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Title: There is No Spoon
Source:
NewsWithViews
URL Source: http://www.newswithviews.com/Yates/steven.htm
Published: Oct 12, 2006
Author: Steven Yates
Post Date: 2006-10-12 20:24:29 by YertleTurtle
Keywords: None
Views: 146
Comments: 10
The Matrix, easily the most thought-provoking film in a generation, tells the story of a computer hacker going by the alias Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) who discovers that the world he has taken for granted his entire life is an illusion. The “Matrix” is a virtual-reality simulation created by a powerful artificial intelligence. Since birth Neo has been wired directly into an immense computer system that can project a panorama of sensory information directly into his brain and central nervous system. This creates the illusion of his living in a world where by day he is Thomas A. Anderson, a programmer for a software giant. One of the working premises of the film is that the majority of human beings are born, live out their lives, and die inhabiting cocoon-like structures, plugged into this system, never suspecting the truth. Their life-experiences are fabricated, while their life-energies sustain the ruling entity. Neo has long suspected that something is amiss without being able to put his finger on it. It was this something that drew him into hacking and into the world of computers generally. His presence became known to Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), leader of a band of rebels fighting to free the human race from bondage to the artificial intelligence. Of course, Neo’s nocturnal computer explorations have also become known to the “agents,” living programs who service the artificial intelligence. The first half-hour or so of the film is a race to see which side can get to him first. One of the rebels, Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), hacks into his computer and lures him to a Gothic nightclub. There she confronts him with his unease: “I know why you’re here, Neo. I know what you’ve been doing. I know why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night you sit at your computer. You’re looking for him. I know, because I was once looking for the same thing. And when he found me, he told me I wasn’t really looking for him. I was looking for an answer. It’s the question that drives us, Neo. It’s the question that brought you here. You know the question just as I did.” Neo: “What is the Matrix?” Trinity: “The answer is out there, Neo. It’s looking for you. And it will find you, if you want it to.” The pivotal scene occurs when she introduces Neo to Morpheus. With a thunderstorm in the background, some gripping dialogue ensues: Morpheus: I imagine that right now you’re feeling a little like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit-hole…I can see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. Ironically, this is not far from the truth…Let me tell you why you are here. You’re here because you know something. What you know, you can’t explain. But you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. That there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about? Neo: The Matrix? Morpheus: Do you want to know what it is? Neo: (nods) Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now, in this very room. 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, or when you go to church, or when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Neo: What truth? Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself. (Produces a box containing two colored pills, one blue and one red.) This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you awake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. (Pause. Neo reaches for the red pill.) Remember: all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more. (Neo swallows the red pill with a glass of water.) After that, things happen pretty quickly. Neo is jerked free of the artificial intelligence and finds himself in the “desert of the real,” with Morpheus, Trinity and the others on board the Nebuchadnezzar who are struggling to free the human race from control by the artificial intelligence, while simultaneously battling superhuman “agents” and monstrous mechanical “sentinels” sent to destroy them. Science fiction, right? Unquestionably, many viewers watched The Matrix convinced that all they were seeing was a science fiction action film—entertainment, without further significance. I believe it’s more. The Matrix—which has begun to generate a secondary literature in academic disciplines like philosophy and cultural studies—may be seen an allegory for our present situation after the past hundred-plus years. The allegory is about power and concealment. The “real matrix” is then a world most of middle America takes for granted—a world where “they hate us because we are free,” and where the public schools educate. A world where we can trust the federal government and believe Dan Rather. A world where the former obeys its founding document, the U.S. Constitution. In other words, a fantasy world. Let us conduct a thought experiment. Let us remove the obviously evil artificial intelligence and its minions—“agents” and “sentinels”—and substitute a power system controlled by a few hundred extremely wealthy and well-placed individuals—a super-elite, I will call it. I use this term to distinguish it from visible, national elites. This super-elite operates at an international level, outside all national loyalties. Its only loyalties are to money and power. It exercises control by controlling not just much of the Western world’s finances but much of the information released to the public. It controls the mainstream mass media (television networks and newspapers mostly owned by six or so megaconglomerates) and most education through top-down policies permeating the prevailing form of education in this land: government (“public”) schools. So-called higher education is part of this system. The super-elite bent academic disciplines such as history and psychology in the direction it wanted them to go by generously supplying foundation and grant money to compliant graduate students who then become compliant professors and administrators. Through the endowment system it gained control over Ivy League universities. The latter, via their enormous prestige and control of flagship organizations within academic disciplines (such as the American Historical Association or the American Psychological Association), set the course for those disciplines that others can be expected to follow automatically. Members of the super-elite that controls this power system were never elected to anything, but elected officials in national elites answer to them. Those without the tacit approval of the super-elite have no chance of coming within a thousand miles of the Oval Office. The masses of people, meanwhile, will have been “educated” to adjust to society, which in this context means following the crowd and automatically withholding support from anyone who “can’t get elected.” Combine these two, and you have a reason why no Libertarian Party or Constitution Party candidate has a chance of becoming President of the United States or even reaching high office at the state level as long as this power system remains in place. The media elites continue to promote a system which plays Democrats against Republicans although both parties are controlled at the top. There exists, in other words, a strict gatekeeping system. Only those with certain values and attributes, and a certain mindset, need apply. Let’s now go beyond the thought-experiment stage. Does this super-elite really exist, or is this just more armchair “conspiracy theory”? It is not a theory. It is now quite well documented. The information is available to anyone willing to seek it out. To paraphrase what Trinity told Neo in their initial conversation, the answers are out there, and will find you if you want them to. Or, you can find them, if you go looking. Like most of academia’s tenured class, Professor Carroll Quigley of the School of Foreign Affairs at Georgetown University dumped on “conservatives.” In the Cold War environment of the mid-1960s, it was kosher to ridicule the McCarthyite idea that a legion of communists had infiltrated our government—and represented a dangerous leftist conspiracy run out of Moscow. Quigley, after all, knew the truth. The real agenda was not run out of Moscow but from banking empires long established in New York City, London, and elsewhere. These empires had actually bankrolled communism. They had maneuvered nations into wars by secretly financing both sides and then setting them against one another. Quigley’s 1,300-plus page tome Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time mocks the conspiracy theory of the anticommunists as a “myth” but then suddenly offers one of the most extraordinary revelations ever penned by someone of Quigley’s stature: This myth, like all fables, does in fact have a modicum of truth. There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies…but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known. (p. 950, emphasis mine) Professor Quigley was openly telling us of a hidden power system—a super-elite—operating behind the scenes. He identified it as “the Round Table Groups.” These controllers “wish to remain unknown” as they work out their plans for the world. What are their plans for the world? Quigley elaborated: [T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements, arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups. (p. 324) In other words, the super-elite wanted both wealth and power, and this meant placing the rest of us at a systemic disadvantage in our own pursuits. Later, Quigley outlined the truth about the two-party system in America: The chief problem of American political life for a long time has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and international. The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy… [E]ither party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of those things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies. (pp. 1247-48) Quigley identified shadowy organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations based in New York and the Royal Institute of International Affairs based in London as front organizations for the Round Table Groups he mentioned—sometimes specific individuals such as J.P. Morgan, the banking titan. He claimed to have studied the super-elite’s secret records for twenty years, and to identify with its goals and most of its policies. His only major disagreement was with its desire to “remain unknown.” This disagreement got Tragedy and Hope into trouble. Its publisher, Macmillan, allowed the book to disappear despite thousands of back orders. Inquirers were told it had gone out of print. In addition to the disappearance of nearly every copy, the original plates were destroyed, making new printings impossible given the technology of the time. There can be no doubt of an attempt to suppress the book. Quigley lost control of his own work, as pirated editions began to appear. He wrote near the end of his life that the book “has brought me many headaches as it apparently says something that powerful people don’t want known.” A smaller companion volume, The Anglo-American Establishment, failed to find a publisher during his lifetime. Quigley’s account of these organizations and their development, both in Tragedy and Hope and in The Anglo-American Establishment is authoritative and definitive. Under no circumstances can we dismiss Quigley as a “conspiracy nut.” Quigley was established, with a solid reputation as a macrohistorian: a historian specializing in the larger, long-term tendencies governing the rise and development of entire civilizations. Earlier, he had written an important and very well-received work of macrohistory, The Evolution of Civilizations. Carroll Quigley would not have deliberately sabotaged an ideal career, one with enormous perks, privileges, and access to the centers of influence. There can be no reasonable doubt that he knew what he was talking about. Quigley became mentor to one William Jefferson Clinton, and helped Clinton get the Rhodes Scholarship that sent him to Oxford. (We will say more about Cecil Rhodes and Rhodes Scholarships below.) Quigley was the one person Clinton would thank by name after assuming the presidency in 1993. That was the year our nation took a quantum leap towards globalism: beginning with so-called “free trade” agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, and the President’s Council on Sustainable Development put in place in response to a United Nations “soft law” document called Agenda 21. What results from taking Quigley seriously is a quite different picture of American and Western political history from what we get from history and political science textbooks—and of the political process from what we get from the mainstream media. It suggests that the conventional picture, in which the history of the past hundred years just a series of series of unfortunate accidents and blunders, is a masquerade—and partly the result of the hijacking of academic disciplines such as history. We come to realize that most Americans are indeed plugged into a “matrix”—created not by a malevolent sci-fi machine, of course, but by controls over their education and the information that reaches them. They are “plugged in” as children, attending first public schools and then colleges and universities. They “learn” to trust government information, the academic-bureaucratic complex, and the mainstream news media. This creates the “real matrix.” A few, like Neo in The Matrix, may suspect that something is wrong. But fear of being branded paranoid usually ensures their silence. If they write down their suspicions and publish them, they are ignored. There is, after all, enormous loyalty to the fabricated world. Those “plugged in” have their own gatekeeping systems. Certain ideas—e.g., those having to do with “conspiracy theories”—are automatically screened out. The super-elite then need not work so hard, or even remain entirely secret. If the schools do their job right, its members need not micromanage every institution to make sure everyone follows the rules. The power system runs on a kind of autopilot
Poster Comment: These are Parts I and II
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#1. To: YertleTurtle (#0)
Matrix Lobby Fight
Bohemian Grove is for the elite. It has a message not meant for the cattle. It is to help high and mid level managers of human cattle cope with the psychological stress of doing the mission as it is handed down. What people are told to do causes death, suffering and an inescapable toll in human lives and suffering, and the ceremonies are meant to psychologically steel people to be able to do what they do. And Bohemian Grove is just a component of the big picture I only pick on here as an example of what my gut instincts tell me it is all about. They are willing to kill and punish to keep what goes on there and why secret. I would love to kick over an anthill like Skull and Bones, to go in with a commando team and destroy the place utterly, with other teams set to observe and analyze what happens as a result of this happening. Sort of in the same way as when you set off an explosion to fine oil or other geological riches. We need radar and sonar to see a picture of what exists, because they have built a layered, compartmentalized system designed to keep the full scope of who the power elite is, what they want to do and why they want to do it. A surprise brutal capitation of one of their primary assets -- and I use S&Bs as an example only -- to catch them with their pants dropped and to cause reaction unplanned or contingencies for is the only way we on our level can do this. The Matrix is a profound movie that raises the small hairs on the back of my neck. Something is wrong with the universe, I don't know what it is, but I know it is there, I sense it. There is no spoon, thee are rules to this matrix we all are in that we sense defies the cover story, the plausible denial that things as we are told they are and we see then are what they are at face value. And I trust my intuition enough to believe profoundly this is so. I realize I am too curious for my own good, that it is dangerous. my curiosity and impulses to satisfy it have cost me big over the years, but I am who and what I am and cannot help myself when I try to problem solve why things are not as they seem to be. I want to know why there is no spoon, and why and who wants me to perceive the spoon and think it a tangible entity. This is not a way to think that enhances survival, but I don't really care in the end. I want to know these things, and I want more people to feel this way to make it easier to make it possible to wake up. To finally live in the real world. The mainframe must die. /metaphor
The great thing about The Matrix is that everyone left that movie thinking of a different group which controls the world. At least I did.
If you're not pissed off, you're just not paying attention.
And the message of the matrix was blurred and actioned up in the two subsequent films. More eye candy and less meat for the intellect and gut instincts of the heart that satisfies what is most deeply craved for in our hunger. They want us to live on starch and sugar, not satisfy our true needs with protein and vitamins.
Wolves and Sheep; that's the message of the movie. One, at least.
"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." -- Marshall McLuhan, after Alexander Pope and William Blake.
It is like an onion, with many layers. And only a reference book, an entertaining one, but one that helps measure things and weigh how things are defined when you think out of the box. Most things in our lives are meant to keep us thinking in the box and to accept the fabric of things without question. I hate that with deep passion. As far as the box goes, I want out. I want to see who made it and why.
The Philosophy of the Matrix
If you think this is a good allegory, you guys should pick up "Speedgrapher", an anime title. It's really an amazing series on DVD.
#2. To: YertleTurtle (#0)
#3. To: YertleTurtle (#0)
#4. To: Indrid Cold (#3)
#5. To: Ferret Mike (#2)
#6. To: YertleTurtle (#5)
#7. To: YertleTurtle (#0)
#8. To: Splitends, YertleTurtle (#7)
#9. To: YertleTurtle (#0)
 | What's that Mr. Nipples? You want me to ask the nice lady about her rack?. |
#10. To: YertleTurtle (#0)
Good multi part article.
Mark
The FBI, rather than trying to prevent a terrorist attack, was merely gathering intelligence so they would know who to arrest when a terrorist attack occurred.— Robert Wright - Former FBI agent
Given the scope of the tragedy from last week, I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C., that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink."— Christie Todd Whitman - 9/18/2001
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