Stopping the Bullets in Midair
A while back I was catching up with my former students Garrett and Matt. When I asked how they were doing, Garrett told me that on occasion they’ll be listening to a lecture or a sermon and—if they’re sitting far apart from each other—they make eye contact and pretend they’re stopping bullets in midair.
Fans of the first Matrix film know this is one of the last scenes in the movie. Agents Smith, Brown, and Jones think they’ve finally killed Neo. They haven’t. Neo arises. The agents turn toward him, stunned, opening fire. But Neo sees the hail of bullets isn’t real. They’re zeroes and ones, as are the agents. They’re part of the Matrix. Neo stops the bullets in midair.
Garrett and Matt can stop the bullets in midair because they took the red pill. They’ve become like the sons of Judah in Babylon, the few who recognized reality. In today’s world, a son or daughter of Judah recognize that many of the religious words we use to explain life have no meaningful connection to reality. They’re like the bullets in the Matrix film. Today’s sons and daughters of Judah see this. They stop the bullets in midair.
This is why I say the first Matrix film is arguably one of the best movies in recent memory. The film’s plotline parallels the biblical story of the Babylonian exile. For example, The Matrix posits a future where humans are deluded, blithely unaware they’re living in a machine. In Babylon, most of the nation of Judah was delusional, blithely unaware that she’d been idolatrous for 500 years. Idols blind us to reality, so most of the nation simply couldn’t fathom that God’s people were being punished in exile.
There are other parallels. In The Matrix film, human beings float in pods managed by sentient machines. Humans created the machines and gave them intelligence. The machines then enslaved the humans, trapping them like prey to use as battery power, just as the Babylonian captors enslaved the Judeans in exile, using them as slave labor.
In the film, the few who recognize they’re in the Matrix are members of the human underground working to overthrow the machines. They live in a hovercraft called Nebuchadnezzar. In Babylon, the few who recognizes exile, the sons of Judah, were brought into the courts of Nebuchadnezzar to learn the language and literature of Babylon.
In Babylon, Isaiah prophesied of a savior to come. In the film, the human underground is looking for a savior. It turns out he’s a computer programmer and hacker named Neo. Neo senses that something is wrong with the fabric of everyday life, but he can’t describe it. Morpheus, the leader of the underground, can. But to be like Morpheus, freed from the dream of reality represented by the Matrix, Neo must take the red pill.
There are many today who have taken the red pill. One is the British writer and recent convert to (Orthodox) Christianity, Paul Kingsnorth. You can follow him on his Substack site, The Abbey of Misrule. I also follow Matthew Crawford (another new convert to Christianity) on his Substack site, Archedelia, N. S. Lyons on his Substack site, The Upheaval, and Peco and Ruth Gaskovski on their Substack site, Pilgrims in the Machine.
Beginning about three years ago, Kingsnorth began writing a powerful series of essays, The Tale of the Machine. In one essay, “You Are Harvest,” published in 2021, he writes:
Sometimes I lie awake at night, or I wander in the field behind my house, or I walk down the street in our local town and think I can see it all around me: the grid. The veins and sinews of the Machine that surrounds us and pins us and provides for us and defines us now. I imagine a kind of network of shining lines in the air, glowing like a dewed spiderweb in the morning sun. I imagine the cables and the satellite links, the films and the words and the records and the opinions, the nodes and the data centres that track and record the details of my life. I imagine the mesh created by the bank transactions and the shopping trips, the passport applications and the text messages sent. I see this thing, whatever it is, being constructed, or constructing itself around me, I see it rising and tightening its grip, and I see that none of us can stop it from evolving into whatever it is becoming.
I see the Machine, humming gently to itself as it binds us with its offerings, as it dangles its promises before us and slowly, slowly, slowly reels us in. I think of the part of it we interact with daily, the glowing white interface through which we volunteer every detail of our lives in exchange for information or pleasure or stories told by global entertainment corporations who commodify our culture and sell it back to us. I think of the words we use to describe this interface, which we carry with us in our pockets wherever we go, as we are tracked down every street and into every forest that remains: the web; the net.
I think: These are things designed to trap prey.
Iain McGilchrist says we’re trapped in a hall of mirrors. We only reflect back to ourselves what we already know we know we know… our understanding of reality becoming narrower and narrower until we’re delusional. This is especially true with technology. It giveth, but it also taketh away. U2’s Numb captures what’s being taken away.
And so I urge you to take the red pill. Become a monthly donor subscriber. Taking the red pill is a prerequisite for beginning to recognize reality, for stopping the bullets in midair. Since I took the red pill many years ago, I’ve been dumbfounded at how many of the words and images we use to explain life have no meaningful connection to reality.
I could try to explain this to you, but we’d end up talking about the Matrix, and no one can be told what the Matrix (and the Machine) is. You have to see it for yourself. Take the red pill. We’ll go down the rabbit hole and discover how deep our 500-year slide into the left hemisphere goes. Touch bottom, and one day you too will be stopping the bullets in midair.