Born in Bondage

Some more philosophy from the movie, The Matrix.    

Agent Smith: Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.

One thing that nobody seems to have mentioned (though its not surprising) is the underlying Buddhist theory behind The Matrix. When Mr. Smith, one of the agents, is describing the evolution of The Matrix, he mentions a prior version. One in which all suffering and pain cease to exist. All of humanity was "living" in a perfect world devoid of unhappiness. The odd part, he says, is that it failed. Mr. Smith's theory is that suffering define's human experience. This is a parallel to the buddhist notion of suffering. From The Art of Happiness, "Within a Buddhist context, when one reflects on the fact that one's ordinary day-to-day existence is characterized by suffering, this serves to encourage one to engage in the practices that will eliminate the root causes of one's suffering." Taking this concept further, we find that the true goal of life is to, in fact, eliminate suffering (in the Buddhist context). With no suffering to eliminate, the mind has nothing to do. It cannot define the passage of time (think about it, only when suffering do we keep track of time), and has nothing to work on (self-improvement, etc). If there is nothing to do, the mind would quickly rot away (again in Buddhist context) and probably die. Sound like Mr. Smith's speech?