Transcendentalists do not follow the crowd for the sake of following the crowd, they believed that they should follow the path that their intuition leads them to. In Whitman's "O Me! O Life!" he describes society as "...the endless trains of the faithless -- of cities fill'd with the foolish." (Whitman, handout. 2) Whitman is referencing the people who don't know the truth, or in other words are faithless. The Matrix is set in the future, similar to a post-apocalyptic world the 'real world' is overrun by machines and the human population is nothing more than an energy source for the computers. The majority of the human race in this movie live contently in what is known as the Matrix; a computer generated world very similar to a video game. Neo is contacted by Morpheus who offers to show Neo the truth. Neo is offered two pills "Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is; you have to see it for yourself. This is your last chance, after this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, and the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." (Matrix.youtube) Morpheus gives Neo the decision to either go back to life as he knew it, or to find out the truth. Neo takes the red pill and follows Morpheus. The Matrix is very similar to Plato's Allegory of the Cave because when Neo 'steps outside of the cave and sees the real world' all of the agents set out to kill him. The agents are the government that controls the "cities fill'd with the foolish" (Whitman, handout, 2) To leave the Matrix Neo showed nonconformity and free thought, both are characteristics of traditional transcendentalists.
"The Matrix (1999) - The Pill Scene" Youtube. Warner Bros, 1999. May 18, 2011.
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