week 7

Critical Practice

Dunhuang Chen

0244729

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” 

Morpheus gave Neo two pills-the blue and the red then told him this sentence, then Neo picked the red one and wake up from the “real” world. Later, Neo learned the true story about the “new” world: the rest of people who survived the war between human and robots has been living in the underground sewer system for centuries.

What is ironic that this quote is a mirror of the actual world we living in. It reflects the real situation that when we wake up in the morning and we hear and see countless news from news paper, TV, networks, radios, etc everyday. People are drowned by tons of information and cannot escape from that. The serious question is that how much information is true. Imagine that our exist is a building and it is made of those information we received every seconds, the more information we will take in, the more stronger this building will be, which means the more rich and fancy our livelihood could be. What if someday you have realized that all the information around you is not true which makes this building fake. It turns out that we have been living in a castle in the air since we are born. our life means nothings!

Of course our life is not full of lies actually, it is just not the one we think it should be. The one of most famous anti-utopia novel- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley was a true portrayal of what future looks like, it is pretty much like Matrix. people were divided by caste system even before they were born and tanking inoculation while they were sleeping. The emotion has been eliminated therefore the entire world is extremely ordered and organized. everyone has a easy and comfortable life. The manger used conditioning, hypnosis, and physiological sleep therapy to manipulate other people, to control and shape their interests, humanity and morality, values. Making people to fit in their determined fate without question. Only few people felt something wrong with reality and revolted  for seeking truth, to fought against the authorities, and the story ends badly.

Also, another famous anti-utopia novel-Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman has talked about our modern society`s problem; entire society public discourse is appeared in the form of entertainment and our political, religious, news, sports, education and business are willing ti become subservient to the entertainment. The reason why I mentioned this book, is that we think that our life is beautiful and abundant because there are so much entertainments such as movies, cartoons, sports, news. These things are filled with our life so that we forget who we really are and what the real feature is behind illusions. And we will be consumed by what we love finally. The Neo has chosen the red pill because the red pill represent the truth no matter how ugly the truth is. and how dark the reality is. ( it is so hard to believe that the former US Secretary of State has an affair with terrorist? ).

In the end, the moment of movie here remind me of another novel by Chinese writer Lu Xun, it is called A Madman`s Diary. There is a interesting story that has been told, many people are sleeping in a dark iron room, suddenly a man wakes up and realizes there is no lights by his said. He is scared and trying to wake up others. However others are refuse to wake up because the dream is so beautiful. No body knows how many people are willing to swallow the red pill or got nerve to do it.