The ideal office world is the modern conception of heaven. When a programmer dies, he is dropped in a well-lit waiting room with worn but clever chairs. The wear and tear on the carpet in this room is the only sign of life. He sits there until he is called to the cherry oak desk behind which sits a man in an immaculate white suit. He wears perfect-mirror eyeglasses; he is untouchably hip. His ingeniously simple organizational system produces the file at a wave of his hand, the single-move, single-click of a mouse. Nothing about this man, this being, is unintentional. And beyond him are endless rows of dustless office chairs bathed in light—light emitted by an ever-so-slightly sunny chapel at the top of a hill reaching out of the heavy marble floor. This is where Good Management go when they die.
And so consider the Matrix. Although it is the case that we see blood, we are also told that it is not real blood, it is the digital replication of blood. It is in truth that clean, green code. The characters are walking parables, reflections of that historical Immaculate Office, Philosophy. Humans have always had a fascination with this, the perfect clean.
No man, it is ever seen, is the Perfect Philosopher. The wish, however, is that the Perfect Philosopher is self-creating. All that is necessary is the simple principle, the root, the core that defines his life, and all else must logically spring from this, defining every obvious action and allowing perfect self-controlled execution. The wish is that one might acquire this perfect object of Mind and through it grow to experience Nature's Whole Being—to enter the Kingdom of Heaven while still on earth—all for bearing in one's mind a little resolute mass of Truth. A kernel of impenetrable wisdom. The figurative Philosopher's Stone, perhaps. The allegories are too numerous to name. But this is the goal, the end, that thought should yield perfect thought and perfect thought should yield Perfect Being.
In the end, though, man is only really looking for a way out, not a way up. He will blind himself if it means that in the darkness of the cataract he can imagine any perfection, even the perfect inverse of Pure White. This grips almost the whole of human existence, this search for a Context, some attempt to bring the Apparent in line with the Ideal.
There can be nothing more than still my room, my computer, the cracked seeds and the dried drool and droppings and crumbs. A somewhat greasy keyboard over which hundreds of meals have been eaten. I cannot defend it, but I cannot escape it any more, either. We have not discovered here any great Defining Principle or even demolished Falsehood. I have no parable for you because I still have no dogma.