Religion Is the Red Pill

The popular opinion on the film “The Matrix,” is surely that it is a bit of wild speculative fiction; an acid trip. 

Actually, though, its essential thesis, that the world as it appears to us is purely an illusion, is one of the oldest and most basic insights known to man.

This is Plato’s cave: the physical and social world is no more than the shadows of puppets cast on dark cavern walls. The real is elsewhere.

This is also the basic insight of Buddhism, or of Hinduism: nothing in the physical or the social world is real. It is all a dream of Vishnu, asleep on the cosmic sea; or it is a delusion caused by desire. In Taoism, Chuang Tsu awoke from a dream of being a butterfly, and asked: “How do I know whether I am Chuang Tsu, who dreamt I was a butterfly, or a butterfly who is dreaming I am Chuang Tsu?”

Christianity and Judaism partly depart from this ancestral consensus by accepting that the physical world, at least, is real. It, after all, is created by God; and God would not deceive. They continue, however, to maintain that the social consensus is false. The social reality, after all, is created by man. God himself appears on Earth--and is put to death by the social authorities and the popular consensus as a common criminal. The social is opposed to the true; only the narrow gate leads to the kingdom of heaven.

In Judaism, the matter is less emphatic. Nevertheless, formulaically, the prophets, who speak for God and truth, are driven into the wilderness. In Kabbalah, the physical world as well is seen as a series of shells concealing the shekhinah, the divine glory: like Shelley’s “painted veil, that those who live call life.”

Islam is the one major faith that seems to lack this core insight, that the social world falsifies the real world. Muhammed is called a prophet, but he differs utterly from the Biblical prophets in being a ruler and presented as the ultimate moral authority: his kingdom is very much of this world. Granted that David or Solomon in the Bible were also rulers—they were also shown as deeply morally flawed, and confessed to this. Within Islam, Sufism preserves the essential insight that the visible and social world is not real; but Sufism is a minority tradition. This, to my mind, is an insurmountable flaw in Islam, and leads to all the problems of “political Islam.”

Take the social as the real, as authority for truth, as political Islam does, and you inevitably get mass murder; Satan is the ruler of this world, and Satan is thereby in command. You get Nazism, Marxism, Jonestown, and similar movements.

This, of course, is exactly what we are doing currently with postmodernism. Postmodernism holds, in so many words, that “reality is a social construct.” No statement could be more false, poisonous or supportive of the Matrix.