What is Happiness? The answer to this question has been something that has been sought by humanity throughout the ages. It comes as no surprise that this question is a constant theme in popular culture. The move The Matrix imaginatively presses a number of important questions on us, one of which regards the true nature of happiness. This question to a large extent revolves around the characters Neo and Cypher.
The dictionary definition of a matrix is a womb, a mold in which creatures are shaped and nourished. In the movie, the Matrix functions much like the cave from Plato’s famous simile. Its inhabitants are prisoners, locked in a false and untrue world. They, however, do not realize their ignorance and remain trapped, insisting at all costs the truth of their world. When one of the prisoners (Neo) is liberated, it is a painful process, but once liberated is very happy and, as in the platonic simile meets violent opposition when he returns to free the other prisoners, both from their guards and the prisoners themselves.
Morpheus is the mysterious man who liberates Neo from the Matrix; he is the unmanned agent freeing prisoners from the cave. The name Morpheus is that of the Greek God of sleep, who better to understand the difference between the “dream” of the Matrix and the wakefulness of the real. It is a crucial theme that to awake, one must first dream that one is awake.
Happiness is not a mood, like when mouse spends time with the women in the red, but a long-term state. Contentment over a long-term is different from happiness over long-term in that it is the tendency of contentment to reduce itself to a state of mind severed from an appraisal of the objective facts. The content slave, resigned to the limitations of life, is the perfect example. Or the example of the well-bred human battery cell of The Matrix. In this situation, you can certainly be content, but you cannot be happy. However much a person’s state of mind is tranquil, there must be a fact of the matter relative to which it can be evaluated. Cypher shows opposition to this. He wants to free from reality in order to be happy. He embodies the question about the difference between contentment and happiness. His answer is clear; contentment in a life of illusion is happiness. Here are two examples that can illustrate why Cypher is wrong and Neo made the right decision. Suppose a drug was invented that was continuously and painlessly pumped into you. You are unaware of this drug, and experience long-term tranquility even though your life alternates between periods as a couch potato and violent murders. Your tranquility is merely a state of contentment and indeed an artificially induced state of mind. Or imagine that you habitually drank too much moonshine and then regretted it in the morning for years. When your are drunk, you were content, while sober you were terribly unhappy. This sort of experience is common and shows that one cannot be happy if one harbors a well-grounded standing dissatisfaction with oneself. While happiness is inseparable from a state of mind, it is distinguishable from contentment because it is also inseparable from an arrangement of one’s life and more deeply because any such arrangement of one’s life must be evaluatively liked to the notion of what sort of life is worth living. The various kinds of self-delusion upon which an erroneous sense of happiness may be built all suffer from three defects, they are unstable, they are a truncated partaking that do not measure up to their own objects, and finally, they are not as fulfilling and satisfying as the real thing since they are a derivative of your fantasy rather than a product of your being. In order to have happiness, one needs a right understanding of reality about oneself and what is truly the case in the world. In order to flesh out this view a bit further, we must propose three theses of happiness. First, that tranquility is connected with the long-range sense of happiness discussed previously with the notion of the proper ordering of soul and that the enemy of happiness is anxiety, that kind of splinter in your mind that keeps you awake at night. Second, that one fundamental view associates happiness with tranquility and the other follows Aristotle in associating happiness with activity. This provides us with a means of assessing claims to happiness and how people can think they are happy when they are (as the Matrix portrays) no more than human batteries. Third that neither of the two basic alternative views of happiness are adequate alone. One cannot accept happiness with only tranquility as it is barren, dry, and forsaking much of that which is the value of human life.
Happiness as tranquility requires evaluative assessment of life, otherwise it would be difficult to distinguish between contentment and tranquility.