Things I Heard While Listening to Morpheus

I have recently thought extensively regarding the idea of worldview and the connections between this idea and the extremely important film The Matrix. Before I make some of these connections allow me to first explain what I mean when I say worldview. A person's worldview could be defined as one's underlying assumptions about life which determines the comprehensive framework of one’s basic belief about "things." In this definition "things" is defined in the broadest sense. It includes the world, human life in general, the meaning of suffering, the value of education, social morality, and the importance of family, etc. Even God could be included in these “things” (Wolters).

The reality is that many people in our world live without the knowledge that humans have a worldview often because we are so sunken into the everydayness of life that we do not step back and reflect on such things. However, we all have a worldview and we show it every time we respond to everyday issues like abortion, capital punishment, pacifism, communism, or homosexuality because our worldview determines our reaction to all of these issues and many more. We are being informed regarding all of these subjects and others without knowing it. We are being stimulated by a matrix of ideas. These ideas are in the air we breath. We cannot see them but we take them in and we unknowingly use them as a lense to see the world and to discern truth. If you look for them you can see these ideas when "you turn on your television, you can feel them when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes."

Morpheus, however, is correct again when he says that no one can be told what the matrix is we can only experience it for ourselves. This is why the college years are so crucial for young people. The university is the first place where most young people are exposed to other ideas besides the one's that are fed to them in their often sheltered upbringings. I am not using sheltered in the way we normally think of it as protected by parental figures from the "real world." Everyone is exposed to the world in some fashion, but the fact is that most people are only exposed to one view of the world and hence have a tidy, simple perspective on a world that is infinitely nuanced and complex.

It is at college where some of us are disconnected from our home (just as Neo was disconnected from the Matrix) and are introduced to professors who are no longer giving us the neat and tidy textbook version of history. Likewise, The philosophy course we may take shows us many alternative life philosophies and presents them in a light where all of them seem equally valid. College is often the place where a young person is shown, often for the first time, many opposing, but valid, worldviews and thus realizes that he or she has a worldview. Often we must see parts of a worldview in someone else in order to clarify our own. It is the free exchange of ideas combined with the the diversity of a college campus and the distance from all that has been familiar to us that join forces to ultimately pull us from the matrix. The fact is that, “Sometimes we simply encounter someone, or some new experience or idea, that calls into question things as we have perceived them, or as they were taught to us. Or as we have read, heard or assumed. This kind of experience can suddenly rip into the fabric of life, or it may slowly yet just as surely unravel the meanings that have served as the home for the soul” (Parks.)

However, higher education is not the only call to leave the matrix, nor is it a guaranteed ticket to a new life of the mind. No matter where we are or what we are doing we must make the choice, just as Neo chose the red pill, so must we call into question our taken for granted reality and seek out our own underlying perceptions regarding the world and our place in it.