Plato's Red Pill
Plato relates a story in The Republic, of 375 BC, that the Wachowskis reference in their 1999 sci-fi classic The Matrix. I want to tell that story, giving Plato's gloss on it, and show how the cinematic homage adds an interesting twist to a classic tale.
In Book VII of The Republic Plato has Socrates tell the Myth of the Cave.
Picture a cave with prisoners chained at the end, facing a wall. Behind them is a fire, and people and animals moving around it. The fire throws shadows on the wall, and that is what the prisoners are faced with every day. One prisoner gets free, and turns around. He makes his way through the confusion around the fire, and upwards towards the mouth of the cave. In the bright daylight he is almost blinded, but looks at the shadows under trees until his eyes adjust. Eventually he can look at the sun. Excited by what he has discovered, he makes his way back down into the cave to tell the others. But he stumbles in the dark. When he goes to tell them they laugh at him - he can’t even find his way around.
Plato uses this myth to draw a map of human knowledge:
First there is the play of shadows on the wall of the cave, and this is the lowest level of knowledge, illusory and deceptive sense-knowledge.
Next there is the level of physical things, of the concrete objective world, and this he says is the level of natural science.
Next, with the emergence from the cave, comes the level of mathematical reasoning, as the prisoner perceives clearly but
Finally, when looking at the sun, comes the final level of ultimate truth and wisdom. This source of wisdom is so strong that the little light that filters down into the cave is enough to illuminate objects down there.
The journey upwards begins with the conversion of the prisoner, a turning point in his life, the decision to liberate himself. The rest that follows is his progressive education. Literally, it is a journey of enlightenment. This is the formation of the philosopher. But it puts him at a disadvantage with his friends.
The myth illustrates Plato’s philosophical views about epistemology, the study of knowledge, and about ontology, the study of being. There is his job description for the philosopher. And there are political implications which he draws out elsewhere in The Republic.
But more importantly, there is the proposition that there are two realities, or rather two worlds, one world of appearances and one of higher reality. And this is a theme that is echoed in other parts of the world at that time, including by Buddha, Confucius and Jeremiah. Everything on earth was a pale shadow of a reality in the divine world. The sacred world was a prototype of our world. Rituals meant imitating the action of a god; for example, the Aborigines in Australia saw the Dreamtime as far more real than the material world, although they only glimpsed the dreamtime in sleep and visionary moments. When they hunted, they imitated the First Hunter.
You may recognise Plato’s story from the 1999 sci-fi film The Matrix by the Wachowskis. In the film, Morpheus says to the hero, Neo, ‘The world has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to the truth.’ ‘What truth?’ asks Neo. ‘That you are a slave. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage.’ That’s Morpheus channeling Plato.
Then Morpheus offers Neo a dramatic choice. ‘And after this,’ he says, ‘there is no turning back.’ Notice the echo of Plato in the reference to ‘turning back’, the conversion of the prisoner.
Neo is to choose between a Blue Pill and a Red Pill.
‘You take the Blue Pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and 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…’
The twist the movie offers on Plato is to suggest that the prisoners are in bondage to a simulated reality. But that is no more than the Myth of the Cave in contemporary costume, for what else are the shadows on the wall but simulated reality?
The two pills are a classic cinematic McGuffin. A choice of consumables replacing the extended journey of the prisoner… and for an audience familiar with Ecstasy and Viagra, an existential choice in pill-form!
There is also an appendix to this story: the Red Pill has had an afterlife on the internet. Adapted to various causes, the two most prominent being the Men’s Movement, and the Trans Movement. The latter is based on the interpretation of the Red Pill as an exit from binary gendering. This has been endorsed by the movie’s directors. When they made the movie they were the Wachowski brothers. They have since become the Wachowski sisters… Lana and Lilly.
But, in conclusion, my question about all this is the following: do you believe that ‘the world has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to the truth?’
And, if so… what can you do about it?