Today, we simply accept that leaders lie; not just occasionally but habitually. Trump did. Johnson does. Putin got there way before either of them. And yet, strangely, part of Johnson’s appeal has always been said to be his “authenticity”. He is a real person. His history of lying did not bother many people, nor his history of betraying everyone he has worked for or every woman he has been involved with. The electorate could not be expected to know the truth about Borisconi’s career.

I started calling him that because he always was — pre-Trump — the only politician with a similarly acute understanding of the incestuous relationship between politicians and the media. Surely he could be king of both? Or so he thought. He could control what he understood to be the most important thing about power, which was not “truth” but “the narrative”. His narrative was “fun”. For Bunga Bunga parties just substitute batshit-crazy Jennifer Arcuri and a Christmas quiz.

But things fall apart. Some lies matter more than others. This must have been a shock to Borisconi because the visual evidence of his lies — the video, the photo — cuts through. No amount of wordplay or random classical references can make people unsee what they have seen. Mirabile dictu!

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Just as the CCTV footage of Matt Hancock snogging his bit on the side did for him, so these photos did for Downing Street. Those who worked for Borisconi were sent out to lie for him, and then he lied about them too. This we know for certain. It is not an idea, an opinion, or an interpretation. It is a fact.

But it’s not necessarily the end for him. He may stagger on until the next wave of the virus has passed. Who, quite frankly, would want to take over right now? He may chuck it in, not because he suddenly acquires a sense of morality or even shame, but because he is skint and there is money to be made in them there hills of after-dinner buffoonery.

I’m so tired of writing about the mendacity and entitlement of the man, though. I would far rather talk about another man who has also made me think about the nature of reality this week (and whom I unashamedly adore): Keanu Reeves.

Normally, press junkets for a new film are nothing more than dull promotion. But in their interviews for The Matrix Resurrections, Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss answered questions about the nature of reality in interesting ways. The Matrix, after all, is an entire world of distraction — and an influential one at that. Who could have known in 1999 how it would infiltrate our culture?

Take “redpilling”, a term which has come to be used by many men’s rights activists, largely thanks to a Reddit thread in which men discuss waking up to the reality that women oppress men. Not all these guys are incels, but redpilling is nearly always talked about online by those on the anti-feminist Right.

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For some, the notion of questioning reality that The Matrix so cleverly explored has morphed into a denial of reality. Sure, men are oppressed — but more so than women? Is that the radical breakthrough that the red pill offers? Apparently so.

Will facts and statistics change their minds? I know now that we are living in a profoundly anti-science moment. Anti-vaxxers do not believe in science. Many trans-activists do not accept basic biology. Grace Lavery talks of a liberated future in which transwomen like herself will be able to have abortions — and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I have fought my entire life for women’s right to abortion. But since transwomen cannot get pregnant, I wonder how this is progressive, how this fantasy of womanhood is in any way radical, and not in some way deeply insulting to women’s actual experience of abortion? Can we really say physical reality has had its day?

Reeves talked in an interview about having dinner with a director who had his three teenage children with him. They had not seen The Matrix, so he explained that it was about a guy in a virtual world who was trying to get back to reality. The young girl asked: “Why? Who cares if it’s real?” Keanu said: “You don’t care if it’s real?” She said: “No”. When the interviewer asked Keanu how it made him feel, he paused and said: “Awesome.”

Are we the 17-year-old girl at dinner with Keanu Reeves who no longer cares what is real? I’m not convinced. Reality TV, itself scripted and managed, may be coming to the end of its cruel reign. Yet it was Ant and Dec on I’m A Celebrity, gunning for our Prime Minister, who alerted the Westminster bubble to the idea that the non-stop pizza, quiz, cheese and wine gatherings during lockdown was ‘cutting through’. A basic unfairness was exposed; a truth about rules not applying to those who govern us.

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It was almost as if reality mattered, that endless lying was no longer acceptable. There is always something that punctures the Matrix. It’s there in The Communist Manifesto: “Man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Sure, it’s more comfortable to be fooled. But in the end, we have to do the work. We can argue forever about subjective and objective truth but hold the hand of a new baby or the hand of a person who is about to die and tell me that everything is virtual and nothing matters.

You can’t can you? The glitch in the Matrix is where we find ourselves. It’s the only place to be.

Mattis was thinking of the philosopher’s Meditation on First Philosophy, championed the importance of doubt by hypothesising that everything he thought he knew about reality might be an illusion created by an evil demon. Of course, The Matrix is about a lot more than that. The Wachowskis themselves have cited a litany of influences: ranging from Homer’s Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville to the cybernetics expert Kevin Kelly, Schopenhauer, Buddhism and Jean Baudrillard, whose 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation appears in the movie. The phrase “desert of the real” comes from its very first page, although the man himself sniffed that “The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the Matrix that the Matrix would have been able to produce”.

Critics and fans have suggested numerous other influences: Plato’s cave, Hilary Putnam’s brain in a vat, Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine, Philip K Dick, Plato, Socrates, Kant, Marx, Hegel, Lacan, Dostoevsky, Sartre and even Doctor Who. The essays in the 2002 book The Matrix and Philosophy contradict each other to hilarious extent: It’s Buddhist! It’s Christian! It’s Marxist! It’s postmodern! Yet none are wrong exactly because the movie is a mash-up of ideas, not a thesis. When the Wachowskis were asked in a web chat how many of these perceived allusions were intentional, they replied in the teasing spirit of a Sixties Bob Dylan press conference: “All of it.”

In the week that Matrix Resurrections, the fourth film in the franchise, opens, it’s worth remembering that before The Matrix was released in March 1999, it was unflatteringly compared to the 1995 flop Johnny Mnemonic, another film about virtual reality starring Keanu Reeves.

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But it was no Johnny Mnemonic. Raking in almost half a billion dollars, it proved that Hollywood could tap into the new immersive nature of gaming, paved the way for the superhero imperium, and (to the immense benefit of Christopher Nolan) made explicitly philosophical non-franchise blockbusters a going concern. Better still, and despite two widely disliked sequels, it became a cultural touchstone. The Wachowskis talked about “making mythology relevant in a modern context” and they succeeded in spades. The Matrix has become a modern myth and, like any myth, it has been interpreted in radically different ways.

The brilliance of The Matrix is that it can make anybody feel clever. It signals that it is about something profound but the basic conceit is very simple. You could grasp it by knowing your Descartes or just by listening to Queen: “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?”

Reeves’s character believes he is a coder called Thomas Anderson, living in a boring 1999. In fact, he resides comatose in a gooey pod in the late 22^nd century, where he serves as an organic battery for humanity’s new AI overlords. His life has been a simulation, a dream, the Matrix. Waking up is a kind of rebirth. At the end, he tells those damned dirty machines that he will usher in “a world without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible”.

The Matrix was perfectly timed. The AI law enforcer Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) explains that the Matrix takes place in an infinite 1999 because it was “the peak of your civilisation”. Movie-goers in that period would have had a different impression. There were multiple examples of what the critic Joshua Clover calls “Edge of the Construct” movies, in which “reality” is revealed to be a hi-tech charade created for nefarious purposes: The Truman Show, Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor. Then there were what you might call “Work sucks” movies: Fight Club, American Beauty and Office Space — in which the cubicle is a prison cell.

“That decade was so comfortable,” Mattis told Raftery. “The stock market was up, and people were making money. But there was a splinter in the mind’s eye: something felt wrong. In all of that comfort, people started thinking, ‘There’s something missing here.’” It’s no surprise that the film’s climactic song is Wake Up by Rage Against the Machine, the band who soundtracked the enormous protests against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle a few months later. Still, there’s a temptation to tell the filmmakers of 1999, y’know, things could be worse.

The Matrix also reminds us how new and raw the internet felt in 1999. Even with the first dotcom boom in full swing, online culture retained a freewheeling, anarchic energy. For many message-board users, the internet was an opportunity to craft a new identity from scratch and an online community could be far more rewarding — more real — than one in “meatspace”. Even within the Matrix, Thomas Anderson lives a double life as the hacker Neo, the hacker being the quintessential cyberpunk hero.

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One consequence of online culture that was already evident in 1999 was the spread of conspiracy theories. The Matrix, in which everything Neo knows about his life is indeed a lie propagated by a malign conspiracy, was a timely text. The last movie to use imagery from Lewis Carroll’s stories so prominently was Oliver Stone’s JFK. “This world has the Matrix all over the place,” Lana Wachowski said at the time. “People accept ways of thinking that are imposed upon them rather than working them out for themselves. The free-thinking people are those who question every sort of Matrix, every system of thought or belief, be it political, religious, philosophical.”

These are worthwhile questions to ask but the answers aren’t always pretty and the cult of The Matrix has taken a sinister turn. In 2012, a group of men’s rights activists founded a subreddit called TheRedPill. In The Matrix, the human explication machine Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) gives Neo two pills and a choice. “After this there is no turning back,” he says thrillingly. “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more.”

Neo’s choice is a fable of courage, self-discovery, empowerment and radicalisation. To TheRedPill users, the idea of a world which favours men is the simulation and systemic bias against men is the reality. Feminists are the Agents, I guess. You can see why men’s rights activists might relate to Trinity’s (Carrie-Anne Moss) assessment of Neo: “I know why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night you sit at your computer.” He’s the discontented nerd who becomes a kick-ass messiah.

The metaphor has achieved broader popularity on the Right, from incels to Infowars, and QAnon to full-blown neo-Nazis, so much so that when Maroon 5 called their 2017 album Red Pill Blues, they had to clarify that they were simply Matrix fans and not fascist conspiracy theorists. Ironically, the red pill represents being awakened, which is also the meaning of woke.

There are, of course, other readings. To one group of fans, the red pill bears a suspicious resemblance to the brand of prescription oestrogen that was popular in the Nineties. Lana came out as a trans woman in 2012 (after a decade of rumours), followed by Lilly in 2016. Inevitably, this gave rise to the theory that The Matrix is a trans allegory, in which the “splinter in your mind, driving you mad” is gender dysphoria, names and bodies are mutable, and Morpheus is Neo’s therapist, guiding him into his new identity.

In 2016, Lilly approved of this theory in the-more-the-merrier terms, “because it’s an excellent reminder that art is never static” and “the ideas of identity and transformation are critical components in our work”. Four years later, however, she went further: “That was the original intention but the world wasn’t quite ready.” The androgynous character Switch was originally intended to be a man in the real world and a woman in the Matrix. “The Matrix stuff was all about the desire for transformation but it was all coming from a closeted point of view,” Lilly said.

Yet this alone doesn’t justify one Atlantic writer’s bald claim that the film itself is “an allegory of gender dysphoria, as its creators have repeatedly said”. In fact, I couldn’t find a single mention of a trans subtext in any of the books about The Matrix published prior to Lana’s transition. The tortuous passages about it in gender-critical feminist Helen Joyce’s Trans are a good illustration of the problem with taking this idea too literally. To quote the trans writer Andrea Long Chu: “Allegorically is the least interesting way to read anything. Nothing ruins a question like an answer; the world is weirder than that.”

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An allegory is a story where the author’s message is coherent and undeniable. A myth is fluid and ambiguous, open to diverse and contradictory interpretations. In a revealing 2012 New Yorker profile, Lana Wachowski remembered being confused and frustrated as a child by the black monolith in 2001 until her father told her it was a symbol. “That simple sentence went into my brain and rearranged things in such an unbelievable way that I don’t think I’ve been the same since,” she said. “Something clicked inside.” It’s not just that the monolith is a symbol; it’s that Kubrick refused to explain what it symbolised. It is more myth than allegory. In a single interview, Kubrick could have made the movie half as interesting.

The Wachowskis are not so taciturn. Last year, when Elon Musk tweeted “Take the red pill” and Ivanka Trump replied “Taken!”, Lilly tweeted back: “Fuck both of you.” I can see why the sisters might want to reimpose some authorial control over the meaning of The Matrix now that “all of it” includes some horrific stuff. Like Matt Furie, the cartoonist who created Pepe the Frog, they’ve seen their work appropriated by the far-Right and that can’t feel good. But the price of creating a modern myth is that it can’t be controlled — and any attempt to do so can only diminish it.

As some viewers prepare to unravel the ideas in Matrix Resurrections, it’s important to remember that the first movie is not a philosophical treatise but a wildly entertaining Hollywood spectacle. Of all the answers the Wachowskis have given to the eternal question “What is The Matrix about?”, my favourite is the most flippant: “It’s about robots vs kung fu.” True enough. If it weren’t also about that, we wouldn’t be talking about it at all.

LARP, or live action role-playing, is an offshoot of the fantasy roleplaying subculture. It involves dressing up in costume and acting out a fantasy-fiction game narrative in real time and space, sometimes over several days. A witty friend once characterised the experience as something akin to ‘cross-country pantomime’.

Thanks to lockdown, no one’s LARPing this year — at least not in the cross-country pantomime sense. But the word ‘LARP’ has escaped into the wild: far from being the preserve of fantasy fans, I’ve noticed it appearing with increasing frequency in political discourse.

When riot police finally pushed activists out of the Chapel Hill Autonomous Zone following the murder of one joyriding teenager and serious wounding of another by CHAZ ‘security’, resistance to the advancing riot shields was so paltry it prompted contemptuous accusations of ‘revolutionary larping’. Weird Christian Twitter (it’s a thing) hosts arguments where people are accused of larping more traditionalist theologies than they truly espouse. Still further out on the fringes, the QAnon conspiracy rabbit hole (don’t go there) is fiercely defended by its True Believers against accusations that it is, in fact, a bunch of people LARPing.

Around the time my friends were discovering LARP, I got into LARP’s Very Online cousin, Alternate Reality Gaming (ARGs). An artefact of the age before Facebook and Twitter colonised most of the internet, ARGs are a hybrid of online treasure hunt, mystery story, and live-action immersive theatre. The first mass-participation ARG was a promotional stunt for the 2001 film AI, and featured a series of fiendish clues for participants to crack and follow, which unlocked further elements of story including live-action segments.

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For a moment in the mid-Noughties, ARGs looked like the future of storytelling. The idea of internet communities over-writing stable systems of meaning with playful new narratives that danced back and forth between the web and real world felt refreshing and subversive. With hindsight, though, the phenomenon was just a more-than-usually-creative moment in a widespread unmooring of reality that’s been under way for decades.

It’s not all the fault of the internet. In 1955, the philosopher J L Austin developed a theory of ‘performative’ language: that is, language that does something to reality in the act of being spoken. ‘I pronounce you man and wife’ is an example of performative speech — words that effect change through the act of being spoken.

Then, in 1993, the queer theorist Judith Butler borrowed the concept of ‘performative’ language wholesale and applied it to sex and gender, arguing that the identities ‘man’ and ‘woman’ — along with the bodies and biologies associated with those identities — are performative. In taking these roles on, Butler claimed, we make them real.

While these ideas pre-date mass adoption of the internet, the notion that we participate in creating our own realities has been wildly accelerated by social media. Online, it’s easy to get the impression that we can reinvent ourselves entirely, independent of our bodies or other dull ‘meatspace’ constraints. Unsurprisingly, Butler’s conception of sex and gender as performance has long since escaped the petri dish of academia and, like the concept of LARPing, is evolving rapidly in the wild.

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Strikingly, the word ‘performative’ has also mutated. Today, it isn’t used as Butler did, to mean “a performance that shapes reality”, but the opposite: an insincere performance for social kudos. So, for example, celebrity endorsements of social justice orthodoxies are often accused of being ‘performative’. It means much the same as ‘larping’, but with an added payload of cynicism. So where ‘LARPing’ means “playacting at something you wish you were”, ‘performative’ means “playacting at something you don’t really believe”.

Meanwhile, the LARP is no longer confined to cheery camping trips accessorised with pretend armour. Back in the noughties, online communities refactoring reality to fit a fantasy storyline felt like a fun game, but as I stare into the sucking void of the QAnon conspiracy, that perspective now seems hopelessly naïve. It’s not a game today: it’s how we do politics.

Liberal commentators spend a great deal of energy trying to explain why this is bad. Countless writers ‘fact-check’ Trump’s bloviations, seemingly unaware that from the perspective of reality-as-ARG, the fact that Trump is lying doesn’t matter. Nor does it really matter whether QAnon is real or not. Reality is, to a great extent, beside the point.

Laurie Penny got closer to the truth in this 2018 piece, where she characterises the very notion of a ‘marketplace of ideas’ as being a kind of LARP: “a Classical fever-dream of a society where pedigreed intellectuals freely exchange ideas in front of a respectful audience”. The reality, she argues, is that this ‘marketplace of ideas’ is less free, rational exchange than dick-swinging theatre.

Those who like to imagine this pessimistic perspective is new, wholly the fault of the Orange Man (or perhaps Facebook), should recall the words of an unnamed aide to George W Bush, quoted in 2004 on the relationship between facts, reality and the military invasion of Iraq:

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The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works any more,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Though his approach was less overtly hubristic, Tony Blair’s embrace of spin reflected a similar belief in his own ability to manipulate public narratives. ‘Political communications’ has only grown in significance since those days, and taken a self-referential turn. Today it’s as common for commentators to criticise a politician for performing badly at a presser — for poor-quality larping, or bad theatre in Penny’s formulation — as for saying things that are immoral or factually wrong.

Donald Trump is distinct from George W Bush not so much in disdaining facts as in lacking the religious conviction Bush deployed to fill in the gaps left behind by their disregard. But both, in different ways, embodied or embody the idea that what you believe is what is. If you LARP hard enough, this view says, your larp will come true.

Boris Johnson’s administration has something of the same cavalier attitude to the relationship between facts and rhetoric. To date, the handling of coronavirus has routinely over-promised and under-delivered, while seeming indifferent to the disorienting effect on public life of a string of announcements only very loosely tethered to everyday experience.

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It’s not a coincidence that this larpification of politics has evolved in tandem with a public fixation on ‘evidence-based policy’. The political polarity of absolute LARP — blatant political lying — and absolute insistence on evidence are two sides of the same loss of faith in a common understanding of reality.

If you’re not convinced, consider SAGE, the government’s scientific advisory committee. Then consider ‘Independent SAGE’, a kind of counter-SAGE comprising scientists every bit as eminent as those on SAGE. This august body produces its own carefully evidence-based reports, which are then used as a foundation from which to disagree with whatever positions the Tories choose to adopt from official SAGE.

Who do we believe? That’s politics. If the Brexit debate hadn’t already killed your faith in ‘the evidence’, the competing claims of SAGE and counter-SAGE should be the death-blow. There is no dispassionate foundation of facts we can deploy to take the politics out of political decisions. The original LARPers might have a fun weekend, then pack up and go back to their normal lives; but in its political sense, there’s no outside to the game. It’s larping all the way down.

Some parts of our culture are coping better with this shift than others. Among the worst performers, to my eye, are mainstream liberals of both left and right. Many have responded to the larpification of everything by concluding that in losing objectivity we’ve lost reality. Some then imagine they can make reality whatever they want it to be by sheer force of will (the Trump/Bush approach). Others suggest we can fix things by supplying enough facts to prove whatever we already believed (the SAGE/counter-SAGE approach). Others, such as Laurie Penny, try to refuse to play.

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But we haven’t lost reality, just the fixed vantage point we pretended we had from which to evaluate it. What we have instead is a kind of reality-shaping free-for-all, and there’s no opting out.

As most of us flounder, disoriented, we’re starting to see subcultures adapting. The old story about the Inuit having 50 words for snow is (appropriately) itself probably fake news. But much as a snow-dwelling people might be expected to develop specialist terminology for different types of frozen precipitation, we should understand the emergence of words like ‘larp’ and ‘performative’ as analogous. We’re developing a specialist vocabulary for types of unreality.

We’re also having to find new ways to talk about the reality that, inconveniently, refuses to go away completely. The grim story of the Iraq invasion and its destructive and bloody aftermath gave the lie to Bush’s messianic faith in his capacity to create a new reality to order. Humans still can’t really change sex. And no amount of fiddling the statistics can bring back those people who’ve already died of coronavirus.

The political future turns on our being able to get used to parsing our new Babel for what’s actually happening, and what actually matters. We have to get used to doing this without trying to eliminate the element of LARP (spoiler: can’t be done) or pretending we can abolish reality (ditto).

But there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. If the ground is moving under all our feet now, the way forward is learning how to dance.