Nineteen-ninety-nine was a great year! Not only was it the last year of the twentieth-century, but it marked the theatrical release of the Wachowski brother 's, The Matrix. The movie constantly rolls around the interior of my head whenever the question of reality comes up. A very memorable, and important, scene has Thomas Anderson, better known as Neo, having The Matrix explained to him by his soon-to-be mentor, Morpheus.
Morpheus: Do you want to know what IT is? The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over
…show more content…
Plato writes in Book VII of The Republic, prisoners within a cave, and this is represented in modernity by The Matrix. The narrator of the The Republic is Socrates. He begins Book VII by describing the place in which the prisoners inhabit. They are kept chained up like some sort of rabid creature(maybe make creature plural so as to fit with "they" at the beg of the sen); "...their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads."1(cite) They are completely immobilized, and have been since childhood. There is a slit in the wall behind them and outside, in what we would recognize as the "real world," there is a path that people walk along at nearly all times of the day. Between the prisoners and the wall, there is(make sure it is present tense for the description of the cave) a fire; this fire serves no purpose other than to cast shadows from those outside on to the interior wall in front of the captives. Socrates likens the wall "...like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets."(cite) To the prisoners, what they see is(emphasis) reality, it is their reality. Socrates goes on to describe what would likely happen if one of the prisoners were to be freed from the depths of the cave. "... he will suffer sharp pains: the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the