What is DD7? DD7 is a cleaner. I know this because when I was about four or five years old, I was a big fan of the Saturday morning World Wide Wrestling Federation[1]matches that aired locally on WSBK T.V. 38. After the Wrestling matches, there was always this infomercial for the DD7 cleaner that for some reasons I usually watched the infomercial as well. During the infomercial, the company spokesperson would always do something like spill tomato juice on a carpet or nail polish on a sofa and then say “you can watch how DD7 can clean any stain, but you won’t believe your eyes.” There was always some different women who allegedly was a random house wife that would be watching this after questioning DD7’s effectiveness and turn to the spokesperson and say “ I really can’t believe what I just saw” while she had a look of pure wonderment on her face like god just reveled to her all of the worlds universal truths.[2] This infomercial was silly and most likely a borderline con, but in it we find a very important question “can you believe what your eyes just saw?”

            Write now I am typing on a key board. I can see the keyboard and feel it against my fingertips so I know it is there. Right? Right? What if my senses are for some reason not reliable? What if what I think I know to be true is actually false? What if someone or something else is controlling what I can actually see? What if god or some higher power (possibly a guy in an infomercial) showed me the true nature of the world? Would I want to revert back to my ignorance or face the true?

            These are the types of questions that are asked and in some cases answered in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”[3] and the Wachowski Brothers’ film The Matrix. In the following paragraphs, I will briefly summarize Plato’s Allegory and the Wachowski Brothers’ film, compare and contrast their messages, and finally state my own views of the issue at hand.

            In Plato’s Allegory we find Socrates talking to Plato’s brother Glaucon; Socrates starts off by asking Glaucon to compare the effects of education to a situation that he will describe. (Bowie p. 205) Socrates gives an extremely detailed analogy that involves prisoners in cave. I will not attempt to give all the details of the situation Plato describes, but touch upon the major aspects of the description. In the cave Plato describes, there are prisoners who are stuck facing the same wall who can only see shadows of artifacts and objects in front of them. Furthermore, they can hear voices but instead of thinking they are coming from behind them, the echo of the voice seems to be coming from the shadows they see. Thus, they believe that the shadows are real things. Eventually, a prisoner is freed and turns around to see the actual objects and the fire behind them, but assumes that these new objects where not true and then try to flee back to looking at the old shadows which he perceived to be true. Then, the prisoner is dragged completely out of the cave and forced to confront the sunlight and the world in it’s entirely. The prisoner after getting adjusted to the sunlight begins to realize that this is the true reality and pities those that are in the cave. However, when he travels back to the cave and tries to convince his fellow prisoners what he has seen, they assume he is crazy and the journey up has destroyed his eye sight and not worth taking. Socrates goes on to tell Glaucon that this is how the world is and that those who have seen the light or intelligent world would most likely nor longer be as concerned with earthly matters and hence perceived by everyone else to be mad.

            In The Matrix we first meet Thomas Anderson who also goes by the computer hacker name of Neo. Neo captured by a group of people led by a man named Morpheus who convinces him to swallow a red pill in order to find out the answer to a question that has been plaguing Neo, What is The Matrix? Neo learns that it is a few hundred years past the time he believed he was in and that there has been an ongoing war between human and computers with artificial intelligence. The machines have essentially won the war and are harvesting humans in order to use their bioelectrical energy and body heat to fuel the machines because the machines no longer have access to solar power after the humans scorched the sky during the war. In order to pacify the humans while they are being harvested, the machines have created The Matrix which is a computer simulation program based on the height of human civilization. [4]

            There are many parallels in the themes, imagery, and is some cases actual language used in the move The Matrix and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. While using the imagery  the cave, of Plato seems to be suggesting that humans are prisoners like those in the cave who because of a lack of education are “facing the wrong way” and as a result unable to see the world as it is. Instead, they believe a reality of shadows that is controlled by puppeteers. In the Matrix, humans are again prisoners who are unable to move and believing a reality of shadows (the simulation of the Matrix) that is being created for them by puppeteers ( in this case the puppeteers are the machines who are harvesting the humans. )

            Those are some of the broadest parallels between the 2 works. There are some that are even more specific. In Plato’s work, when the prisoner first has to look at the fire, Plato mentions that “his eyes would hurt.” This corresponds to when Neo is first unplugged from the Matrix and gets his first look at reality and instantly asks Morpheus “why do my eyes hurt?”

            Plato talks about having to drag the prisoner into the sunlight which would lead to physical pain as he was dragged along. This is similar to Neo who while wanting to know what the matrix is, does not find out for himself. Instead, he is captured and forced to out of the matrix ( or the cave) in a way where at times he is under great duress and experiences much physical pain. What all of this seems to be suggesting from both works is that in order to see the truth, one must be helped (or dragged) along by an educator. Furthermore, this process of being educated enough in order to see the truth will be a painful one.

            Now let’s get back to one of the broader if not the broadest theme that both works seem to expose. It is the idea that we can not trust what we see and are limited by our senses to a point where what is think to be true can easily be manipulated. In the Allegory of The Cave, the simplest of technology is used to manipulate the minds of the humans into believing a false reality, Bondage and puppets. In the Matrix, it is the extremely sophisticated technology of a complex computer program that achieves the same result. Both systems of manipulation seem to rely on the same principal that what humans can interpret as truth is tied to our senses.

            Some of the line of reasoning in the previous paragraphs has what I believe to be a fundamental logistical flaw. First I am going to focus with some logical problems in the allegory’s of The Cave and of The Matrix. One of these problems is what I like to call the second opinion principal. If 2 cars crash, and there are a thousand witnesses to the accident, and you interviewed all the witnesses to get a description of everything that happened, you would most likely get a thousand different responses. While humans are for the most part equipped with similar senses, we all perceive the world different. In addition, and even more importantly, humans seem to be self aware enough to understand that sometimes what their perception of reality is might be false or distorted in someway. When this is the case, many times people will look to get a second opinion. The classic example of this is an umpire that calls a ball fair, but is not entirely sure of what he saw and then consults with the other umpires who give their perspectives which cause him to change the call to foul.

            This has profound implications when it comes to the idea of The Cave or The Matrix. In those cases humans where not allowed to interact with each other. In our world that is not the case. There is an old Abe Lincoln quote that goes “you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” This is a cliché, but holds a lot of weight in terms of human history. In history, we have seen many times when there was uniformity of opinion, but that uniformity never holds. There are always dissenters and or people with opposing views who eventually come up and spread their ideas. This is similar to the idea of the Neo being “The One” in The Matrix or the idea of the prisoner who leaves the cave to see the light in Plato’s Allegory. The One or The Person that can see the light are examples of the dissenters that have existed though out history.

            The Matrix and Plato’s Allegory seem to argue that these types of people can only exist if they are dragged to see the true or as Plato puts it to be turned to face the right direction via education. On the other hand, we have established people seek second opinions to confirm what they see and we see people throughout history who search for truths in many realms of knowledge such as philosophy, math, and science. Many times this happens without someone having to be dragged painfully in search of better sight. Because there have consistently been Neo’s or people who have left the cave, I don’t believe society has ever been in a position long enough where the Matrix or Cave analogies can hold. Sure we are limited by our senses, but we understand this. That is why we constantly look for ways to confirm or disprove what we have experienced outside of our senses.

Works Cited

            Bowie, Lee. 21 Questions : An Introduction to Philosophy. Sixth edition.

Wadsworth. Belmont CA. 2007

            The Matrix  Dir. Wachowski, Andy & Larry. Warner Brothers. 1999