Dialectics: Fate and Control

Harry, you don’t need to worry about the future. It’s already been decided for you, long before you were born in a room with a crazy old lady and an evil, evil man. Neo, you too. You’re ‘the one’? Don’t know what that means? You’ll figure it out, we all have oodles and oodles of faith in you because we’ve heard it our whole live. We might live in this horrible wasteland, but we all know that you have the power to get us out.

You say I should go to the Oracle, because what she says is law?  But what if she tells that the one who had guided me all this way will die, and it will be my fault? This is insanity! I don’t want to be ‘the one’. That’s not how I want my life to end up! I can be whoever I want to be, just like my parents told me when I was a kid! I can make my own decisions, thank you very much.

I am all-knowing and all-powerful, and I can’t be defied. I may not have the power to change things, and make them my own, but what I can only speak the truth. I speak of the future, I speak of the past. I can inspire hope and dreams but also crush them. I can tell you what your ‘fate’ is, but are you ready? The future is heavy stuff; best leave it up to me. You can delude yourself with these ideas over ‘control’ and ‘freedom’. I might even let you make a few harmless choices along the way. Alas, the big stuff, I already know.

Even love? You’ll take away finding the most wonderful part of life from me, and expect me to just love this women [who only loves me because you told her she would] unconditionally? Why can’t I choose for myself, experience some heartbreak and maybe some happiness along the way? Ever heard of ‘it’s the journey, not the destination’? I don’t get a journey, thanks to you all knowing fate. All I get is pain and far too much stress to be any good.

You’re unhappy now, but what about afterwards when you’re a celebrated hero? Will you think your destiny is so bad then? All this wandering around, trying to figure out what you’re good at and who is trustworthy, isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. It just leads to useless dead time in an already short life. The better alternative is just being told your inevitable strengths and weaknesses, and other tidbits to, well how put this: take you to the right path.

But what if, even if I knew this information, what I was ‘born to do’ right from the state, but even with all that, not end up on the right path? What if some extraneous event occurred, one that you didn’t see coming when everything was decided that set me free? What if I could make my own decisions then? Would your word still be law? Would that convince all this people that I’m not ‘the one’ and I don’t want to be? Sure, being able to move at the speed of life is cool, but so is being able to go to sleep without fear at night.

Oh but my dear, that would assume I made a mistake! After all, I’m just another part of the matrix.

So what do we know? What is the truth? All we know is that we don’t. We could be controlled by some outside force, guiding out every move or manipulating our minds to do their bidding. Or we’re all just random parts of the universe, interacting randomly at a matter of our own will and the will of those around us. It’s up to us to choice which one we believe, and then to guide our actions as such. As Neo knows, it is possible to defy fate, if fate is real at all.