV screens. ... Explaining the excess of reality after 9/11, Jean Baudrillard stated that "it is the terrorist model to bring about an excess of reality, and have the system collapse beneath the excess". Morpheus, a character in The Matrix, quotes Baudrillard when he says "Welcome to the desert of the real". This phrase refers to a cultural space where hyperreality doesn’t refer to the real solid world but to the virtual world. Baudrillard’s prognosis in 1991 encapsulates the world that we inhabit today. It is a world where the self is broken and "everyday familiarity collapses".
The Matrix sequels completely abandoned this philosophical foundation to focus exclusively on improbable gunfights and superficial dialog. Even so, the film contributed something important to our cultural mythology. Now, 25 years later, people who experience sudden new awareness about our manufactured reality can say they're "having a matrix moment" and we all know what they mean. At the same time, one of the film's creators is now reimagining the film to make it all about gender. In 2020, BBC ran a story about it. Here's a quote:
The Matrix films are about being transgender, the trilogy's co-director says. "That was the original intention but the world wasn't quite ready," says Lilly Wachowski, who came out as trans along with her sister Lana [in 2016]. "We had the character of Switch - who was a character who would be a man in the real world and then a woman in the Matrix."
So we're now being told this film was about gender. This a clear example of celebrity messaging encouraging us to focus on personal identity instead of focusing on how we're being exploited by technological overlords. I don't doubt that Wachowski was exploring gender identity while writing the script. And I do think the movie would've been better if they'd made Switch present as different genders in different realities. But reinterpreting cultural mythology to obscure an important universal metaphor isn't ideal.
If trans people see The Matrix and think it's about them, that's great. If an office drone sees the film and feels inspired to leave the world of cubicles behind for a more meaningful job, that's great too. It would also be great if the film contributes to millions of people experiencing profound moments of awakening before separating their lives from the control regime's artificial world. In other words, I feel like there's room in the culture for this story to mean different things to different people.
While some believe that we're literally living in a computer simulation, I haven't seen convincing evidence of that. Danny Goler's experiments revealing language-like characters in diffracted laser light while under the influence of DMT are intriguing, but they haven't proven anything yet. A matrix made unconsciously by us out of our own consciousnesses, on the other hand, strikes me as much more plausible. More plausible and more empowering.
If our matrix is a computer program that we can't modify, the wisest course of action may simply be to keep pleasing our robot overlords. But if our matrix is instead a co-creation of all of our consciousnesses, it may be more malleable than we've been led to believe. There are many kinds of code running in our biological and psychological machinery, influencing the reality that our consciousness generates for us. But this code probably doesn't work like C++. If we want our consciousness to generate a better reality for us, the mythologies that pattern the stories we use to make sense of the world seem like as good of a place to start as any.
An oil portrait of Jean Baudrilliard that I modified using stable diffusion. To learn more, check out the Tezos NFT.
Rituals Embedded in our Basic Programming
Humans co-evolved with human religion. Religious rituals were some of the first psychosocial technologies put into use by our species. When compared with all of history, our culture's secularization is a very recent and very strange development. My personal belief is that people are innately religious, and their unconscious religious inclinations have not disappeared. They've merely found expression in secular activities.
Nearly all public discourse sounds religious to me. By that I mean that nearly all of this conversation's participants promote ideas that are grounded more in mythology than in anything rational. And many of our most prominent talking heads are simply religious zealots, whether their religion is Christianity or Pfizerism. Modern culture is filled with zealots unconsciously attempting to enact religious rituals that don't produce their desired results, because society isn't structured to deliver such results.
Consider coming of age. In nearly every culture in human history, coming of age was defined by a sacred process wherein a child went through a special ordeal and was subsequently recognized as an adult by the community. This general process is deeply embedded in our collective psyche. Nearly every child unconsciously expects this process to occur, and when it doesn't, many attempt to make it happen by going through special ordeals of their own devising.
No matter what happens in these special ordeals, the person undertaking them is never recognized as an adult by the community afterwards. How could they be? Even adults are not treated as adults in our system. We may be sovereign beings, but our sovereignty is denied by our control regime as a matter of course. The overall effect of this is a large population of adults who are perpetually trapped in adolescence.
The impact of this is easy to see in the choices we've made. We add fluoride to drinking water knowing it reduces IQ. We add glyphosate to the food knowing it impairs cognition. We use toxic chemicals everywhere knowing they disrupt hormones, which negatively impacts clear thinking. So does the insufficient sleep that about 1 in 3 adults get.
The folly of these kinds of choices is evident everywhere. In 2000, 1 in 150 kids had autism. By 2020, that figure was 1 in 36. Alongside skyrocketing autism rates, mental health in general began deteriorating quickly. About 80% of the population can now expect be hospitalized or prescribed medication for a mental health condition at some point, and the medical system usually makes matters worse because it creates new socioeconomic difficulties.
In a society of cognitively impaired perpetual adolescents plagued with mental illness, there may not be much hope for considered public discourse leading to solutions to the many problems we face. If we want to get to a place where such discourse is even possible, we first need a great deal of healing. The physical dimension of this is obvious. But the psychological dimension is just as important and maybe easier to approach.
Prayer and Healing
Along with coming of age, there other universal rituals embedded deep in our psyches. Most people have a prayer ritual in some form or another. These range from formal observances of religious tradition to offhanded comments. Many pray to a deity while the rest pray in more secular ways. "I don't know who I'm talking to, but please let this work," a person might say in a moment of tension to an empty room.
While prayer may improve health in various ways, its benefit to cognition is rarely considered. Here's a quote from one study looking at that:
Praying about a problem appeared to liberate cognitive resources that are presumably otherwise consumed by worry and rumination, leaving individuals better able to process other information, and additionally to bias attention to favor detection of problem-relevant information.
These benefits were most pronounced in the devoutly religious, but there are probably ways for the secular to engage similar psychological mechanics while offering their own kinds of prayers. The only downside to prayer that I've encountered while reading up on the subject involves people who perceive the divine as a negative force persecuting them. When these people pray, they don't feel better.
Rebirth and Recognition
The ritual of death and rebirth is as deeply embedded in our collective psyche as the ritual of prayer. We're all reborn countless times, in countless moments of transformation. The initiation rituals of mystery traditions often include a symbolic death or dismemberment, followed by the divine reassembly of the person. This strongly overlaps some coming of age rituals, suggesting the possibility that the essential processes in play are embedded in us on some deep level.
As with coming of age, death and rebirth rituals are often enacted unconsciously and incompletely by people who innately know that their current self has reached its end and cannot go on. These people are motivated to become someone new, and they plug this motivation into the social systems they have access to. Some get lost in substance use. Some get makeovers. Some change their names. Some change their genders. There are situations where a person's transformation is recognized by their community. More often, the person seeks this recognition and doesn't find it.
This produces something similar to the perpetual adolescence mentioned earlier. Masses of people enacting symbolic deaths again and again, hoping for a symbolic rebirth into a social body that recognizes their struggle and the person they've become. When the recognition fails to materialize, the person tries again by enacting a new symbolic death.
If we want to break this cycle, our social ecology will have to be significantly transformed. Imagine all of us truly recognized by the people around us for who we've become. This is a nice idea, but there's no clear path from here to there. What we really need is a rebirth ritual for the whole social ecology.
For more of my writing, check out my scifi novels and my Hive blog.