Were you paying attention Neo?
What’s your favorite quote from the movie, The Matrix?
Do you remember the scene where Morpheus first takes Neo back into the matrix?
They’re walking around and Morpheus is literally showing Neo how the world works when Neo gets distracted by a beautiful woman who passes him by.
That’s when Morpheus says one of my favorite Matrix quotes, “were you paying attention, Neo? Or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?”
It got me thinking about the symbolism of that character.
Someone on Reddit brilliantly said that the woman in the red dress represented “a red herring”, a piece of information that is intended to be misleading.
Then I read an article that spoke about how she triggered the “red dress effect”, a phenomenon in which a woman wearing red clothing is perceived to be more appealing than she is when wearing other colors.
To me, the woman in the red dress represents the loud and vibrant things that are deliberately shown to us just to keep us distracted.
The real reasons why we’re divided won’t be found in the headlines… and the things that are put into the books aren’t the problem. No, that’s just the “red dress”.
It’s the powerful and revolutionary ideas that the system fights tooth and nail to make sure stays out of the books that we should be paying attention to…
That is if we truly want to liberate ourselves from the matrix of today.
Felecia is a software engineer by trade but a philosopher at heart who has amassed a following of over 500K on TikTok by talking about society. Felecia chats about social constructs, social experiments, social programming, and social psychology.
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