Steve the Owl's Blog

One of the greatest movies of the last 20 years is The Matrix, the sci-fi/action thriller styarring Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne as humans leading the struggle agaisnt Aritifical Intelligence gone haywire. I think that the reason for this movie’s success is because it is a movie that did not want to be a silly action movie that was just like everything else out there. There are deep and powerful questions about philosophy, theology, and the nature of truth in this tale of a fake world that enslaves humanity.

A Quick Disclaimer

I am not arguing that capitalism is an evil system. Capitalism by itself is neither good nor evil, but a tool that can be used for either one. I am not a utopian at all, and I consider myself to be a Keynsian in part because I believe that John Maynard Keynes made the best effort to be practical in his theories.

Are We Slaves?

The key theme to The Matrix is that we live in a fantasy world that enslaves us. One of the goals of network marketing is to give us time freedom so we can do the things we want to do. When we think of the path most of us take, we come out of college tens of thousands of dollars in debt, buy a house with a 30-year mortgage, and spend, spend, spend to the point where almost all of our money goes to lenders before all is done. In that sense, I think that the idea of building a business to free ourselves from our financial traps is definitely an appealing one.

Where the Analogy Doesn’t Hold

In the movie, humans worried about the impact of artificial intelligence, and they tried to hide the sun in order to disable the solar-powered Sentients. However, they found out that humans emitted all of the bioelectricity and heat that they needed. At this point, they decided to grow humans and keep them in a virtual reality fantasy (The Matrix), killing them and using them for their energy when they die in the Matrix. In one sense, I think that we are distracted by too much entertainment and oblivious to the truth of our economic picture.

However, I think that there is the ultimate fact that a lot of people who start their own business are not doing so with the thought of breaking away from the working world. Personally, I love teaching, and as much as I enjoy the business, it is not the same thing as teaching about early church history, and I want to continue to do my job, but have the ability to choose the job where I want to work, not the one where I have to. Then again, if everyone left the workforce to open their own business, we wouldn’t have anyone to do the things that makes society go, so I think that it is better that some people decide that they want to keep their day job and run their business because they love both, and that is the real promise of network and Internet marketing

Tags: capitalism, have to vs. want to, internet marketing, network marketing, The Matrix, time freedom

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Business, Culture, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.