The third Matrix film, The Matrix Revolutions, has just come out. Which raises a question. The Matrix films are brilliant. But what is their real message? What, aside from special effects, is the core of their appeal? We have a hunger for paranoia, and the Matrix feeds it brilliantly. It's a paranoia that goes right to the heart of epistemology's chief question--how do we know what we know?

But is philosophy and semiotics a distraction from something much more primal? We have been encouraged by the post-Foucaultian culture to see the negative side of everything. We see influence and expression as manipulation. We see our own ways of expressing ourselves to others as tricks--NLP-style devices with which to manipulate others. Everything is a con game played on us by forces bigger than we are. We've put our brains in permanent danger-mode.

We've been victimized by the ultimate manipulation--the imposition on all of us of a French philosopher's perpetual depression. We've been made to share the curse of this gay thinker's pain, his legitimate sense of oppression by the mid-20th century's homophobic society. We've been made to share Foucault's literal fears and loathings. Foucault wrote up his agonies as interpretations of history in books like his Archaeology of Knowledge, his History of Sexuality, and his Religion and Culture. We've been victimized by the perverse power Foucault's writing and his lecturing gave him--the power over the brains of those he was seducing, the power to make a generation believe that someone else was trying to achieve what he in fact achieved--the kidnap of our moods and minds.

It is time to see the opportunities, not just the traps in what's ahead and in our daily lives. It's time to see the rocks of desolation so we can steer a course away from them toward joy. Joy is something humans seldom achieve. Joy that comes from accomplishing something. Joy comes of adding to the lives of other human beings. The Matrix is a joy in its own way. But its message screams out something accidental--that joy is the ultimate challenge, not finding new ways to be paranoid.

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