Inside the Matrix
Movies like to capture the essence of self-determination in overcoming tremendous odds. Characters surmount the impossible by finding courage and strength within themselves and with the help of their friends. There is often a sacrifice in some way to make the achievement possible.
This is the basis that we use to find encouragement and determination to live our lives. The problem is that is not how God wants us to see things. We can try to relate these movies and stories as analogies to the Christian perspective, using the sacrifice to compare to Christ and the value of unity and the ability for the “good” to defeat the great “evil”. However that leaves out the most important element, it leaves out God. We do it all ourselves and the idea of God is either pushed farther away into abstraction or brought down to a level of corruption. The Man, or big brother, the system, the matrix, the force… A cold, alien controller that tries to oppress the valiant spirit. The hero has to find a way to break free of the oppression and in doing so will free everyone else.
Overall the story is a contradiction. For example, In the Matrix, the Matrix was the reality. The characters had to borrow from the same reality they were trying to destroy. How can you step into a programmed reality and rewrite it without access or authority? We do the same thing in our own lives, lets say it is God that controls the Matrix, and you cannot unplug, or find a door out, or a glitch in the system. He writes the program for all reality and controls everything within. There are no tools, skills, no amount of knowledge, no special training that can increase our odds. We cannot sacrifice ourselves to free everyone else, that would be pointless, we have no real power in ourselves. So everyone pretends that they are in control, that maybe they will find the secret that will give them the freedom from the programming that is within them and all around them. Perhaps if we imagine a different reality, make up our own authority we can live in freedom. We always know the truth though, when the end comes and our version of reality is about to be unplugged, we know our control is about to end and it never belonged to us to begin with.
Some people realize this is reality. The futility of their existence. That they have no control and real freedom is subject to the boundaries that contain them. Then comes the question, what is the point of freedom or control anyway. What good would it do? How do we know who is the “good” and “evil” anyway? It is all futility. They realize that the individuality we have has no relevancy, we are blowing in the wind being defined by the places we land along the way. Some find this place in reality and lose all hope and purpose, and many just never look. There are others that keep looking, groping in the dark trying to find a purpose. That is when our eyes can be opened and we can see like the patterns in the code on the Matrix. Only we see that what controls the boundaries around us is not what oppresses us, it is our struggle to be free that binds us and tangles us in our own bonds. We have redefined reality for our own purpose and we have changed truth to fit. We use borrowed logic to try to cheat the inevitable. We say that we will choose the truths we want to believe, we will pick our own morality, virtues, purposes and our own gods. The world around us will be subject to our viewpoint and our own authority. Then we call that free will, spirit, and determination. It is really defiance, audacity and lies. The ultimate deception is our own. This is sin, this is the place our heart is in when we decide to put ourselves first. Redefine a little truth here or there to make it OK to lie, or rationalize a bit to steal, if we change enough around, we can even justify taking someones life. Without a universal authority who can say it isn’t?
So once we see that we have been busy deceiving ourselves into believing we our own authority, God helps us to see that he is the one is charge. He created us, he knows everything, sees everything, controls everything. He is always good, he is truth. He frees us from the chains of our own deception, he opens our eyes to the world as it was really meant to be, where we have a much greater purpose than just for ourselves, but at the same time we finally find real freedom, and we find our true selves.
To illustrate this in the movies, Neo would have to realize his futility, change his version of reality, and submit to the will of the Matrix. The Matrix would not be the great “evil” but really the great “good” that was not cold and oppressive and the Matrix would be the one to sacrifice and free everyone because it was the only one that had the capability. Something tells me people would be less likely to watch that. A powerless hero subject to the will of the system. We like our own version of reality reinforced not shaken or disturbed. Of course we want to believe that we have the power to overcome, that we can get stronger, dive deeper, beat the odds, but the truth is, we can only do what God allows us to do. If we listen to that truth, step out of the made up world around us, God promises us strength and courage and the power to overcome any odds.
The Rabbit Hole 
The Overman
Waking up, to a world with no meaning.
We live in the great nothingness.
Ideas have consequences.
Super heroes have developed as the ultimate expression of transcending the boundaries of society. We love the idea of being free to fly above the masses while having the ability to make the world a better place. Our culture reflects our belief that we can choose our own reality. The temporal realm is kept at a surface level of understanding and it’s our interpretations of that reality that is nurtured. We are led to create a world where our feelings and experiences are key. Whether we lock ourselves in a repetitive cycle like Momento or Inception, take our blue pill, or our soma, we are encouraged to escape the truth. We are attracted to the ideas of individual freedom and non-conformity, but without a transcendental source of truth we become fragmented into an existential darkness and an ultimate state of apathy. Our world has erased all absolutes and therefore we choose to dwell in individual bubbles of distraction, finding short-lived temporal comfort in our fragmented state of purposelessness. This has created an overall society of individual perspectives that are so apathetically detached, the only possible eventuality is a tyrannical police state. Of course, as in A Brave New World, our sense of purpose will be so far removed we will likely embrace the tyranny as if we could be bothered to engage long enough to even notice.
This cycle will result in the snake eating his tail scenario. Ironically our longing for individual freedom leads to its own demise. In our quest to break free from the bonds of society, we get lost in trying to secure our own imaginative state of autonomy. Then we willingly relinquish our freedom for dependency. Like Batman, feeding the Joker’s psychosis, we create our own monsters. We sow the seeds of our own destruction. We willingly blur the lines of truth to justify our emotional reality. We feed the hatred, play both sides, so in the end we are not even sure which side was which. This false confidence we look for within ourselves, trusting our own constructs, has a cyclical nature, but also leads to a linear progression in the pschycosphere.
From romanticism, to transcendentalism, existentialism, and finally the ultimate nihilism we have today, authors like Faust, Emerson, and Nietzsche, have been systematically deconstructing our reality for centuries. They have all contributed to the ideal image of the “overman” or “ubermensch” that became our “Superman” that we now hold dear. Sadly though, instead of a the moral and just hero we associate with Superman, we are really being prepared for the coming anti-Christ. Hitler used the idea of the overman to justify killing millions of Jews, we use it to justify post modernism.
We have gone from reason to non-reason. The French Revolution, communism, Nazi Germany, and the war on terror, all show us how idealism fails to translate to reality in an ever increasingly relativistic society. The most deadly century in history is our result.
It’s no wonder that Carl Jung’s solution of escaping reality to find the god within ourselves is the epitome our culture’s inability to live in and comprehend the real world. We are ill-equipped to deal the potential threats and convoluted entanglement of consequences that will come from our detached reality, whether we are warding off real and imaginary crime villains, or trying to deal with our own everyday hum drum problems and commitments.
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