Get My Brain Out of that Vat!

Plato is no doubt rolling over in his cave.

I have never seen The Matrix. But the basic idea behind the movie seems to have resonated at least on the right: that what we take to be reality is a vast simulation. Everyone talks now of “red pills.”

How do we know we are not living in a vast simulation?

Elon Musk argues that this is probably the case. Here’s his argument, as I recall it:

We can predict that soon our own computer-generated simulations, our virtual reality, will be impossible to distinguish from the physical world. Not to mention our robots and NPCs passing the Turing test.

Now, assume there are alien civilizations, and that technological progress is inevitable over time. Some will surely have advanced beyond ourselves, and will therefore be beyond this point. It seems unlikely we would turn out to be the most advanced in the universe. So they will have already made such virtual realities. So we may be characters in them.

As a matter of fact, absent the aliens, most of the world has always believed this—that the physical world is a simulation. All Buddhists and Hindus believe this. They call it “maya”: “illusion.” Taoists agree. This is what Neoplatonists believed in the West—this world is Plato’s Cave. This is what North American Indians believed before they became Christian—making the idea that they were especially concerned with “nature” and “the environment” the opposite of the truth.

One Hindu concept of the cosmos is Shiva as "Lord of the Dance." What we take for the physical, substantial, world is his deceptive movements to draw our attention first here, then there.

Why don’t Christians and Jews believe it?

One word: God.

As Descartes, for one, explained, if God created this universe, being all-good, he is not going to play any tricks. A clear perception will be a warrant for truth. Hence we end up with things like empirical science.

If you do not believe in a personal God, it all falls apart. You do not know.

But there is a second, lesser sort of Matrix in which we Christians are aware that live. The gospel warns us that the Devil is the lord of “this world.” Earthly power is in his gift, as in the third temptation of Christ. And the Devil is the “father of lies.”

In other words, there is a real matrix when it comes to social opinions—the realm of earthly social power. The realm controlled by the scribes and the Pharisees.

We have already referred to one example: the common belief that the North American Indians had a special concern for nature and the ecology. Utter bollocks, and everyone believes it.

There are many social myths—Francis Bacon called them “idols of the tribe”—which we take as certain truth, which are perfectly false, but serve somebody’s purposes. Such myths can be the glue that holds society together.

No, not that Francis Bacon.

These social truths, matters of “common knowledge,” do not come from God, unless, perhaps, they are from the Bible, and the Bible is his revelation, but are invented by men and women. As it happens, men and women do often have selfish interests and ulterior motives.

I find this is a reliable general rule, a rule for life: when referring to some social or psychological as opposed to purely physical affair, if “everyone” thinks something is so, it is not so.

You might think that this is a matter of general ignorance, and improves with education. Some things, after all, are not obvious, but must be learned. I find the opposite: the better educated someone is, at least in our society, the more likely they are to believe things that are obviously false. “Urban legends” seem to thrive in the academy as though this is their natural medium of transmission.

Freudian and Marxist ideas, for example, which were long ago debunked as science, not only survive but are absolutely unquestioned in the universities, at least outside the psychology or the economics deparments; scientism, the naïve faith that science can explain everything; the dogmatic faith in a series of increasingly dubious assumptions that is global warming; feminism, which became beyond question without having ever been properly debated on its merits; the dogma that homosexuality is innate; and now the doctrine that one’s sex is not, and can be changed at will. The list is very long. It is likely I too still hold some such beliefs, which I have not yet discovered to be either wrong or entirely unsubstantiated. I have spent a lot of years in the academy.

To be educated currently seems to mean to be either vetted for or indoctrinated into the matrix. Perhaps it was always so, but it seems to be coming to a head. There is, as many have noted, an alarming conformity in academic thinking now.

There is also a powerful force now operating in the opposite direction: the Internet. The matrix works on information being restricted and controlled, managed and crafted. The internet makes information unbridled and free.

The two trends may be related. This may be exactly why there is such a growing demand for conformity, and a rapid expansion of the number of points on which one must conform. It all smacks of desperation. It may be because the fabric is visibly fraying, and the gears and pulleys are beginning to show through.

What really happened to Jeffrey Epstein? What really happened in Benghazi? What is the real story of Hillary Clinton’s emails? Why is everyone coalescing so suddenly behind Joe Biden? Why the apparent coordinated suppression of the candidacy of Tulsi Gabbard?

It is easy to see that as lot is going on behind the scenes, even if we cannot know what.

All this only in the sphere of politics. That’s just the tip of an iceberg bigger than the one that took out the Titanic. There are far stranger things happening in the professions.

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

An obvious and trivial example of an apparent reaction to the threat of the Internet is the inevitable insistence by teachers and librarians that you must not use Wikipedia as a reference. Actual studies have shown that Wikipedia is more trustworthy than Britannica or other “expert” sources. But it is beyond professional control.

More blatant is the growing tsunami of “deplatforming.” A commentator begins to draw an audience, starts to say something interesting, and suddenly he is gone. Especially on the right, of course, but even, now, Chris Matthews. It seems he was too inclined to speak for himself. He was not sufficiently under someone’s control. He had become an unacceptable risk.

A yet more striking current example is the sudden cancellation of Woody Allen’s new autobiography by Hachette; only a few days after publication was announced.

Perhaps the reader does not know that the charges of pedophilia against Allen have been aired in court, twice, and twice dismissed. That information, it almost seems, has been systematically suppressed.

Yet he is now not to be allowed the right to speak in his own defense. The public must not know his side of it. For some reason, he is a risk.

I had my own experience, with a Canadian online magazine, Convivium. They just loved a piece I had written about the Irish churches of Ontario, and had it slated for publication.

Then they realized I had written Playing the Indian Card. I have good reason to believe that they had never read it. Nevertheless, simply the idea that I had written something saying “everything you think you know about Canada’s ‘First Nations’ is wrong,” was enough to make them drop the piece. They made no bones about this being why. Any serious examination of the history of Canada’s relationship with its “indigenous people” was enough to mark me as too dangerous to be associated with. Even though the piece I had submitted to them was on an entirely unrelated subject.

The atmosphere of suppression, the actual blacklisting, is now far worse than anything in the McCarthy era.

Perhaps, if you are interested, you should buy the book now, while it is still available.

I suspect our descendants will not recall us fondly. I suspect that we will one day appear in the history books in more or less the same light as the Spanish Inquisition, or the witchburnings, or even the Fascists and Nazis.

The good news is that it seems certain the whole current matrix has become so fragile it is unlikely to last must longer.