Metamorphoses of The Spirit

Nietzsche wrote this idea on the metamorphosis of the spirit, going from a camel to a lion and a lion to a child. The first stage is the camel, and as the camel you are eager to prove yourself worthy of the truth so you seek for the most burdensome of insights and force yourself to live by these insights as a rite of passage. Over time this burden causes the risk of being poisoned by despair and bitterness by the spirit of revenge.

Camel

Next stage of the metamorphosis is the lion. The lion starts when the camel goes through a spiritual transformation discovering there is no god, he is dead. The lion assumes that since god is dead anything is okay to do. They realize that there is nothing holding them back to impose their values on others and forcing their own will on the world. As the lion is making their own rules upon the world they encounter a dragon. The dragon is Nietzsche's depiction of social norms in the society. The lion must face this dragon in mortal combat to get past societal views to be able to flourish in the spiritual transformation the individual is trying to make.

Lion

Lastly is the child, the concept of the child is to gain maturity by rediscovering the seriousness of a child at play. The child spirit is to bring happiness and well being. It is, what Nietzsche says, "The innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred 'Yes.'" The lion spirit becomes a child by affirming the statement "I will" and their values that they want to adopt in order to complete the spiritual transformation.

Child

Free Will or Fate

The Matrix is a reality built on fate. The people in the Matrix go to the Oracle to find out their fate, and even if they don't feel like it'll come true it does. Like for Neo the Oracle said he has a gift but that he is waiting for a new life, he got that gift by becoming part of the Matrix. For Trinity the Oracle said she will fall in love with the One and she did because Neo's gift was to become the One and she fell in love with Neo. Morpheus' fate by the Oracle was to find the One and he did because he found Neo and led and prepared him for his fate of becoming the One.

Trinity, Neo, Morpheus

Plato's Cave and Mine

Plato's Cave

Plato made an allegory to a Cave to represent the human condition and how he opens his eyes to his true purpose. 

At first there are two different groups of humans; the People and the Prisoners. The Prisoners are all the way in the back of Cave and they can't see the light coming from the opening. There is a fire that the People make shadow puppets with, and that is the only thing the Prisoners can see. By Prisoner Plato mean humans that are going through a struggle or hard times that they can't find a way out of. The People are still going through the struggle and is still in the Cave of lies and deceit but they are close to getting over it. 

When the person comes out of being a Prisoner he sees that the shadows are just statues and figurines of ignorance. Once he knows that the illusions that he was looking at weren't reality he starts to get over the hardship in his life to become a People. Then he makes it out of the Cave and into the sunlight.

The Sun is reality, a reality that the former Prisoner didn't expect. But once he sees this he can't go back to not knowing what the world is really like, so he has to adjust to his new life in the enlightenment period and go fully through the process of getting over his struggle.

My Cave

The Truman Show

In the Truman Show, Truman has lived his whole life as a lie, but he doesn't know about it. His whole life is a reality TV show but he doesn't even know about it. His friend since he was 7 is an actor, his wife for a while is an actress. The town that he lives in is the biggest film studio in the world because it's all fake. Descartes said, in a nutshell, that life was a game of deceit that God or a genius or a demon was playing on him, that nothing in his life was real. The deceiver/s in the Truman Show is/are the director for making Truman go through with this since he was born without any say in the matter, and the actors and actress in Truman's life that go through with lying to him about his life.

Truman

Throughout this whole lie he is forced to live, the one thing Truman can actually depend on being true and genuine is his own existence. Descartes says that "Then without doubt I exist also if he deceives me, and let him deceive me as much as he will, he can never cause me to be nothing so long as I think that I am something." Connecting back to Truman the quote means that even though Christof made his life a whole lie he wasn't able to fully deceive him because Truman thought he was real and that is all that mattered.

The Hunger Games and Machiavelli

The Hunger Games is an interesting book/movie; in both the movie and the book a girl Katniss is put up with 23 other people from the 12 districts around the country of Panem in the annual Hunger Games. In the middle of all the districts is the Capitol; the children in the Capitol don't go into a Reaping for the Games, and they are very privileged. Also in the Capitol is President Snow and the way he rules Panem is more unorthodox then regular presidents.

President Snow looking evil

Niccolo di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was an Italian philosopher who came up with the theory, for leaders, to be feared more than loved. He said, " ... a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated... " by this quote he means that a leader should want to be feared than love because he can not control who loves or hates him but he can control who fears him. President Snow  is in a way different then the leaders Machiavelli describe.
Machiavelli would assess Snow as a leader that would rather be feared than loved. He wants to be feared to the districts, but in the Capitol he wants them to love him. The districts rebelled against the capitol when there were 13 districts instead of just 12. In return of the rebellion the Capitol made the Hunger Games and genetic mutations in normal animals. They made Jabber-Jays to spy on people linked to the rebellion; and Tracker Jackers to sting people and make them have hallucinations. Then there is the Hunger Games, He didn't come up with the Games but he reinforces them and if anything goes wrong he punishes them. At the end of the Games the head gamemaker, Seneca Crane, lets both Katniss and Peeta live after the berry incident. Snow wasn't too happy with this, so he locked Crane in a room with the same nightlock berries and made him choose a slow starving death or eat them and die painlessly.

Seneca's poison berries

So in the end, President Snow got what he wanted, Seneca dead and Katniss knowing he wanted her dead as well.

Snow crowning Katniss

Snow is an odd fellow, not like most leaders. He wants to be feared more than loved, but will do anything in his power to have the Capitol love him and praise him. He makes the districts fear him so they think they can't defeat him to keep away the idea of rebellion. So maybe Machiavelli would assess Snow the way he thinks a prince/leader should be, but Snow has some qualities that don't fully add up to Machiavelli's standards.