On pills and reality
April 13, 2008
In the midst of discussing Marx, Vonnegut, and religion, “Sacred Slut” of the blog “Whore in the Temple of Reason” (potentially NSFW, I’m sure that’s a shock) says this:
But is there still a real need for religion for most people nowadays? I wonder about this a lot. While most Christians imagine that atheists reject gods to make their lives easier and more self-determined, the reality is that it’s often more difficult to be an atheist, without any imaginary friend who loves you no matter how much of an asshole you are, and to face the reality of death rather than harbor fantasies about life everlasting … Which is to say: The blue pill, or the red pill? [ Opium for Everyone ]
Just to catch you up on your Keanu Reeves costume-drama metaphors, the blue pill is the pill you take if you want to maintain your ignorance and the red pill the pill you take if you want to face the reality of the Matrix head on. When Neo took the red pill, it dissolved the illusion of the apparent material world of the Matrix and replaced it with what could only be considered paranoid fantasy — to anyone still under the influence of the illusion.
What makes the red pill/blue pill metaphor such an interesting choice for atheist argument is that the Matrix suggested that our reality is a construct. Not just whether or not there’s a god but quite literally whether the sky looks blue and you’re really wearing a suit and working in a cubicle. What you think is the material world is not the material world.
This is essentially the argument of all religion. What we can see, touch, hear, feel, smell, experiment on — this is only a small portion of what is. And our understanding of that is even flawed. Materialism is the blue pill, the illusion, the choice of those who cannot deal with the broader truth.
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April 13th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
What we can see, touch, hear, feel, smell, experiment on — this is only a small portion of what is
Really? But how would you ever know if you can’t experience it in any way?
April 13th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
You don’t have to look much farther than your own metaphor. When Neo takes the red pill and wakes up into the reality outside the matrix, that echoes the shaman taking a hallucinogenic substance to invoke a vision. And just as the shaman comes back to communicate what he or she has seen, Neo returns to the mundane.
Mysticism — and suspicion of material reality — lies at the heart of The Matrix.
Note that you don’t always need hallucinogens to invoke religious experience (many people do so through meditation alone, and sometimes it occurs spontaneously), but religious experience does tend to lay outside of standard sensory perception.
April 13th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
It takes a special kind of credulous stupidity to take a movie, especially a bad movie, as the basis of one’s philosophical thinking.
April 13th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
[and no, Slut, I'm not talking about you.]
April 13th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Movies are poor foundations for philosophies, BB. No one should make life choices because of an overwrought Keanu Reeves film. But even bad movies can have theme and illustrate much older philosophical or religious viewpoints.
April 15th, 2008 at 10:49 am
I don’t know that anyone’s using The Matrix as a belief-system foundation. I read the pills reference as merely a (fairly) common knowledge shorthand. Yes, Keanu has burrowed his way into our collective consciousness…
And I should know this for sure, but I think Marx was rifting off Plato’ Republic when it came to framing reality/experience as a construct.