Red, Blue, or Third Pill?

The family left for an 8-month stay at our family home in Taiwan in the Spring of 2005. Being home-alone, it seems the next day, I rented The Matrix movies, popped a big batch of popcorn, and watched them non-stop. There have been many reviews, documentaries, and rips on the movies and recently it occurred to me that the Movies were speaking to us as the U.S. House of Representatives is voting this afternoon to repeal & replace The Obama Health Care Act. In this first scene, Neo meets Orpheus for the first time and is offered a choice between a blue or a red pill – “you take the blue pill the stories ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe, you take the red pill and stay in Wonderland and i show you how deep the rabbit hole goes…. Remember all I am offering is the truth – nothing more.” [thunder claps]. How is today’s House vote a choice between a Republican or a Democrat Pill?

Similarities can be extended as we come to see our current predicament like that of being trapped in the Matrix of the American led Global System and trying to get to the “Truth”. The computer Construct Program loads in and produces the realities that Orpheus’s team needs to fight the Matrix. Neo is shown that he has been living in a “dream world” created by the Matrix, when in fact he is living in the “desert of the real” – the World destroyed by war. Neo is confronted by the “truth” that the Matrix is designed to turn human energy into a Delco D battery. It is not a big jump to suggest Communism = Capitalism both have the same objective. When Neo accepts this job, the first thing he requests are guns, lots of guns – and the NRA is Johnny-on-the-spot.

Slavoj Zizek, however, is not satisfied with the choice given to Neo, he wants a Third Pill. What is Zizek’s Third Pill? He tells us:

The choice between the blue and the red pill is not really a choice between illusion and reality. Of course Matrix is a machine for fiction but these are fictions that already structure our reality. If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you lose reality itself.
I want a third pill and definitely it is not a transcendental pill which enables a fast-food religious experience but a pill that would enable me to perceive not the reality behind the illusion but the reality in illusion itself. If something gets too dramatic too violent and even too filled in with enjoyment it shatters the coordinates of our reality and we have to fictionalize it. In sexuality it is never me and my partner, or more partners whatever you are doing, there always has to be some fantasy element. There has to be some third imagined element, which enables me to engage in sexuality.
So why does The Matrix need our energy? I think the proper way to ask this question is to turn it around, not why does The Matrix need the energy?, but why does the energy need the Matrix? I think that the energy we are talking about is libido energy – our pleasure. Why does our libido need the virtual universe of fantasies? Why can’t we simple enjoy it directly? – a sexual partner and so on – that’s the fundamental question, why do we need this virtual supplement? Our libido needs an illusion in order to sustain itself.
Our fundamental delusion today is not to believe in what is only a fiction – today fiction is too seriously, it is on the contrary not to take fictions seriously enough. You think it is just a game, it is reality – it is more real than it appears to you. For example, people who play video games. They adopt a screen persona a sadist, rapist, whatever. The idea is that in reality I am a weak person so I can supplement my real life within this game by adopting a false image of a strong sexually promiscuous person. This would be the naive reading. I want to appear stronger in the game because in real life I am a weak person. But what if we read it in the opposite way? That this strong brutal rapist identity is my true self – this is the psychic truth of myself and that in real life because of social constraints and so on, I am not able to enact. So, because I only think it is a game, it is only a persona that I adopt in virtual space, I can be there much more truthfully. I can enact there an identify that is much closer to my true self.

In the above clip, we see just a 2-second clip from the Solaris movie. Here Zizek – Solaris deconstructs that movie. The logic and implications for the loss of Hillary Clinton’s Presidential effort is startling and will be fully explored later. For now, let us get it from the unconscious into consciousness. If you like, you can watch George Clooney in Solaris. We will unpack this but i am looking for you to begin… I have stated “Deconstructing American Deconstruction” essay and many of my past Trumpian posts add to this unfolding effort.

This last clip from Zizek addresses What is Ideology?, which is a clip from the documentary The pervert’s guide to Ideology. This clip shows the movie They Live, where John Nada is forcing his best friend to put on special glasses that allow one to see ideology, the Martix, the American cultural/economic system we live in. “The material force of ideology makes us effectively not see what i am eating,… We are already eating from this trash can, its name is national global capitalism.

Finally, something we can fall asleep to, however, The Philosophy and the Martix should produce a mental orgasm for you – it sure did for me!

Just finished the popcorn, time for a beer lunch at the Tailgate, and a nap before this afternoon’s U.S. House vote to see if we are truly Living in the end of times? sas