The Matrix of Distraction and the War on God

We all have significant years in our lives - years that stand out from the others. The year 1999 was probably the one that stands out most in my life. I was 15 and in love for the first time. If truth be told I had been in love with the girl for some years already, from before I even knew what love was or what one did with it. But 1999 was the year we came together.

The intensity of feeling one has as an adolescent in a relationship like that is really quite incredible - scary even, looking back at it now from the remove of 25 years. I was utterly intoxicated, my every waking thought dedicated to her and her alone.

I mention this relationship only because it explains why I spent most of the summer that year in cinemas. We lived quite a ways from one another so we got to meet only once a week in the city centre which we lived either side of. With nowhere really to go we generally ended up in the cinema which afforded us somewhere indoors to spend time together while the darkness added a little welcome privacy.

As such, we saw every single film in the cinema that summer. We weren’t fussy. We really just wanted somewhere we could spend time together so the film barely mattered at all. As an example, going through old film stubs from that period, which I faithfully retained, I can see that we went to see The Rugrats Movie - not once, but twice. Not a great look for a wannabe cool 15 year old but it gave us our time together so it would do.

Often, we barely paid attention to the film and hours seemed to disappear in the blink of an eye. However, one day in June we found ourselves in the Savoy cinema queuing to buy tickets for something called The Matrix. I knew nothing about it other than that it was new and we hadn’t seen it.

It would do.

We took our seats in the old Screen 1 with its red velvet curtain that drew back across Ireland’s biggest cinema screen (sadly destroyed in 2018 in an act of cultural vandalism when the new owners split it into multiple auditoriums). We were all set to mostly ignore the film but when it began it quickly became apparent that this was something different, something worth temporarily tearing our eyes away from one another. When I think now about the film and what so instantly grabs you and demands your attention I realise that it’s not the breathless action scenes nor the (for its time) revolutionary special effects. Nor is it the intriguing and unique plot or even the sheer spectacle of the whole thing. It’s that it’s true.

The movie is fundamentally true.

Films like this describe something about our world which may not be literally true but is essentially true usually through allegory or symbolism. And the audience instinctively recognises this - even if it doesn’t consciously realise it. We recognise the truth when it’s laid before us and we respond to it. And The Matrix is true. And in that cinema in 1999, two lovestruck teenagers recognised it.

As it happens, The Matrix is actually closer to being literally true than most movies of this type. It’s not really allegorical¹ like The Lord of the Rings - another true film. The Matrix accurately describes the world - it just adds a little glitz to keep us entertained.

The film posits a very feasible scenario - that the human race has been conquered by A.I. and imprisoned in a virtual reality that apes our pre-conquest existence. We are zoo animals unaware that we are living in a fake virtual world inside a computer which a malevolent force can control completely. If you’ve read my earlier essay on A.I., you’ll know that I believe our world actually has been taken over by A.I. - not in the form of an actual computer system but through the emergence and dominance of a hyper-rationalist way of thinking that, in terms of its output and effect on the world, amounts to the same thing as the dominance of a computerised artificial intelligence. This way of thinking has infected our whole society and all our major institutions. We don’t recognise this reality because it doesn’t look like how dystopian stories told us it would look - like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey or Skynet in Terminator. It looks just like me and you because it is me and you. We have allowed ourselves to think and act like computers and all of the important processes and decisions that shape our society are dictated by products of that way of thinking - regimented bureaucracies and inflexible operating protocols that have taken on a life of their own and coalesced into a System that now rules our world for us. The journalist Glenn Greenwald recognised this quite well, referring to it as a machine, when he commented on the lack of impact from Joe Biden’s failure to function as President of the U.S.

But The Matrix goes further than that. Its truest and most important depiction is that of a world that is fundamentally unreal - not just because it is (in the film) virtual but because everything in it is controllable by those in power. The A.I. tyranny can manipulate the Matrix in whatever way it pleases. If it wants its virtual society to tend towards a particular political position (Hard left or hard Right as an example) they need only tweak the algorithm in that way, change the code that controls how and what the VR media reports or what the entertainment industry implicitly or explicitly promotes. They can create celebrities or politicians that will drive a preferred agenda forward. These could either be real humans selected as compatible with the A.I.’s goal and boosted via the algorithm the same way Elon Musk’s X openly boosts certain users and buries others - or the celebrity or politician could be not real at all, just a piece of code inserted in the Matrix to achieve a particular goal like the Woman in Red whose goal was to distract the male viewer.

Such control makes the inhabitants of the Matrix completely helpless. It’s not just that they’re prisoners - it’s that they don’t know that they’re prisoners in a reality that can shape their every thought, their every sensation. Everything they see, everything they hear can be engineered to make them think, feel, or believe whatever the A.I. wishes. If it wants them to hate the President of the United States, how could they resist? It would code the entire social and media sphere to prod them in that direction. Neighbours and colleagues (some real, some just pieces of code) would decry him, newspapers would produce headlines and articles algorithmically designed to best enrage the population against him. Favoured celebrities would malign him while discredited ones would vainly champion him. He would be mocked by comedians and parodied and lampooned in countless TV shows and films.

Or, they could just as easily make people love him. They could make him hated one year and loved the next - all just code. And, of course, they could do this with anything. Global pandemics, climate change, war - all such things could be started or stopped at the stroke of a few keys. They might be real (as much as something would be real in a virtual world) or completely fictional even in the virtual sense - it would matter little as the people would be at the behest of whatever the code wanted them to think and feel.

Now, ask yourself, how different to this virtual world is our real physical one? Elon Musk purportedly believes that we might well be living in an actual stimulated reality. I don’t but the System I described above, which runs our world, has developed much the same power to control and manipulate the population as that of the fictional A.I. in the movie. It achieves this not through the coding of a virtual world but through its rigid control of nearly all the inputs from which we receive information about our world. Newspapers, governments, institutions, academia, the entire entertainment and celebrity industry is controlled and managed by the System almost as effectively as if it were coding a VR world. All of this amounts to an industrial-scale propaganda machine that can deluge the common person with so many inputs urging them in one direction that it can be almost impossible to resist.

Covid was the perfect example of this when all of these levers of power were pulled at once to convince everyone to be terrified of a mysterious virus. The System was relentless. Images of people collapsed in the street (almost certainly staged), stories of young, attractive victims (even though it later transpired there was no link to Covid), celebrities working overtime urging you to be vigilant, the constant, daily reading of case and death notices. It never stopped coming, from every direction. Its purest crystallisation was probably in this report from Sky News in Bergamo which despite showing fairly anodyne footage from a busy but hardly overwhelmed hospital spread panic around the world. It spread panic because it wanted to spread panic. The reporter is literally trying to terrify you. The System was trying to terrify you and because it controlled everything, it was irresistible.²

This pattern, once noticed with Covid, repeats everywhere. Consider the examples above from the VR world. Would it be that much harder for the System in our real world to make most people hate the President of the United States? Is that not essentially what happened with Trump, a man whose undeniable flaws were highlighted constantly by the press while those of his opponent were suppressed (remember, it wasn’t until 2024 that we were allowed to acknowledge that Joe Biden is mentally unfit for office)? What of Climate Change? The System is working hard on spreading that particular fear right now. Every natural disaster is attributed to it while a phalanx of scientists and academics urge you to accept the threat just like they did with Covid. We even saw in 2022 how CNN was planning an orchestrated push on climate fear as an undercover exposé caught one of its directors outlining how it was the next story they “would beat to death.”

To that end, we do live in a Matrix - not one of code and simulated reality but one of orchestrated propaganda and widespread psychological manipulation and, for the most part, this amounts to the same thing. That is the truth which The Matrix film describes - that there is an artifice around us, one that controls and manipulates us for its own end.

What, though, is that end? Funnily enough, it is the same both in the virtual world of the movie and our own world.

Distraction.

In The Matrix, everything that happened in the VR prison, every single thing they coded was for one purpose and one purpose only. It was to distract the population from realising they were in a prison. More specifically, it was to distract them from the real world. Morpheus woke Neo up and showed him the real world and explained to him that everything he experienced up to now was fake. His entire reality was a distraction to keep him from the truth.

The exact same is true in our world. I often see someone comment on social media that a particular news report is a distraction. A shocking story is to distract from some more mundane but far more important event. A high profile murder case is to distract you while the government push through a piece of legislation eroding your rights. A war is to distract you from some major indiscretion on the government’s part.

Such assertions are half right. They’re all distractions - not from one another but all of them together are distractions from the real world - the one that existed before computers and bureaucracy and propaganda. The world of nature. The world of God.

Yes, God. I believe in God.

Maybe you don’t and that’s fine. I actually think everyone would believe in God were it not for this Matrix of Distraction I describe above because that is its very goal - to distract us from that very belief. I think that in the past before the Enlightenment freed us from religious superstition and even further back than that, before this Matrix was built around us, that people didn't just believe in God so much as they knew that God existed. Belief wasn't required because God was all around them and was as obvious to them as a mountain or a tree. But ever since then a war has been waged on God by evil. It is not a war as we would normally understand it because such a war would be over before it began. Evil would be swatted aside in an instant. Rather, it is a war of distraction designed to make you forget God. That is the way evil wins - the only way it can win.

I remember being told as a child that if God were to stop thinking about you for even a second you would cease to exist. It was intended not to terrify but to demonstrate how God loved and cherished each and every one of us. I come to think now that the opposite is also true . That if God’s creation stops thinking of Him, forgets about Him completely, then it is God who would blink out of existence. This is, of course, the ultimate goal of evil - to destroy God. And this is how it does it, by wrapping creation up in an artifice of distraction so that we can no longer find God even if we wanted. And that which we forget, which we abandon completely, will wither and die.

And note that if this is the purpose of our Matrix, to distract you, then it doesn’t even have to be consistent in its manipulation of you. The System might fail to successfully convince everyone of the perils of some great threat but those that aren’t convinced are often just as distracted by a plethora of inputs pointing in the opposite direction - that the threat is overblown or not real at all. Ultimately, it barely matters what is true. The goal is distraction so the System is happy either way. So long as your focus is absorbed. So long as you are not allowed for a moment to lean back and relax and stare at the sky and to see, through a tear in the fabric of the artifice, the real world beyond. That is what the System, what evil, fears the most.

This, then, is the horrible power of the Matrix - how it works and why it does what it does. The final question is how can it be resisted. And of course, the answer is to resist distraction. In essence, this is achieved by seeing the Matrix for what it is - just as Neo did at the end of the movie. Once he saw the reality of the artifice it no longer held any power over him. Its weapons against him were useless. He could pluck them from the air at will and swat them away.

Again, it’s the same in our world. Once you recognise the artifice of our reality, how it endeavours to influence your every thought and every emotion via a relentless barrage of propaganda and cultural programming across all media, it all of a sudden becomes so obvious - tacky almost. You stop and consider a “horrifying” Sky News report the way Neo considers one of the bullets fired by the Agents - almost amused that something so trivial could ever have held any sway over you. And then you wave them all away and the whole Matrix of Distraction begins to crumble.

After that, anything truly is possible.

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Now, I’m going to finish on a different note after all that. It occurs to me that you might be curious about what happened to the girl from the start of the essay?

We broke up not long after that summer. The feelings hadn’t gone away on either of our parts but it was all too much at that young age and it ended. Abruptly and painfully. I struggled with it very much and for quite a while.

But that was 25 years ago. Time went by and things changed. The years moved on and we both grew up and, to cut a long story short, that girl who is now a woman is currently downstairs playing with our children as I write these words. We never forgot our love so it didn’t wither and die. It survived.

There is, as they say, always hope.

1. There are ways in which it is allegorical - the depiction of Neo as a kind of Christ-like saviour for example but the main theme of the movie and the one focused on here is not allegorical.

2. See my thread on Twitter for a more detailed denunciation of the Sky News Bergamo Report: https://x.com/raggedlines/status/1332334492174979073