systems | wokeness
Understanding "Wokeness" / Consciousness
When you are conscious you will understand why “wokeness” is under attack. The mind that is sleeping desires to stay asleep, entranced by its benefits. However, staying asleep too long is destructive to the tasks that can only be done when you’re awake. We all live for a night and a day. Life is too short to sleep it away.
I’ve given you the definitions but these definitions are somewhat lacking on their own. We need to apply the correct philosophy to them in order to actually spark the creation of consciousness and new neural connections. Many people think they understand these words because they read the definition in a dictionary. However, these words alone cannot quantify the experiences they speak to.
In the movie, The Matrix was shown as a fully rendered virtual reality but its operator saw it for what it really was. Code. Programming. As a programmer myself, this is easy to digest. And Neo could understand it more readily even though he was just woken up because he too was a programmer inside the program. Most of what we see is based on what we expect to see, which is the image created by society. We both feed into it (output) as well as adapt to it (input). Many people want to know how they can help make things better if they’re not racists. I/O. Be conscious of your input and output. Your output is (influence) someone else’s input. Racism persists because the virus creates a feedback loop. Because a common factor is ignorance we can say that racism feeds off ignorance. Therefore the virus (seeming to have a mind of its own) seeks to block and destroy any education that would create a vaccine to itself.
For those (deep sleepers) who cannot be told what the Matrix is, you simply have to see it. Morpheus (An older black man) explains the difficulty of this (to a younger white man). It is important that Neo understands that the system is everything and everyone around him, whether they realize they are or not. Morpheus tells Neo what the goal is. The goal is not payback or retribution which is often the secret fear and fantasy of so much unspoken hype. No, this is not a story of mutually assured destruction. This is a story of salvation. The last profession you hear from Morpheus is “carpenter”; one of many references to Yeshua (“Jesus”). Neo has to be willing to sacrifice himself to save humanity; however, like Yeshua, this sacrifice is simply a demonstration of love. Love itself requires us to sacrifice our own selfish wants and desires in the interest of the greater good. What is the greater good and who does it apply to? Well if you’re stuck in the Matrix then it only applies to the people stuck with you in the Matrix. And if you’re programmed to hate a group of people then you are programmed to fear and hinder their progress. You’re not actually free unless you aren’t programmed. And this doesn’t apply only to race, but to gender and sexual orientation. Until we can escape the programming, as a society, there will always be Neos (the ones) who must rebel.
Another hugely important note is that until people are saved from the programming of The Matrix, they are an enemy. You’ve surely already heard that we are all our own worst enemy. So then apply the same logic to society. There’s no reason to be partisan about it if we apply this same logic. It’s not about which society is superior. It’s about how we, as a society, can improve. And if we’re stuck in the past, stuck in loops, we cannot move forward. The reason there is a racial divide when it comes to consciousness is also because of what Morpheus says about why they aren’t ready to be unplugged. He tells Neo that he has to understand because he wants him to be understanding and not try to force everyone into consciousness kicking and screaming.
Morpheus is telling us, in general, that attacking random people on Twitter is not the answer. In fact, that behavior likely further entrenches them into their position. Instead, we must understand why they hold that position similar to a pawn on a chess board. And that is because they are “so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it”. Ever wonder why the MAGA crowd plays the angle of being so patriotic? For them, America is The System and it is good because of what it has done for them. And so they are blinded to what it may be doing to you. And so the MAGA crowd is afraid of gay men trying to “get” their children when the reality is that those gay men used to be children; children who were brutally teased and bullied. So they’re not trying to “get” them. They’re trying to show them that it’s okay to be who they are. But the defensive mechanisms of the system aren’t trained to see that. They only recognize it as a “virus” because their immune response can only see it as “other”.
Were you listening to me? Or were you looking at the woman in the red dress? These are the distractions that The System parades out in front of us to steer our attention from the truth; from the agents manipulating us and protecting the Matrix. The purpose of the Agents is to keep the masses asleep by silencing those who are telling the masses to wake up.
An example of this is every debate about every new movie that some people will always hate because they’re responding to something in it that is “too woke”. What they’re telling you is that they cannot be educated and entertained at the same time. They just want to be entertained. They just want to sleep and dream and who is Morpheus but the god of dreams?
You're supposed to share in this negative reaction; missing the fact that the greatest stories ever told have always inspired and educated us. Storytellers, like griots, recounted our history and preached to our imaginations by having us relate to characters and inspiring us through the hero’s journey. If all you want is action then all you want from your meal is sugar. And that may be all your stomach craves but it isn’t what you need and it isn’t what content creators have to serve you. Mindless entertainment inspires mindless consumption. Dopamine highs. People get addicted like crack without being conscious of what it’s doing to their bodies because they aren’t “woke” to its effects. And why do we get addicted to mindless entertainment, demanding more and more? It is because we want to escape. But are we escaping the dream? Or are we trying to escape reality by staying and being put back to sleep?
The training program used to teach Neo about the Matrix was designed to teach one thing. If you are not one of us you are one of them. When Neo asks who they are as I’m sometimes asked who the “they” is that I keep referring to, Morpheus answers by saying “sentient programs”. In essence, what he’s revealing is that even though most people in The System are asleep (which enables The System to keep running) these agents are not. They have a higher level of awareness and, unlike others, are choosing to fight for The System. They are ruthless because they too depend on the system but they are fully conscious of it. They accept that they're racist, but they’re also a police officer or a judge, or a prosecutor, or your lawyer, or your school teacher, and so at any moment, the virus (epitomized by Agent Smith who literally replicated) the virus manifests itself as something more than just a harmless carrier. At that moment, when the gun is drawn, that is when they will execute the will of The System from the conscious perspective of one who is the enemy. This is why Systemic Racism exists. It is because the agents only appear when they are acting out the racism embedded in their programming. That police officer interrogating a kid for 10 hours? He doesn’t care about the well-being or mental health of that kid. He is simply following his programming with ruthless efficiency.
Agents incite sleepers to judge Systemic Racism by the existence of policy. Policy is Programming. It’s written down. It’s a rule that everyone can see. When we take the job we are agreeing to follow the rules and regulations of that job and the policies of that employer, acting as their “agent”. But Racism is a mental virus. Viruses are code. Viruses often use “good code” to sneak “bad code” into a system. And then the bad code is executed by The System because it cannot tell the difference. A lot of people don’t expect viruses because they’ve been taught that bad things look bad and good things look good. A man in a suit… good. A group of young men wearing baggy jeans… bad. But one of those young men could steal a purse or a wallet, but the man in a suit can steal the pensions of hundreds or thousands of people. You can’t judge a book by its cover and this is often exactly what people do when it comes to race.
Why black people? It is simply due to the contrast of skin color that makes it easier to see one’s own self as “good” by seeing “the other” as bad. Anyone who hasn’t been unplugged potentially sees the world like this and will potentially act, consciously or subconsciously, according to their explicit or implicit biases. As Morpheus says, “they are everyone and they are no one.” The masses gather round in a circle to tell each other they’re not racist and racism is over and so there’s nothing to fix now because ding dong the witch is dead. But the stark reality is that Black people have survived up to recent years by hiding from them and running from them.
A lot of white people consider why black friends aren’t plentiful. They, like the author of Dilbert, reach a faulty conclusion that it is because black people don’t like white people. The only reason why Morpheus is hanging out with Neo is because he knew that Neo had been at least, on a physical level, unplugged. Morpheus’s trust in Neo is based on his potential of being The One. Otherwise, everything Morpheus said about The System and people in it, applies to Neo by default. By default, Black People’s survival is predicated upon limiting our exposure. I’m in communities with white people but I need to have something in common with them and our commonality has to be stronger than our differences. We may both want to live in a world where this is the default. But in the real world, the virus is the default. That is The System.
Lastly, before I leave the rest to address in other articles designed for Neos and Future Neos (aka Allies), White people often seem to wonder about this “they” who long ago we simply called “The Man” which no doubt drove white people crazy trying to figure out… but more than who is how. How are Agents doing… this? And by this, long ago we would say “he’s holding me down”. This translates to modern and academic terminology as… prejudice, disenfranchisement/exclusion, and the subtle manipulation of a person’s future through everyday and ordinary discrimination; things that DEI (Diversity Equity and Inclusion) were designed to stop. Only agents would try and stop that. Many people can’t, for the life of them, see the harm done by modern-day racism. They think it exists but question how powerful of a force it could be without painfully overt policies and marketing campaigns around those policies with flashing pulsing red arrows pointing to them. And because they are looking for the obvious they cannot see the virus because the individual cells… individual cases of it… are simply too small to be seen by the naked eye unless you zoom in which you wouldn’t do if you weren’t consciously trying to see it. This is why so many do not. They just want to be entertained so just shut up and dribble.
But we can’t. Because as Morpheus said, “they are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors and holding all the keys which means that sooner or later someone will have to fight them.”