Plato's Cave, the Matrix... continuing thoughts from last post

The Matrix is an allegory for Plato's Cave (which is also an allegory). In Plato's allegory, the Cave is a place wherein prisoners live in ignorance and experience the world through the distortion of moving shadows that don't reveal their true forms. Once freed, the prisoner struggles to leave the cave and to move toward the light. After finally being able to use his eyes for the first time, he can see things as they are... but once then given an opportunity to re-enter the cave he cannot go back to live as he had before. It becomes not only an imperative to stay free, but to also free others from the cave - which is something they can only experience themselves.

The theme is intentially dublicated exactly within the Matrix. Throughout the movie, we question reality as Neo traverses back and forth between a simulated world and the "real world" which he has just discovered. His fight within the simulated world is to help save the "real world".

Herein lies the problem - in the postmodern world, there is no refuge in the "real world" as Reality is but a memory of a tattered map. Plato's Cave for us is not finding the Real - but finding the evidence which allows us to understand that we live in a society that has let the Real slowly fade to simulacra - I have stepped into this life mid-simulacra. The context is already placed firmly within the timeline of the many "copies without originals" that forms our collective understanding and memories. The beauty of the Matrix trilogy is that it ended in such a way that so many people were furious at the ending, which was almost comically too perfect. It had to be so to mirror back to us the conditions of our "reality".

Again, to consider what this protends for the future - there are revolutions waiting to happen, but none of them are poised to fix the actual problem we are facing. At some point though, perhaps not even in my lifetime, one of those revolutions is going to create a new crisis upon shattering the dimensions of the simulacra that give us what we understand as context. People already don't trust politicians, the news, and often even their own eyes and ears. What will happen when what little trust that is left is not only crushed, but completely confounded?

You could ask yourself what you would do... or what Neo would do... but the problem lies in the fact that there is no foundation for how to handle this sort of collapse. It cannot be answered by any of us unless we truly were in the position. Not a collapse of meaning (we're already suffering through that), but an awakening of the gravity of that collapse - certainly further progressed with time - which cannot be ignored.