evolution or destruction?

The 1st episode of The Matrix was pretty explicit in the author’s attempt to crit­i­cize the today’s world of “walking dead”. Are we really con­sciously living, fully under­stand what we’re doing? How many of us are truly aware of the fact that we’re noth­ing but a tool to help the soci­ety evolve. For a “greater good” of our col­lec­tive human race.

I thought it is a pretty new con­cept people started to think about recently. How­ever, as it turns out, time and time again writ­ers have warned us of our path to doom.

In Fight Club (1999), the Nar­ra­tor lives a “walking dead” life as a car com­pany con­sul­tant. His every day is the same as every other day, he goes to work, buys his sat­is­fac­tion from IKEA fur­ni­ture as a con­sumer. He never really thought of what he’s doing, not until he met Tyler Durden. Who enlight­ened and brought him out of his rat race, but not in the soci­ety accepted ways such as giving him wealth and mate­ri­als. He intro­duced him to the Fight Club.

With­out fur­ther spoil­ing this mag­nif­i­cent story, I can make the point I want to: How many of us can NOT iden­tify with the protagonist’s life? We go to school, get a job, buy stuffs, get a family, get old, finally die. That is noth­ing but the life of a “walking dead”, a cell sup­port­ing the life of The Matrix.

What shocked me most was the mis­er­able fact that the whole human race have no signs what­so­ever to stop “evolving” for the soci­ety. Back in 1955, the movie Rebel with­out a Cause also crit­i­cize the exact same thing about the modern societies.

Years later, con­sumerism has grown stronger than it has ever been. People are now work­ing even harder to achieve the intan­gi­ble. Just as global warm­ing is at an alarm­ing stage, so is our con­scious­ness as indi­vid­u­als. Per­haps this is not to be sur­prised, as awak­en­ing from the Matrix can be very daunting:

All the above prob­a­bly makes no fuck­ing sense at all to some people. To people who under­stand it, how­ever, it should have a pro­found mean­ing. So, can you truly say you’re know what you’re doing? If not, are you ready to shake it off and man up, or you’d rather stay uncon­scious and follow the crowd, for “our greater good”?