I was rewatching Matrix yesterday. Among others, this movie and its sequels have a prominent place in my Science Fiction video collection. This time around, what caught my attention was when Agent Smith, the main antagonist of the movie, was interrogating Morpheus, one of the main protagonists, and he was telling him about the first incarnation of the titular Matrix itself.
For those not in the know, within the movie, the "matrix" is a massively multiplayer virtual reality system to which all human beings are connected from birth. Human beings in this dystopian future are grown by machines and implanted with cybernetics so that their brains are linked to the matrix from gestation onwards. The machines do this to use the electrical energy produced by the human body as a power source after all other power sources were destroyed. The human beings connected to the matrix are completely unaware of any of this. They are born, age, live their lives, and die thinking that it is the late nineties. They go to school, go to work, pay taxes, raise families, and retire all blissfully ignorant of what the reality of the situation is. The main protagonists of the movie are those humans who have been disconnected from the matrix and who are trying to free others from it as well. The whole scenario is very much a modern take on Plato's allegory of the cave, and an intentional one at that.
As horrifying as the reality of this world appears, the machines were not intentionally cruel to those human beings they grew as Agent Smith, himself a machine program, explains. The first incarnation of the matrix, he tells us, was meant to be a utopian paradise for humans to experience where no one was unhappy or in need of anything. He then tells us that it was a failure. Whole fields of human beings were lost. Millions dead. Why? Because the human mind couldn't accept the program. It couldn't accept that everything could be perfect. As a result, the machines recalculated and tried again. This time, the world they created was a representation of what they considered to be the height of human civilization, an urban landscape in the late nineties. Imperfect, but the best possible situation the human mind would accept without danger of rejection.
The reason why the machines in the movie are the antagonists and the humans trying to free those still connected are the protagonists is because the machines demand absolute control over the human beings, and those who do not submit to their control are considered a threat which must be eliminated.
There sometimes occurs the question as to why God, if He is all good and all powerful, does not just fix everyone and everything in the world. As I was thinking about this short piece of dialogue, it came to me that He would be no better than those machines if He did. If He just simply rewrote everything to where it would be a utopian paradise, and forced everyone into it, it would be just as artificial and untenable as the matrix.
God respects our free will more than that. He does not hide reality from us, but shows it to us both about the world and about ourselves in all its ugly glory, and He lets us make our own choices as to how to respond. If there is a matrix-like fictional reality in existence, it is one which the collective human mind has created for itself to protect itself from a reality it does not want to face. Human beings want to bury our heads in a fictional world of our own creation rather than face the reality God shows us. The hardest, ugliest truth about the reality we live in which we do not want to face is that we ourselves, human beings collectively, are the architects of the problems we face, and not Him. Our failures and our selfish actions are what has brought the world to the brink of catastrophe in which it finds itself.
Yes, God has the power to just make a paradaisical utopia right here and right now and ignore the consequences of our actions, but it wouldn't be the truth. And because it wouldn't be the truth, it wouldn't be who He is.
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