Hollyweird: Prescient, Mirroring or Conditioning?

The Signs Of Our Times

An analysis of the effect of Hollyweird movies in society quickly identifies that they are designed with a purposes in mind that lie far beyond mere entertainment. One does not have to look too far to see the affirmation indeed, requirement of DIE ideology (“diversity.” “inclusion,” and “equity") in the filmography and scripts of today. As so many critics and commentators on social media point out, this Weird is not winning the hearts and minds of audiences or generating the hoped for investment returns.

Nonetheless, to what extent does a Hollyweird contemporary ‘block buster’ movie manifest prescience, societal mirroring or outright conditioning? Clearly an underpinning ideological conformity will dictate or imply certain values, perhaps by orchestrating pivotal scenes or employing the artifice of a false dialectic or by the normalisation of the unusual, or even in a story’s use of incoherent and astonishingly different values.

And so we have …

Afflicted as I was by a case of severely limited interest I nevertheless watched ‘The Matrix Resurrections’ (2021). The plot line is summed up at imdb as,

Return to a world of two realities: one, everyday life; the other, what lies behind it. To find out if his reality is a construct, to truly know himself, Mr. Anderson will have to choose to follow the white rabbit once more.

A Nugget In The Mud

I do not want to dwell on anything other than a vignette of monologue that captured my dwindling attention. There is no need to provide the fictional context as this monologue stands starkly out from the rest of the script like a gold nugget in the mud.

Paraphrasing the important quotes:

“A world without war is possible”

“The past, stuck in war, us or them, is now only, us and them.” …. (reference here is made to the humans, the robots and the synthients, the latter as I understood it, a mix of both).

“The fiction of self-awareness is based on feelings that merely validate the fiction. Feelings are easy to control. The sheeple want to be controlled. They want certainty.”

“The worse we treat you, the more we manipulate you, the more energy you produce, yearning for what you don’t have, while dreading losing what you do have.”

“The definition of reality rests on desires and fears. We give the people what they want.”

The reference to, “Deus Machina” has been commented on elsewhere, to wit:

‘A well-known phrase taken from Latin, Deus ex-machina roughly translates as "god out of the machine," which is a solid description of Neo's place in "The Matrix." Originally set free by Morpheus and his crew in the 1999 film, the former human battery of the machines became a god-like figure among humanity and a considerable threat to the machine army’.

I idly wondered whether Yuval Noah Harari, doyen of the WEF had been employed as a script consultant. In the context of the current torments afflicted and waged by global “leaders” upon humanity all those phrases rang with a distressing resonance.

Yuval Noah Harari is quoted widely, and is a acclaimed doyen of the WEF, to wit:

“Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.”

“People already have bionic arms and legs that work by the power of thought. And we increasingly outsource mental and communicative activities to computers. We are merging with our smartphones. Very soon, they will just be part of the body.

“Techno-humanism aims to amplify the power of humans, creating cyborgs and connecting humans to computers, but it still sees human interests and desires as the highest authority in the universe.”

“Increasingly, our decisions will be made by the algorithms that surround us. Whenever there is a big dilemma, you just ask Google what to do. And what kind of life is that?”

The Irony Reveals The Truth

And perhaps most ironically and revealingly Harari stated,

“Modernity is a deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.”

It appears much more likely to me that an evident distinction exists between ‘giving up’ and losing. A conscious decision is implied in ‘agree’ and ‘giving up’ and I suggest that no one (in their sane, right mind) intentionally relinquishes ‘meaning’ and purpose in life. At some point then, when an individual has acquired nigh on infinite wealth and the acquisition of anything becomes a meaningless exchange of money for whatever is desired, an existential void develops (that urgently and compellingly demands to be filled with meaning, for what is the point of life otherwise?).

Meaning may only be reacquired under such circumstances when it dwarfs the extant and presents a genuine illusion of challenge. Such few people seize on an idea or self-conceived vision that is grandiose in extremis.

‘Saving the world’ comes to mind.

The loss of meaning and purpose is exemplified by the saying, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely," (John Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton (1834–1902). Lord Acton, wrote in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887:

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."

Post Script

The irony (loss of meaning when acquiring absolute power) is exemplified by those with infinite wealth and power in the Davos Cabal, those in the WEF, the UN, WHO, Wellcome, the apex of the technocorporate globalist elite who present an abject mortal danger to the rest of us. Bereft of meaning, they are driven to absolute corruption (self-absorbed hubris) through their desperate personal search for meaning.

Moreover, their distorted perception can only be sated temporarily by dallying with the destiny and fate of humanity. Moving to control every dimension of our existence reliably leads, as history has shown, to tyrannical rigidity, incoherence and a literal and figurative dead-end.

The signs of our times?