The Morality of The Matrix

Neo, Trinity and Morpheus were mass murderers.

This realisation came to me as I re-watched The Matrix recently. It’s still a fine film, no doubt, which stands the test of time. Slick, stylish, philosophically intriguing, with some fantastic set-piece action pieces. I still recall the feeling I had in 1999 after seeing it for the first time at the movies – I injured my groin trying to do a running jump-kick off the wall of an alley just outside the cinema.

The two sequels, of course, were an abomination; so bad they threatened to retrospectively drag the first film down with them into a noxious pit filled with a thesaurus-chewing Colonel Sanders impersonator, a bunch of undergraduate philosophers arguing about post-modernism, and Monica Bellucci’s cleavage. The only logical response to these latter travesties is obvious: choose the blue pill and pretend they do not exist.

But back to the brilliant original film and its morally troubling underbelly: Morpheus, Trinity and Neo kill an awful lot of innocent bystanders. In the opening sequence of the film, for example, Trinity kills three police officers sent to arrest her. Or the exhilarating lobby scene, as another example, where Neo and Trinity kick, beat, and machine-gun to death twenty or thirty security guards.

It’s worth pointing out that these murdered people weren’t bad guys working for even badder guys. They were policemen or guards who thought they were working for the legitimate, legal authorities.

As we know, the moral justification for this carnage is that they weren’t really people: they were, in ‘reality’, merely ‘batteries’ used to satisfy the power needs of the Machines. So that’s okay, right? They aren’t real people, just a simulation, so it’s sort of like killing someone in a computer game, right?

I’m not so sure. These are human beings living out the simulation of reality so real that they live entire lives within the program, experiencing all the things we experience.

Agent Smith, while interrogating Morpheus late in the film, tells him that the Machines initially had all of us humans living in a utopia:  they had constructed a perfect human world where none suffered. But our minds rejected this. Smith explains:  “it was a disaster, no one would accept the program, entire crops (human batteries) were lost.”

So the Machines had to create an imperfect world filled with ‘misery and suffering’ – i.e. the world as it actually is. They created a perfect simulation of the real world, where according to Agent Smith, “Billions of people just live out their lives, oblivious.”  (Which brings to mind the line from Albert Einstein: “reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”)

So we can assume that if someone dies within the Matrix the consciousness of that life ends.  Let me repeat: consciousness dies. Others within the Matrix perceive that death; relatives mourn the one that is lost, the implications of the death ripple through that reality.

The comatose ‘enslaved’ body of the one dying does not die, of course; the battery still lives. We can assume at this point the Matrix switches over the consciousness of one of its other human batteries to the one that died in order to keep it stimulated.

Indeed, people would be dying all the time in the Matrix and programs consequently being switched all the time in order to keep the human batteries running. Presumably the Machines have some sort of power optimisation program so if a unit isn’t working at full capacity, or failing for whatever reason, the human consciousness stimulating the malfunctioning battery switches to one that is fully operational.

Which begs the observation: there’s no real need for our Matrix bodies to look like our real-world bodies – no real need for Neo to look like Keanu Reeves in both places.

So we will accept that the people within the Matrix are living full, human lives. We also have to accept – given that ‘whole crops would die otherwise’ – that human beings have the illusion of free will.  Furthermore, within the complex, epic world-building of the Machines’ program, simulated free will is indistinguishable from free will in the real world.

For what is free will, but seeking out the sweet embrace of human misery?

Thus, an individual will live out a full, human life within the Matrix. They love, they experience tragedy and triumph, and they make decisions that directly affect the nature of their perceived lives. The fact that Cypher betrays his comrades and is willing to be re-inserted back into the Matrix, for example, with all knowledge of the ‘real’ world wiped from his mind, shows just how real the Matrix feels to those living within it.

So when two leather-clad, gun-toting, cyber-warriors pop out of nowhere and start shooting up the joint, lives are actually lost. The ripple effect of misery and loss radiates outwards from these intrusions – and let us not forget that the effect of real misery and perfectly simulated misery on a human brain, unable to tell the difference between the two, are exactly the same thing.

Let us imagine then a day in the life of Joe Denisovich. Joe goes to work every day as a security guard, earning minimum wage running the reception desk for some corporation. This one particular day he’s reading the paper, having a cup of coffee, thinking about the two weeks’ leave approaching and how he is going to spend it relaxing down the coast, watching the cricket on television.

Then BOOM, some Goth in a long leather jacket wielding a machine pistol in each hand puts three bullets in his head.

There’s no other way to put this: Joe was murdered. Murdered by an emo nihilist.

The Matrix and the Real World are both constructed by machines. Human consciousness exists in both, as does free will. The death of consciousness in either is the death of an intricate, beautiful, fully-formed human life.

I don’t care how good you look in tight leather pants: murder is still murder.