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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27783 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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This view of suffering, as some sort of negative imposed on life, is bizarre to me. I mean it makes sense coming from a person suffering clinical depression or otherwise deeply disordered. But suffering, by and large, is our biology's way of pointing the way to go. Only children think the world would be better off without suffering. Anyone who has ever seen a news segment or documentary about people literally born without the ability to feel pain understands what a nightmarish body horror that is. I'll never forget the one I saw. Turns out without pain, it's hard to keep an infant from clawing their own eyes out, chewing off their own tongue, fingers and toes, and other acts of senseless self mutilation. They won't cry when they need something, so the new parent, ignorant to the condition, first discovers something is amiss after the child, instead of crying to be fed in the middle of the night, lets their parents sleep peacefully while they remove their own eye with their curious searching fingers.

Suffering may seem pointless to the disordered mind, but every now and again we get a Twilight Zone like glimpse at a world without suffering, and it's a horror almost beyond belief. Like a hell out of Event Horizon or Hellraiser.

This view of suffering, as some sort of negative imposed on life, is bizarre to me.

It almost seems gnostic: we've been trapped by a terrible demiurge into a prison world of suffering. If only we can deprive ourselves of enough material items (now including honey) in this prison world, we'll finally be able to reach the perfect spiritual realm.

So much of modern leftism has Gnostic parallels, it's unsettling once you know what to look for.

I've never thought about it that way. Do you have other examples that come to mind?

A lot of Marxist false consciousness and its derivatives seems very reminiscent of certain ideas about the demiurge.

The Matrix is obviously a big Gnostic metaphor (the machines have pulled the wool over our eyes and trapped us inside a false reality, we must see the truth and escape into the real world; machines = Demiurge). The Wachowskis later claimed that they'd always intended the film as a metaphor for coming out as trans, which inspired a lot of eyerolls and accusations of revisionism. But I don't think that's the case at all, I really do think that's what they intended at the time of writing:

the reason this interpretation doesn't jump out at most people is because they're approaching gender ideology from the perspective of "most people are cis, but some people are trans and that's okay and they deserve respect and compassion" as opposed to the perspective of "everyone is trans, but most have been brainwashed into believing they're cis - freethinkers whose eggs have hatched see the truth". Cypher is a detransitioner and also a cowardly traitorous villain: not a coincidence.

Everything about trans activism, really, has Gnostic undertones: the very concept of a "gender identity" which is wholly distinct from one's sex is obviously sneaking dualism in by the backdoor, but the way so many trans people talk about being trapped inside these nauseating flesh prisons and their transhumanistic desire to mould, slice and sculpt their bodies to better achieve their embodiment goals carries a big whiff of it too. This is part of a broader trend since the emergence of the internet towards Gibson's "relaxed contempt for the flesh": the tendency to see your body not as "you" but as a tool or vehicle you are controlling. Sometimes this can end up in weird science-denial places: fat acceptance activists who deny that the laws of physics apply to human beings just as much as anything else, that the only thing that can cause disease is mean words and fat shaming. It almost seems to come off like a denial of the existence of an objective external world: instead, we are all just souls trapped inside flesh prisons, and the only way one soul can be harmed is if another soul inflicts harm upon it.

At the extremes, you get into whatever the Zizians were doing, with their outré decision theory ideas about doing whatever it would be optimal for every one of your paraselves to do elsewhere in the multiverse - but they're a noncentral idea of the trend I'm describing.

The Wachowskis later claimed that they'd always intended the film as a metaphor for coming out as trans, which inspired a lot of eyerolls and accusations of revisionism

From time to time I read movie screenplays for movies I've already seen to help me fall asleep at night.

I read The Matrix screenplay right after a close friend of mine came out as trans and talked to me about it so it was top of mind and let me tell you the script is suspiciously full of trans messaging.

The police let their guard down in the beginning when arresting Trinity, not expecting a girl to be all that dangerous. Except she kills them

Then there's this

                   SCREEN
             JACKON:  I heard Morpheus has been
             on this board.
             SUPERASTIC:  Morpheus doesn't even
             exist and the Matrix is nothing
             but an advertising gimmick 4 a new
             game.
             TIMAXE:  All I want to know is
             Trinity really a girl?
             LODIII:  87% of all women on line
             are really men.

Tee hee.

Then, Neo specifically says to Trinity when she confronts him at a party that he thought she was a guy. She replies that most guys do.

This all seems very Hollywood girlboss by today's standards but in 1999 I think they were playing with something deeper.

                  TRINITY
              They're watching you.  Something
              happened and they found out about
              you.

You're out of the closet buddy.

She continues, talking about Morpheus helping her wake up from the Matrix

               He told me that no one should look
               for the answer unless they have to
               because once you see it,
               everything changes.  Your life and
               the world you live in will never
               be the same.  It's as if you wake
               up one morning and the sky is
               falling.

I've spoken to a few trans people now and a recurring story is the collapse of their denial.They wake up and realize their whole life is a lie. It's really upsetting. They can't go back but they're also scared to go ahead.

Neo attempts to follow Morpheus' plan at work but he chickens out when he has to go out the window. Maybe he can go on without finding out? Then he's arrested.

               AGENT SMITH
               It seems that you have been living
               two lives.

Choosing the red pill to wake up being like the first time you take hormones, etc.

Uhh anyway there's more of this stuff. Might need to make a fun thread post.

I read that their original plan was for Switch to be played by a male actor inside the Matrix, and by a female actor in the real world (or maybe vice versa). They wisely decided against it because they reckoned audiences would find it too confusing, but the fact that that was the original plan makes their intentions all the more explicit.

Consider also the scene in which Agent Smith holds Neo down on the train tracks addressing him as Mr. Anderson (i.e. deadnaming him), but Neo insists that his name is Neo and refuses to let himself be killed by the oncoming subway. Now consider also that, at some point prior to filming, Lana Wachowski was feeling such intense despair brought on by their gender dysphoria that they considered throwing themselves in front of a train. With all the high concepts flying around, it's easy to forget what an intensely personal film The Matrix is for its creators. It was not some commercial film they did for a paycheque: for better and worse, they put every ounce of themselves into this thing, and its first two sequels.

Right. Agent Smith deadnames all of them, in fact, (he calls Cypher "Mr Reagan"). You could imagine Cypher as desperate to de-transition since living the truth is so hard.

100%, Cypher is a detransitioner and also depicted as a cowardly traitor: not a coincidence.

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