Closing thoughts – Resisting the Bliss of ignorance
There’s a scene in the film The Matrix that resonates strongly with me. If you haven’t seen it, the film is famous for its crazy gravity-defying fight scenes, and equally, for the way it popularized the aeons-old philosophical idea of radical scepticism and made it understandable, perhaps disturbingly so. The film made us question reality like Descartes once did. Is anything we see truly real? In this film’s setting, the answer is no: the world most people know is a fantasy concocted by a malevolent robot civilization, designed to deceive and placate us into being unwitting cattle that is harvested for energy.
Fighting against the killer robots is a plucky band of protagonists. They’ve all been “unplugged” from the Matrix and want to save humanity from this awful fate. Since this is a Hollywood blockbuster, you know they’re going to win, and it’s true, they do achieve a kind of victory before the film (and the trilogy it spawned) wraps up. What I found most interesting along the way though, was the traitor among them. A man named “Cypher” who, unplugged from the Matrix world, now lives a shitty, stressful existence that includes subsisting on a porridge-like gruel. See, Cypher is like that part of me I opened this discussion with; ready to get lost in the fantasy, rather than deal with reality. He wants to be plugged back into the Matrix. He wants to forget.
So, he plugs back into the Matrix for a moment and meets with the bad robots to discuss how to get what he wants. He’s sitting in a lush restaurant, speaking with the big bad AI as a lady strums a harp, and what he says is so stupidly simple, and yet such an unforgettable moment to me.
Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?
[Takes a bite of steak]
Cypher: Ignorance is bliss.
I don’t say all this because I’m an unhappily sober undergraduate who’d rather be playing games and thus, decided to write about them as a distance second place. I say it because there’s something genuinely profound in my self-indulgent desires here that I think needs to be addressed.
If you think about it, what I’m really saying here is that instead of writing this and doing my part to be a constructive member of society who contributes their ideas for the betterment of all, I’d much rather the quiet life of a social parasite. That kind of phrasing makes the idea more damning, perhaps, but also more real; more accurate.
Maybe it’s projection, but I think a great many people aren’t too different. I think Cypher represents so many of us. It’s hard to view us as conscientious practitioners of sustainability when something as stupid as convenience drives so much of our problematic behaviour. Single-use plastic, cheeseburgers, and the personal car – I think many people would rather see the world burn than give these daily conveniences or indulgences up, even if they’re the ones accelerating our downfall. It’s poetic, I think, that Cypher seems to be ready to sell the entirety of humanity out over some steak. All these years later after a film from 1999, with our growing awareness of the link between beef consumption and climate change, our traitor Cypher here is basically your average Western consumer. We’re the villains, and if I’m frank, I’m not sure we really care that much.
Ignorance is bliss.
It’s painfully obvious to say, but maybe needs to be said regardless: We generally seem to prefer to meet our own needs and desires right now, than we care about future generations, or even other people alive today. This is, arguably, a bleak or pessimistic view of humanity, and yet, perhaps it’s a realistic one too. Importantly, this kind of perspective is often missing from how we think about, how we communicate, and how we practice sustainability.
We often go into this whole thing with some huge assumptions. Firstly, we assume that humans are worth saving from annihilation. Secondly, we assume that humans do indeed want to be saved, and will do what’s required, if only we communicate it the right way, motivate them the right way, design society the right way, and so on. This article is an excellent example, because it suggests that redesigning society towards a more virtualized existence would provide a way to reduce natural resource consumption, and thus maybe promote the longevity of our species. It assumes, as a starting point, that doing so is a good idea.
We assume that people don’t do the right thing now because they’re not sufficiently empowered, educated, or motivated. But what if, in addition to all that being true, there’s also this more basic problem? What if, at least some of us are perfectly willing to see our species end because the alternative, saving ourselves, is a real grind, a lot of hard work, and takes a lot of sacrifices? What if we’re genuinely happy just saying “fuck it, rather die”? This is an idea similar to “The Fall” mentioned earlier. How do we want to spend our time? If we’re not chasing immortality, then at what point is it acceptable for us to give in; to our desires, to our apathy, or to other things.
It’s not like this would ever be an overtly stated position for us; we’re not about to enshrine defeatism into a Universal Declaration at the UN. But maybe, just maybe, we signal that collective surrender through other channels. Maybe the way we act, and indeed the way we don’t act, represents those interests. Almost like another school of thought about sustainability – one that you won’t ever see raised at the UN, in academic journals, or in mainstream discussions – a philosophy that is only ever in the background as a common thread between many different societal failings.
What if this helps explain where we’re at right now as a society? It’s an obvious, well-trodden answer to explain the ills of our world on human apathy and indifference, and yet perhaps it’s because it has become so cliché that we have become numb to the truth of this reality? Is the biggest conflict of sustainability one between believers and non-believers; between say, science advocates and science deniers? Or is perhaps the biggest battle right now the one driven by these often-unspoken selfish desires we all have? A battle between the people who care, and the people who honestly just don’t. Importantly, sometimes, each of us can play both roles – hero one moment, and villain the next.
This is a largely philosophical point about human world views, attitudes, beliefs, and so on. It is ultimately a deeply philosophical question: to what extent should humans indulge their desires, and at what cost?
I mention it in closing because other, future work in this project will have to focus in more detail on the challenge of communicating sustainability, a topic I only briefly touched upon here. Often, in sustainability communication, we focus on human psychology and this underlying philosophical problem goes unaddressed. For example, we might focus on the ways that humans best respond psychologically to new information. This might help us communicate more effectively, and it might even engender the types of responses we want, but it doesn’t directly address the underlying question of how much we should be manipulating behaviours.
There is an ethical question here that recurs throughout my writing, about the extent to which we should resist the allure of blissful ignorance. How best should we spend our time? And how harshly should we judge the traitors, the Cyphers, amongst us?
The Grass Ceiling 