Buoy, he is sooooooooo fuckingly deep, so let me do a translation of his deep thoughts a la C. Wright Mills:
1. People have limited knowledge of facts beyond their immediate concerns.
2. Democracy calls for ordinary people making decisions on public matters that are usually beyond their immediate concern.
3. That creates a pardoxical situation inw hich people are asked to decide on issues on which theye have rather limited knowledge.
4. Since obtaining information is usually costly, many people often rely on alternative mechanisms that "make-sense" of empirical reality, such as conspiracy theories (which, btw, rely on anthropomorphic reductionism i.e. reducing systemic factors that are beyond the proponent's knowledge-level to something he/she can congitively grasp, that is, will power of human or human-like actors - comment mine, sws).
5. such alternative "sens-making" mechanisms are not necessarily false (in the factual sense) because what passes for valid knowldge in society (or "stock-knowledge" as sociologists call it) is determined by social consensus, instituionalized beliefs, norms of behavior, expectations (i.e. it is "socially constructed"). Consequently, socially accepted, "official" truths are on the same epistemological level as conspiracy theories and kindred sens-making mechanisms - one is not necessarily "closer to facts" than the other.
I hope I did not miss anything.
Now is my question: what is the purpose of genereous names dropping (Kant, Lacan, Freud, etc.) and obscure literary references? Is it:
a) a sign of conspicuous intellectual consumption; b) an exercise in recognition of intellectual property rights (i.e. recognizing proper "owners" of different ideas floating around) c) an exercise in embourgeoisment (i.e. making palatable to the bourgeois audience) of a simple and essentially subversive message of the film in question (see the note below) d) an example of language usage that obscures rather than reveals one's thoughts e) all of the above
NOTE: In the opinion of this writer, "The Matrix" is a very clever idea of introducing a basic Marxist concept of capitalist society to mass audience:
humans have value only as their labour power (the comparison to batteries); they are discarded as soon as they are drained out of their "juice"; however, they fall victims of false consciousness (culture, or the "matrix") that gives them illusions hiding the exploitative nature of the system.
wojtek