What's Wrong With Colour Blindness?

Colour blindness in the classroom is an exercise in taking standardisation and homogenisation to extremes that will never work, primarily because socio-cultural constructs and prejudices will always exist, everybody needs an identity, which their culture and race is a part of, and extremism does not work in practice, and is unhealthy.

One of the primary flaws in the idea of colour blindness in the current school environment is that, when deployed as a policy, whether it be institutional or casual or anything in between, it plays out, in practice, as a kind of polite and shallow appreciation of minority cultures, alongside a blanket ignorance of the dominant. Policies of colour blindness fail because they try to ‘level the playing field’ by truly levelling – that is, razing, it.

On this flattened field, students will play in the rubble, explore their identities, and new constructs will develop. The attitudes, human compulsions and social habits that created the constructs that colour blindness demolished are still present, and will exert themselves over the razed landscape. But these will be rudimentarily expressed in the image of the socio-cultural paradigms that stood, perhaps on the same spot, crafted from the debris strewn about, before the policy of colour blindness knocked it down.

Australia is a very 'multicultural' place. There are children and families from many hundreds of different racial and cultural backgrounds. The constructs that have developed have been stunted by the institutional red-tape-noose of colour blindness, and taken the form of a politically correct and shallow ‘appreciation’ of different foods and festivals. This does much to undermine appreciation and integration, for these reasons and because it is a primitive expression of othering. Children recognise different minority cultures but gain no knowledge or skills in integrating with them. They gain a measure of comfort with their own cultural/racial identity, because these ‘appreciation days’ construct rudimentary symbols to which they can attach. Pre-colour blindness, alongside the racial and cultural apartheids, there existed comparably well-developed opportunities for development of empathy and selfhood. These have now been lost.

The main group to suffer out there on the homogenously razed playing field are the ‘dominant’ culture. That is to say, the Anglo-European males; ‘white boys.’ Post-colour blindness, they are all too often assumed to not only have a well-established, healthy and mature culture, but also a similarly spiffy identity within, and understanding of, that culture. Which culture, by the way, does not need to be recognised because it is so dominant at the expense of all the others. White guilt, anyone? This is an assumption that is creating major developmental problems for these children, as nobody has thought to champion or craft a symbol for them to rally to, and neither actualises nor permits them to build one themselves. The Indigenous do, the Indians do, the Muslims, the Polynesians, the Christians, the Vietnamese, women, the GLBTQI and the rest, they at least have been given chance to build their symbols to identify with. However primitive such symbols may be - thanks to colour-blindness - they are better than nothing. All that the white children - boys in particular - have to identify with is ‘white trash.'

The Half-Baked Human Dream

We will always treat others the way we do and are willing to treat ourselves.

If you condemn someone who loses their marbles when they're weak, hurt, broken and/or pressured, then you will be condemned, and condemn yourself, for your own weakness, hurt, brokenness and/or pressured times.

I made this mistake myself very recently...I am very hard on myself, traditionally, giving my insecurities and weaknesses no mercy or quarter. I have however been fortunate enough to have learned from this, and taken every available opportunity to seek forgiveness and to make it right.

If you wait for a person who remains - or like to think they remain - unaffected by their difficulties, then all you are doing is waiting for a person who will remain unaffected by love, and so will not love you.

Calling anxiety 'head' and excitement 'heart' won’t make it any easier should the awful day come where one chooses to let their ‘head catch up to your heart.’ These two should always be in balance. Anxiety always goes against the natural flow and causes pain, no matter how it is dressed up.

Putting effort into – or caring about – the people who hurt you should only be taken so far, proportionate to the pain they have imposed on you. Even the strongest love for someone should not, because it can not, be extended to someone after they rip out your guts.

In doing so they give you the gift of showing plainly their regard for you and for themselves. There must come a point where your love must learn to become strong enough to wash your hands, accept, and feel sorry for what they have chosen to be.

Hope that love will win the day, that truth will win in the end, and all that, if that's what you want, but at this point, the only way that's ever going to happen is if you allow what is to be what it is. Even if it's the hardest thing you've ever had to do.

Pain teaches; wild adventure builds character.

This is the challenge, not the reward.

For we will always treat others the way we do and are willing to treat ourselves.

Just Love

Stay true to yourself against all odds and against allopposition.

Love yourself and extend that to the world around you.

Let yourself fall in love with everything.

Learn how to channel who you are through your excitement andnot your anxiety.

Be ever mindful of who you are and what you're doing, andwhy.

Explore how you react to things.

Allow what is to be what it is - it's that way for a reasonthat will serve you if you let it.

Know when to stand your ground, know when to step aside.

Live for and in the moment, for the moment is eternity.

Always go with the flow.

Never fight back.

Just love.

Negative Emotional Reactions

You can’t experience something that isn’t already a part of you. All emotion comes from belief. If you don’t have a belief about something then you don’t have an emotional reaction to it. By the same token, if you understood that other people’s behaviour is their choice, and until you make it so, has nothing to do with you, then it would be an observation, not a reaction. It’s on this level that you can ascertain that they are behaving in a negative way. If you choose to make it about you, and create an emotional reaction, that means you have a belief that something in what they are saying is, or might be, actually true about you, and you are afraid that it might be. You can’t have an emotional component about something that has nothing to do with you.

Mostly people are working through their own process, their own pain, and are trying to make you a reflection of what they think they need to see. Reacting emotionally will turn you into that twisted reflection of who you’re meant to be. If you can understand people on this level, that what is being said and done is in their domain, and fundamentally has more to do with them than you. Then you can listen to what they’re saying and decide whether or not, in whole or in part, to incorporate it into your own understanding of yourself or whether it really does have nothing to do with you. From there you can examine your own beliefs and fine-tune yourself, if you wish. Remember, all emotion comes from belief.

If you keep feeling bad, and/or reacting the same way, then you simply haven’t caught all the beliefs that need fine-tuning yet. So you need to keep digging, keep exploring yourself, to find all the reasons and core definitions that define why you continue choosing the same reaction.

This is the whole point to these experiences – and it’s not about the world around you changing, because it won’t. It’s about giving yourself opportunities to find out whether you have really changed…or not. The key is not what’s happening on the outside but how you respond differently to it, even if it looks the same. There will always be emotion. But they can all be observations - emotional responses. Nothing has to be fundamentally foreign, painful or something that doesn’t belong. You don’t have to look at it that way. You can welcome them as opportunities to grow and change and be more of who you are. They can be exciting, new, and wonderful.

What you put into it is what you get out of it. If you believe that people, places, things and experiences come into your life to give you something positive, then that’s all you can ever get from it, no matter what their intention is. And if you keep on finding the same people and things cross your path, it doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong, it just means you’re alive. Prove it to yourself by experiencing everything as positively as you can. Tip your hat to all those who can’t believe it’s you.

It Is What It Is: On Relationships

Relationships tend to start with a mixture of attractions originating from mind, body, and/or spirit. 'That' relationship is where you have all three and manage to fan them into a connection and mutual feelings. If you can explore these feelings and discover through open, clear and honest communication, how to continue moving more and more in that direction, then, well, absolutely smashing.

If you discover that there are no ways to move in that direction, then, well, don't. Yes you'll feel bad, but then, it is clear that the purpose of the relationship, at this moment, is to allow you personally to get in touch with the issues that have caused you to feel that way, and why you reacted that way at that time.

Then the relationship is serving its purpose, and serving you, by allowing you to get in touch with why you feel the way you feel, and integrate these concepts within yourself.

Then, who knows: as you interact with the relationship, using it for what it's there for, then it could also change, because once something serves its purpose, it no longer needs to stick around, and so it doesn't. Different kinds of things can then come up that can open doors that weren't even there before, simply because you were willing to let the relationship be what it was, and use it accordingly.

So many times, people find they get nowhere, going around in circles, going mad, letting their fear destroy what's good about their lives, or their 'head catching up with their heart,' because they are not willing to start with allowing the relationship to be what it is. Once they allow it to be what it is, many times it then changes automatically and they actually do wind up with what they originally thought they wanted.

It doesn't always work that way, but it doesn't matter that it doesn't. Because if you use the relationship for what it's for, then YOU will change, and attract to you, no matter who it is, whatever relationship is absolutely right for you at that moment. If you get in touch with this truth, then it won't matter who it is, because the relationship - and the person - will be totally right and appropriate at that moment. People don't belong to one another, we choose each other every day.

This is how these things 'work themselves out.' Everything aligned and everything in allowance automatically balances. Automatically feels correct and appropriate and right.

And of course, never forget that the most important relationship is the one you have with yourself.

Is This the Real Life?

"Open your eyes, look up to the skies, and see." - Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' 

Reality. Something we've never quite got our heads around. Some of us think we have it figured out. There are others who can't deal with it and go crazy. Or maybe it's the "insane" ones who have it figured, and the priests and scientists who are mad. What is reality?

One film I can't get enough of is Christopher Nolan's Inception. It tackles this concept with the perfect blend of conceptual vagueness, engaging complexity, and relentless hints of multi-faceted and infinite ambiguity (Johnson 2012) that are the closest to representing the best justice we can do to this topic.

For simplicity's sake, reality is 'existing.' Existing is like a rollercoaster at a theme park. It has twists, turns, thrills, chills, highs and lows, and it's very brightly coloured, and it's fun, for a while. But in the end it is just a ride. There is no inherent meaning, no blood on the wall, nothing outside what we can perceive. As Morpheus famously says in The Matrix (1999), "If real is just what we can see, taste, smell, and touch, then real is just electrical signals as interpreted by the brain." And there is no more accurate way to measure reality, to know that it is real.

This is the best we can do, but this is the real beauty of existing - our perceptions actually shape and create our reality. There really is only one moment, one continuum of creation, expressing itself subjectively in all the ways it possibly can - infinitely. Space, time, and physicality are our perceptions of them.

I remember a train trip my brother and I took. There was a man behind us engaged in a lively conversation with somebody named Roland, who neither my brother nor I could see. My brother murmured, "he's insane, there's nobody there!"

Very much as the caretaker in Yusuf's basement said of his dreaming charges, "who are you to tell them otherwise?" I remarked to my brother, "how do you know that Roland isn't real, and we're the crazy ones for our inability to see him?"

What you see and feel when you look at a painting will be very different from what I see and feel. I could use any number of adjectives to describe reality, but it can only come down to this: Reality is eternal, a gem of infinite beauty and facets, which we all appreciate in our own way according to our choices.

There are therefore only four laws in the entire universe.

1. You exist. As Descartes put it, 'Cogito, ergo sum.' - I think therefore I exist.

2. What you put out is what you get back. Whatever else this reality is, it is definitely causal. Credit to The Matrix's Merovingian for reminding us all. The continuum of creation that is reality is a consequence of the choices that the participant makes.

3. The one is all, and all are one. If you exist, then you are relationally attached to everything else.

4. There are no rules, except for the first three.

The reason you can't will a million dollars into your bank account is that you perceive it is a more preferable choice for you not to do what you need to do to get the money (Robinson 2009). In effect, you signed up for the specific way these rules meshed together on planet earth, and if you want something more than you want what you currently have, then you'd make it so.

Perceiving is believing. Believing is seeing, not the other way around. Let's stop blaming God, the government, the 'system,' our pasts, our weaknesses, etc. for what we have. For what we are. For all we can taste, smell, touch, see, hear, and love.

These are truly the things that matter the most. The faculties of our belief, the tools with which we craft and create and perfect our dreams, right now. Especially the last one - it is the pinnacle of existing, the sublime idea that makes reality reality. It is what Cobb risked everything for (Johnson 2012), what his journey was always about. As much as I hate Saviors, it is what made Neo sacrifice himself. It is, I believe, what makes the world go round. And who are you to tell me otherwise?

References

Descartes, R. (2003). Selections from Principles of Philosophy. [Project Gutenberg E-book version]. Retrieved from <http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1455678>

Johnson, K. J. (Ed.). (2012). Inception and Philosophy: Because it's Never Just a Dream. John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey.

Robinson, K. (2009). The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. Viking Penguin, New York.

Wachowski, A. & Wachowski, L. (Directors & Writers). (1999). The Matrix [DVD Movie]. Warner Brothers.

Zizek, S. (1999). The Matrix, or Two Sides of Perversion. Philosophy Today, 43. <http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-matrix-or-two-sides-of-perversion/>

Pictures obtained from:
http://www.moviefanatic.com/gallery/ellen-page-as-ariadne/
http://www.crystalinks.com/Inception.html 
http://youcantgettherefromhere-theresa.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/public-eye-roller-coaster.html
http://tribework.blogspot.com.au/2011/11/intoxicated-in-your-love.html
http://www.maxisciences.com/cosmos/wallpaper

The Search for Enlightenment: Buddha, You're Doing it Wrong.

Siddartha Buddha's birth myth has a lot in common with most other messianic figures, in that it involves a creative avoidance of the necessary involvement of reproduction and any reference to the vagina, as if there were something wrong with it, or with women altogether. What is it that compels the mythmakers to remove the prerequisites and mystify, devalue and idealise women in this way?

What's more, Buddha's mother died a week after his birth, after having her son crawl out from her side. At least they make some kind of attempt to be realistic, although with a hole clean through you, I can't imagine surviving *that* long.

Such a loss in the formative years tends to change one's perspective. I am one of these, as are many of the people I identify with the most. Jasmine is one of them, too. I'm not hesitant to declare my respect and regard for her. There's a depth of wisdom and beauty to such people, I say. An instinctive hunger for the truth that lies beneath the surface. A unique perspective.

So why, then, was Siddartha Buddha a spoiled dandy palace brat until he was 29? He had every pleasure in the world right there for the taking - food, drink, music, comfort, and of course, as many girls as his tongue could cope with. It's kind of understandable really, I suppose - who would say no? Right?

Siddartha seems to have shown no consideration for anything else, instead gorging himself on everything and everyone that his various body parts could handle. Whatever makes you happy, right?

Until you have responsibility. Buddha married and had a son. At this time, as his wife was nursing this baby boy, he decided to grow up just enough to open his eyes a bit. Only a bit, though this has nothing at all to do with the fact that he was Asian.

And it was this eye opening experience - leaving the palace he noticed that there were sick, starving, poor and dying people in the world beyond his own. Probably not realising that they strained themselves so to provide him with his life of comfort, he instead took away from this experience a keen awareness of the inevitability of suffering and (primarily his own) death. Like I said, only opened his eyes a bit. And what, then, did he do with this experience?

He abandoned his baby and his wife. What the hell. Most religious creeds are built on a fundamentally immature reaction to the realisation that death comes for us all. In the words of comedian Dylan Moran - "Religion is just a formalised panic about death; quick, death is coming, put on the gold hat!"

If gold hats are irresponsible, empty and stupid, then what Buddha did is detestable. He then went on to do even worse: trying to find the path to 'Nirvana' - that is, the way to transcend the painful realities of life and death and suffering, to find peace. Double what the hell. This just goes from bad to worse! This only works if you're say, me; I never tried to get anywhere in life by abandoning my family or ditching my responsibilities or the ones I loved.

He then spent the rest of his life teaching others to try and meditate, pray, rationalise and otherwise wank away the pain they themselves created by being alive and therefore responsible for their choices.

Triple what the hell.

It seems to me that everything he did and taught is undermined because they are all attempts made by him to live with the fact that he never manned up and went home.

And as if this were not bad enough, his ideas caught on in a major way. A religious way...for millions and millions of people. But to me, Siddartha Buddha will never be more than a clusterfuck of pseudo-philosophical cowardly cop-outs; excuses for having been a total bastard and abandoning his wife and his son.

Humankind's Talents.

Human beings are very good at, among a select few others, three things: first, making so much noise that we confuse ourselves. Second, breeding uncontrollably. Third, an alarming inability to learn from the past. These attitudes are threatening to seal our fate - our extinction, according to many. Why? There are too many of us for the planet to support, and some of us are hoarding all the resources at the expense of the rest.

Population has exploded in the past not-quite-a-century. As seen in figure 1, this is unprecedented and enormous, but next to nobody is acting like it. In the 1700's, English economist Thomas Malthus observed that population patterns conform to the available resources - both human and natural. He was a critic of the poor laws and work-houses that were springing up in his home country, which earned him the brand of an immoral heretic, even though he was right. About both. Today, human resources have developed into behaviours such as the misguided cheap charitable impulses that Malthus condemned, and galvanisation of empathy and the 'alien other' into market-state patriotic apartheids. Humanity's other characteristics are an embarassing promiscuous inability to not think before making more of us, and our ingenuity resulting in technological petro-chemical enhancements to everything, in particular, medicine and agriculture. These have resulted in a massive population surge.

Like Malthus, modern minds such as Slavoj Zizek and William Shockley, the man who gave us the transistor, have come under fire for criticising humankind's propensity to generate such self-confusing noise (such as the 'climate change crusade' and capitalism 'with a human face'), to breed uncontrollably, all-consumingly, and to not learn from our mistakes.

Keeping the poor alive helps them in the same way as a slave owner helped his slaves by being nice to them. The situation is merely aggravated and prevented from being changed to make such evils a thing of the past. The shrill and obscene crusade surrounding climate change is also similarly misguided and self-sabotaging, since most of the noise there ignores most of the important facts about our impact on the planet, our home, whilst providing a 'moral' justification (to replace the old imperial and colonial excuses) for stealing the resources of the developing world, particularly Africa. This is all noise and it, along with all the other ideological cheap substitutes for truth that we are so good at finding, is inequitable, confusing, destructive and immoral.

Much closer to the truth is realistic and responsible measures like those employed by China, and realistic and responsible minds like Ronald Wright. China's policies have seen a marked drop in their population growth, with an increase in their quality of life. Ironically, when one looks at China's energy consumption per capita, they use dramatically less than the U.S.A., Canada, Norway, Australia, the European Union, etc. Why has China been so successful at its policies but others can't succeed comparatively well in managing their energy use? China's population control policies are relatively successful experiments and examples to the rest of the world, in terms of the direction it should be heading.

This still, however, comes at the direct expense of the Earth's ability to feed us all, as per Jeremy Rifkin's empathy/entropy paradox. Recognising such hard truths as we are the Earth's emphysema (in deforesting 20% of the Amazon, the lungs of the Earth), and the morbid obesity (rendering 1% per year of Earth's arable land barren in the last three decades). We are 1% of her biomass, but consume over 26% of all photosynthesis. This is ridiculous. Not to mention the fossil fuels we used to become so will run out. I'll say that again - they will run out. We will soon, if we have not already, hit world peak oil production and peak oil per capita. The problem of population is not just one for the developing world. It threatens us all. We have, in the words of Ronald Wright, built our own suicide machine.

To fix this problem we first need to fix our attitudes that we apply to it. We need to agree to focus on equity and justice; on responsibility and truth; on education and empathy. And then act accordingly, by repairing the damage to both people and environment - we have the technology for that, let's find the drive. We need to live off Earth's interest, not her capital, and we need to do it equitably and sustainably. 7 billion people is not sustainable, and having the top 1-ish billion hoard everything is not equitable. These two are related to each other very closely. Social and environmental justice, perhaps. We need to keep it in our pants for a little while and take some time to cut through the confusion, and learn from our mistakes. We're not likely to get another chance.

You think plugging a ponytail into an animal is cool?

I watched James Cameron's Avatar movie the other day - it's pretty good, everyone agrees, full of big blue nobly savage people fighting the greedy little pinkskins who killed their own mother, and are now coming after the blue folks' mum. I had three major thoughts as the credits rolled, other than how much cooler Stephen Lang was in Terra Nova.

Firstly, that plugging their hair into animals was so tangible, so...real!

Secondly, how cool would it be if we could do something so tangible in our own attitudes and relationship with ecology?

Annnd third, the real onion, is why they put this in there. There are several possible reasons and all of them are disturbing and annoying. What are people going to think about why we can't? How is skipping symbolism and throwing a tangible middle finger in people's faces going to encourage them *not* to 'kill our mother...' and for that matter we are not even killing the Earth! We're ruining our ability to live on it, sure, but she was here long before we came, and will recover and endure long after we go.

Screw Avatar. Anaesthetic mass-marketed disillusioning lie.

You think plugging a ponytail into an animal is cool? No, it's not. What is cool is that we can achieve far more, in a far less outlandish and dream-like way, in a far less outlandish and dream-like place - our own home. We have to stop anaesthetising ourselves with this bullshit, and figure out our own responsibility, ability, and strength.

There is no Spoon

For Jessie Brownlow - Reminding me why I plug in and how to unplug since 2011 (:

The Matrix has been a formative influence upon me since its release in 1999. It is alive with action, cinematographic genius, and my favourite literal, metaphorical, symbolic, and philosophical ‘coffin nail’ truths about the condition of the human race. Written by the Wachowskis, who later helped kick-start the Anonymous movement in their role as writers in V for Vendetta. Remember the Guy Fawkes masks?

Neither widely accepted nor publically expressed is my own view of philosophy underpinning The Matrix, which is that it provides allegory of our hyper-commercialist, media-disillusioned, impotent and world-destroying experience of reality, showcasing our ‘varying grotesqueries,’ in the words of the film’s The Architect, in all their disgusting glory.

The film had three glaring flaws which stand out like so many sore thumbs. First, the casting of Keanu Reeves as Neo. While he made what was to many a welcome change from Rambo-esque heroes, Reeves attracted increasing criticism as time, and the sequels, passed. George Ouzounian remarks:

‘(He should have been replaced) with a wooden plank with a mean face on it. The subtle point here is the mean face: without it, Reeves would be on par with a wooden plank, except a bit more rigid. He approaches every scene with the steadfast determination of a moron running into a wall.’

Second, the film’s overburdening with vague and condescending ramblings; a smorgasbord of philosophic hair clippings that I found insulting. It bores a hole through the introductory precepts of every paradigm of eastern thought and western philosophy – from causality to duality; Keanu’s backside to purpose; to ‘Christological Symbology,’ whatever that is; to destiny to choice to everything and nothing, all with the depth and dignity of two drunk college freshmen in a dorm room debating apartheid. That being said, the experience of Slavoj Zizek must also be considered:

‘When I saw The Matrix…I had the unique opportunity of sitting close to the ideal spectator of the film - namely, to an idiot. A man in the late 20ies (sic) at my right was so immersed in the film that he all the time disturbed other spectators with loud exclamations, like "My God, wow, so there is no reality!"... I definitely prefer such naive immersion to the…intellectualist readings which project into the film the refined philosophical…distinctions.’

It must be credited for its success in making such concepts accessible to the wider audience. The levels of meaning and communication alter ‘like a jewel in the light’ depending on the viewer. The third sore point about this film is the dialogue. It grows repetitive and annoying very quickly. George Ouzounian comments:

 ‘(It) is tacky, not unlike a pregnant woman in a bathing suit (unless you are turned on by that sort of thing, in which case you might find the dialogue strangely erotic.’ 

In my opinion the most important aspect of the films is Agent Smith. As he is set free from his role in the system, by the ‘saviour,’ Neo, ironically, he is thus unhinged from his purpose. The speech, found in appendix a, embodies his hatred of humanity. He delivers it to Morpheus in the first film, and when he is ‘set free’, becomes the only thing Smith takes with him. His first lesson to us is that he is the manifestation of both the system we exist within. The second is his embodiment of frustrated potential and stymied purpose. William Blake says “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” The third and penultimate lesson in Smith is that despite warnings blaring across all temporal, cultural, technological and spatial barriers, we are collectively rushing to our own demise. We may indeed be the plague, the virus, the cancer, of this planet, and so had better start taking responsibility and exploring this conundrum. Smith is at first an agent of the mind-enslaving system who hates the inhabitants and their propensity to consume and destroy everything. He eventually becomes the system itself, and finally becomes that which he hates, consuming and destroying everything. He is thus an almost literal representation of the current state of humankind within the system we inhabit, which are together becoming an insurmountable obstacle. The experience of such is the one positive condition for humanity.

We live in an existential, apathetic vacuum to The Matrix’s literal vacuum. Our survival as a species may depend on our ability to ‘resist’ our way out of our quagmire of apathetic disavowal, resist our urge to indulge in it. Reality is that which chooses to resist. We can and must resist, because the current system is a suicide machine, as Smith became in the end. 

Why are the too-human Oracle and the too-robotic Neo obsessed with choice? Because choice is the great determiner, of the utmost importance in this process. Choice, represented crudely by pills blue and red, is the beginning of the lucid understanding we require to define ourselves and our systems, and what they are becoming. We are at the proverbial fork in the road, the blue pill or the red. The stakes are as high as what Smith would have for us, and as low as something more bleak indeed than being enslaved and fed delusions of capitalist utopia by machines.

Smith’s burning hatred is the world-destroying fire of causality that will win in the end. The burning of the world is thus the consequence of these, our actions, with which we hurl ourselves like a bullet into the conflagration. It will happen eventually, and it is here that the parable of The Matrix makes an unforgivable omission – or commits its greatest sin. It champions choice and our own strength, combined with haunting reminders as to what will happen if we do not. But viewers are in the next moment robbed of the opportunity tomake choice or be strong, by pinning everything on Neo, and inexplicable hope and faith in him. That, in the words of Serenity’s Mal Reynolds, ‘is a long long wait for a train don’t come.’ It is up to us to save ourselves, from ourselves, before it is too late. Not Neo. There is no Saviour. Only causality. Only the pills and only Smith. At least the likes of Anonymous are stealing timid glances at these truths through the eye-slits of their Guy Fawkes masks. Why, oh why, don’t we even look at the pills?