The article Red Pill or Blue Pill: Is Ignorance Bliss? Christine Cornell and Patrick Malcolmson show the comparison between Neo, the protagonist of The Matrix movie, and Alice, the little girl of wonderland, taking as a reference their strange experiences in a new world which is like a dream where both are confused about what is real, an example could be when in the story of Alice, the caterpillar asked her about who are you? And she just answer - “At least I know who I was when I got up this morning”, showing us the magnitude of the confusion that she has in that place. That kind of feeling is completely comprensible after experiment the changes of her body in gigantic and ridiculous proportions because of the cake and the magic drink she ingested. The same thing happened with Neo on the Matrix, when he makes the decision to ingest the red pill in order to acquire the knowledge and he found a strange reality, kind impossible to understand and of course to face. He felt confuse and was believing that the Matrix world was a kind of dream because it gave to him the possibility to do such impossible things which in real life are completely ridiculous just to imagine it; Like fly or jump between two skyscrapers.
Cornel and Malcolmson also compare The Matrix with the famous account given by Socrates through of the Plato’s The Republic book "The allegory of the cave", because Neo awaking parallels as the slave who leave the cave and found the real world, and living a painful experience; The slave as Neo, felt eyes hurt because they had never used them before, even though both stories are talking about different type of light that open their eyes, the situations is kind similar because the light is the representation of a knowledge acquired due to the exploration of a new view. Those stories do not run far of the reality; because most of the people are looking go away of the ignorance, with different type of explorations, since mental such as the philosophy to physical with the anthropology and anthropology, but as in the reality also there are people who are not agree or comfortable with the reality and prefers to remain in the cave with shadows and illusions pretending avoid the real, and intend to persuade people who are following the idea to find the true, to quit and still in them.
I'm talking about Cypher, who is the traitor of the Mopheus' crew and was disappointed about the real world and decide to do something to go back to live in the illusion of matrix. Not everyone is able to understand the real meaning of the knowledge and what kind of the benefits could carry, as him who prefers to live in a unreal world and name the imaginary things the real bliss.
Back to the question: Is Ignorance Bliss? I think not, because when you get the knowledge you are able to find a way to walk and cross the road. There is not an endless rabbit hole, always there is an exit that peoples would find to expand their ideas and create doors which will be wide open to improve the knowledge and avoid chose the option of quit as Cypher.
Hahaha... I know that there was nothing funny with your post. But, my realization made me laugh. You see, I am a proponent of blue pills (e.g. erection pills). So when I was scouring the blogosphere, I always came across this blue pill VS red pill, but on some other blogs, there was not a lot of content that you can read to get a better feel of what the topic is all about.
ReplyDeleteI like your blog because it is interesting and very informative. I can feel that you are a wide reader. You have definitely piqued my interest in this book.
More power!