The Psychology Of Concealment
Why didn’t the artificially intelligent life-forms in the film ‘The Matrix’ place their human captives into an imaginary world where computer technology had not been invented, and could not be understood?
Like many cultures across the world, the Ilahita people of Papua New Guinea tell each other a story which, though recently imported into their own cycles of mythology, dates back to times before writing. It concerns a man who, finding a group of bird maidens bathing (after having discarded their feathers to appear as human), steals the feathers and takes the swan maiden captive. Here, in brief, is the version they tell:
“The First Man was walking along when he heard the unusual sound of laughter coming from nearby. He espied a group of cassowaries bathing in a pond. Having removed their skins, they had become beautiful human women. The man secretly stole the skin of one of the most fancied, so that later, when the cassowary-women emerged to resume their skins, the one he had chosen could not find hers. The man took her home with him and they began a married life.
Man and wife advanced to old age, after having had many children, the youngest son revealed to his mother where her skin had been hidden. She reacted by placing her cassowary skin back on and running into the forest. The man chased after her, but she exacted her revenge on him by striking him over the head with a spear, killing him”
(adapted from Tuzin 1997)
The form of this particular myth is local, referring as it does to cassowaries, a species of flightless emu-like bird found only in Papua New Guinea and a few surrounding areas. However, the general schema of the story is extremely generic, and similar versions – with swans, geese or even quetzal birds replacing cassowaries – are told all over the world: man sees bird-women bathing, steals one of the feather cloaks and takes the woman captive as his wife. Later on, she finds her feathers and returns to the wild.
Most importantly, in every version of the myth, at no point does the man destroy the feathers to keep the woman permanently captive.
There are numerous points to be made here. Duly noted is the feminist (but not necessarily true) point that was also expounded by poet and mythologist Robert Graves, namely that marriage for most women is little more than captivity. However, what concerns us here is the notion that the man in the myth does not destroy the feathers of the maiden, but conceals them.
Why is it that the man does this? The answer is not merely confined to narrative conventions of both myth and story-telling, but goes to the heart of the human experience.
It is said that by the time it is four years old, a child learns to conceal the truth from its parents. Before that age, lying or speaking of experience in any way other than the perceived truth seems to be impossible for most children. However, in most cultures, even as adults with full capabilities to deceive, we are often extremely uncomfortable with the notions of mistruths and lies.
Trust between individuals and groups is, in general, based not on ritual ideas of friendship, but on repeated experience of ‘proof’ – that is, one group or individual has a shared history with another of being proved trustworthy through speaking the perceived truth. Once this trust is set up, what a trusted individual or group says is often taken at face value. If, however, any deception occurs at any stage in the relationship, this must either be discovered, or – if the relationship is to continue – concealed.
And concealment it very often is. We can read a wide range of literature on this type of behaviour – from serial killers who keep parts of their victims’ bodies in their homes to governments who attempt to conceal compromising documents from the public gaze.
Only very rarely do we ever discover that such things have been destroyed.
To destroy something – especially something which reveals a deception – is not only to remove it from existence, it is also to remove it from the memory of existence. Here, then, lies the beginnings of a solution to the question.
Once something is completely removed from existence, we are robbed of the reminder of the deception, and this might be considered to be a good thing – out of sight, out of mind – but there seems to be a deep and unconscious human need to remember when we have lied.
Whether the revealing item is kept so that we are reminded to maintain the consistency of our (deceptive) story with what we have said before, or whether it is due to a hidden to desire to actually reveal our deception probably depends on the person. But on an unconscious level, there seems to still be a part of us that has not yet reached that stage at four years old where we can tell reality to be other than that which we perceive it to be, and it sends out constant discomfort signals during deception.
Thus, the man hides the feathers and lies to his wife over the years about her origins, her power and his legitimacy as her husband, yet cannot bring himself to make the final break with his deception and permanently destroy all record of his wife’s true nature.
On the other hand, there is also often great delight in deception, a delight in gaining power over others through mistruth and manipulative misinformation. The centre of this type of deception seems not to be that part of us which cannot lie, but the part which seeks to address social issues of status and dominance.
In this case, the deception-revealing object is not kept out of discomfort or as a reminder to fear, but as a keepsake of a job well done. A ‘one-over’ on those deceived.
Thus we find the serial killer keeps body parts in his home, not merely to be close to his victims, but also as a sign of one-upmanship against the police.
In both cases, the desire to reveal is deep seated. In the first instance, the revelation of lies may well be stressful but at least it finally puts to rest the discomfort and guilt of having deceived one’s fellow man. In the second instance, it seems there is a great chance to boast.
But there is also a third case, and it is most subtle. Most types of deception take the form of a complete concealment – squirreling away the lying so that none can see it – which is often then completely revealed at a later time. But in third case, the concealment takes place in full view of everyone.
This is known as hiding in plain sight and is a technique used by numerous governments and secret societies since time immemorial. One thinks of great Masonic monuments which double up as city halls or public offices, and whose clearly visible edifices conceal esoteric truths.(*).
The subtlety of this solution of concealment is that the deceptive object is seen every day, but is not understood to be deceptive in any way, because the average man or woman does not understand the symbolism it contains.
So, we come to the film ‘The Matrix’, in which human beings are enslaved without their knowledge to become power generators for artificially intelligent life forms. The humans are fed a ‘Matrix’ – a virtual world which resembles late 1990s daily life – to keep them sedated. But, curiously, just as in the myth of the cassowary maiden story, the objects of this deception – technology and artificial intelligence – is not destroyed from the virtual world.
The humans are not living in some kind of computerized Stone Age. It is perfectly possible to think about computerized technology and virtual worlds. Could it be that the AI life forms in the film are actually subconsciously guilty about their deception? Or perhaps they wish at some point to reveal the lying and thus boast of their superior intelligence?
No, the truth behind this particular plot device is that the deception is hidden in plain sight, where every man, woman and child can see it, but not understand its import.
As we see, however, in the film, there are a group of those who can see through the deception, and this is one of the messages behind the film as well as the myth.
For once we begin to understand the world more clearly, and attempt to remove ourselves from the ever-shifting sands of deception caused not only by our fellow man, but also by our own senses, we begin to see that all forms of deception and concealment are simply ‘hiding in plain sight’. We drop into the subconscious workings of human society and our own minds, and choose for ourselves which rules and conventions should be obeyed and which should be abandoned.
On this level, not even destruction of a deceptive object can lose its import, but since most things to one extent or another are hidden in plain sight, we can come to a place where we can see more and understand more, and change what seems deceptive and keep what seems true.
Only then can we face our fears, our guilts and even our boasts, give back the coat of feathers to the maiden and choose to live, not in deceit, but in freedom.
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(*) A particularly good example of this can be found in the city of Bristol , England . The city hall building is crescent-shaped and crowned at both ends with statues of golden unicorns. Standing proudly in front of the building is a nameless statue of a man holding a scroll and a sextant, looking towards the cathedral. All of these, to the initiated of the Masons, are clear symbols of esoterica, but are hidden in plain sight to those ‘not in the know’. There is even a Masonic meeting hall just around the corner from the city hall lending weight to my suggestion here.
References:
Donald Tuzin – ‘The Cassowary’s Revenge – The Life and Death of Masculinity in a New Guinea Society’, University of Chicago Press , 1997.
Robert Graves - 'The White Goddess', fabr & faber, amended and enlarged edition, 1961.
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