“THERE IS NO SPOON.” Part I (X.) by X.

Since its viral opening in 1999, The Matrix has become a very useful frame of reference (I’m talking here about the first episode in the trilogy). It is useful because it uses incisive metaphors in its bold critique of the system and because most young progressives have seen it at least once. The Matrix makes it possible to discuss key revolutionary concepts in a striking and accessible way. I’ll focus for now on two of these important metaphors and their significance to the nascent movement for revolutionary democracy in the US.

The metaphor of the blue pill and the red pill is quite often referenced by progressives and revolutionaries. It powerfully expresses the life-changing experience that progressive activists and organizers go through when they first awaken to revolutionary consciousness. It’s the realization that your very understanding of the world does not reflect reality but a misleading set of illusions deeply ingrained in your mind after years of insidious indoctrination. It’s the sudden revelation that much of what you have been told about the world consists of outright lies by the system’s agents, of dingbat craziness perpetuated through sheer ignorance and mostly of confused notions borne out of the force-of-habit of the comfortably numb. The key dialogue between the young hacker Neo (budding activist) and the underground rebel Morpheus (veteran organizer) goes as follows:

Morpheus: We are trained in this world to accept only what is rational and logical. Have you ever wondered why? As children, we do not separate the possible from the impossible which is why the younger a mind is the easier it is to free while a mind like yours can be very difficult.
Neo: Free from what?
Morpheus: From the Matrix. Do you want to know what it is, Neo? It's that feeling you have had all your life. That feeling that something was wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad, driving you to me. But what is it? The Matrix is everywhere, it's all around us, here even in this room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church or 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. That you, like everyone else, was born into bondage... ... kept 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.

The script digs further into the loaded meaning of the red pill/blue pill metaphor by making crystal clear that in an information society, we face a choice pregnant with responsibility:

Neo: How?
Morpheus: Hold out your hands.
In Neo's right hand, Morpheus drops a red pill.
Morpheus: This is your last chance. After this, there is no going back.
In his left, a blue pill.
Morpheus: You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. Remember that all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.
Neo opens his mouth and swallows the red pill.

This bluntly symbolic scene has an uncanny impact on progressive students whose daily practice of accessing new information challenges the absolute dominance of the “official” version of events (even if most of the “biased interpretations” -read revolutionary analyses- have been filtered out of the textbooks). It exacerbates their feeling that “something is wrong with the world” and confronts them inescapably with the newfound revolutionary’s first dilemma: To know or not to know (soon followed by its twin: To act or not to act).

Yet as powerful as the red pill/blue pill image is (and I’ve referred to it quite often), I have come to see another scene in the Matrix as containing the most insightful and instructive of metaphors: the scene of the bended spoon. Although the script’s limitations only allow the metaphor to go so far, the Matrix introduces here the fundamental concept that our “reality” is not bound by immutable rules (just as the system is not ruled by immutable laws); we can affect our world (and our society) in amazing ways that we don’t even suspect if we just learn how. The dialogue takes places in the Oracle’s waiting room between Neo and a monastic-looking child of the underground movement that seemingly bends a spoon with his mind:

Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

I can think of no concept more critical for progressives and revolutionaries to grasp than the simple lesson conveyed in that scene: The rules of the system can be bent; they are not immutable, they are not permanent, they are not absolute. And as in the movie, this is the critical concept that must be first understood and then mastered before attempting to change the system radically with any hope of success.

To be continued...