Society Is a Machine To Be Broken (Part Two)

This is a follow-up to Society Is a Machine To Be Broken (Part One)

Carrie-Anne Moss and Keanu Reeves in The Matrix

That conversation where Morpheus first intones the nature of the Matrix to Neo has become a cultural touchstone. The “What if I told you” and the image of red and blue pills are so widely known, they’ve become self-mocking internet memes. Morpheus’ soft-spoken yet stentorian delivery has become both praise and parody in the intervening decades. Yet I believe the most important message gets lost.

“The Matrix is everywhere,” Morpheus intones sonorously. “You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes.” This omnipresent, invasive, yet vaguely defined force will, in coming scenes, be revealed as a false reality that everyone seemingly accepts. This reality, however, has been created by the real villain: the machines.

Through three movies, and an impending fourth (plus ancillary media), “the machines” become a synecdoche for the arrayed forces that Neo resists. But “the machines” express our human desire to offload decision-making responsibilities onto systems that run without our input. And Morpheus, in that introductory speech, identifies the systems we designed for that purpose. In naming work, church, and taxes, he identifies the three forces dominating most human lives today:

Economy, religion, and government.

Humans create these, the most pervasive social instruments in modern societies, to serve human purposes. Economies distribute resources, religions codify our values, and governments defend foundational principles of justice. Dedicated historians would insist I’m oversimplifying, and disregarding important counterevidence. Which is true. But for clarity’s sake, let’s restrict ourselves to post-Enlightenment Western rationalism and its attempts to retcon origins, at least for now.

But after humans created these systems, the systems stopped needing humans. Anybody who has tried redirecting bureaucratic institutions, like City Hall or their religious denomination, knows how difficult it is making any meaningful change. This applies whether one resists from outside or within, whether one resists as an organized proletariat or a top-level executive. Once these social machines start running, they’re prohibitively difficult to stop.

Further, these systems become so pervasive that they seem all-encompassing, a mere expression of objective reality. Any expressed alternative gets presented as chaos. Neo awakens to an edifice of humans in vats, individuals who believe they’re having unique experiences, but whose perceptions are standardized and mollified by the machines humans once built. Everyone thinks they’re an individual, but they’re literally interchangeable parts.

Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix

It matters that this isn’t inevitable. The instruments of American government were written to defend the interests of the ownership class in 1789, and recent clashes have turned on how beholden to that we must remain. Embryonic capitalism was invented as a compromise to prevent the rise of Christian socialism under leaders like John Ball and Thomas Müntzer. Our ancestors chose the machines of social organization, and others could’ve existed.

At one time, humans needed (or thought they needed) these systems, these machines, to organize the process of existing in society. But over time, the machines stopped serving us, and we started serving them. The expression of modernist desperation, Charlie Chaplin caught between the cogwheels of a massive industrial machine, is only separated from Neo realizing he’s a battery, by the improvements in special effects technology.

The movies notably don’t present an alternative, though. Our view of Zion, the free human city, is limited to a handful of docks, control rooms, and dormitories, besides a single Bacchanalian city festival. We never clearly get any understanding of what awaits if Neo successfully breaks the machine, and in the final sequel (so far), the filmmakers flinch from offering us anything. Because despite what anybody says, the next phase isn’t foreordained.

When the machines we’ve instituted to serve humanity become impediments, when Man serves the Sabbath rather than Sabbath serving Man, it becomes necessary to break the machine. This, however, is terrifying, because nobody knows what awaits on the other side. Karl Marx and Ayn Rand postulated their respective utopian theories, but history indicates that in reality, this creates widespread uncertainty; we may gain the world, or lose everything.

Humans made the machines, but failed to foresee the consequences. Now humans could break the machines, but now we realize we cannot foresee the consequences. We might repair the machines, but these repairs will never be completed; we’ll spend eternity constantly refurbishing the machines to prevent them controlling us. Every option seems equally poor. But one thing seems eminently clear: we’re serving the machines we built to serve us.

Society Is a Machine To Be Broken (Part One)
Society Is a Machine To Be Broken (Part Three)