So, it’s the late fourth century, and you’re a British monk named Pelagius. You travel to Rome and are appalled by the low moral standards of the place. Maybe you’re stuffy, but you attribute the general air of laxity to Augustine, who believes man can attain perfection only through divine grace, not human effort. This just sounds to you like an excuse not to try.

You believe free will means that we are free to make good choices — and that we should be severely punished if we don’t.

So you track down Augustine in North Africa, where he tells you to take it easy. A guy can strive for perfection but can do only so much. Besides, it’s the effort that counts. But, of course, the argument doesn’t end there.

Which is why, if the two of you were to return to earth 16 centuries later and were looking to catch a movie, you might decide on a double feature of “Limitless” and “The Adjustment Bureau,” then continue the debate at Applebee’s.

In “The Adjustment Bureau,” Matt Damon plays David Norris, an idealistic young politician whose every move is controlled by pollsters and political consultants. When he falls in love with a free-spirited dancer (Emily Blunt), he learns that his fate has been preordained by an omnipotent bureaucrat known as the Chairman (who is presumably God, or Frank Sinatra), who has sent a team of celestial functionaries to earth to make sure David sticks to the plan. Stubbornly, David still strives to avoid a fate that he has been told is unavoidable. David is the perfect politician — but he perfects himself only as a human being, the movie suggests, in his struggle for the transcendence of true love.

Then there is “Limitless.” In this film, Bradley Cooper plays a failed writer named Eddie Morra who stumbles upon a stash of magical pills that allow him to blossom into the ultimate version of himself. Before the pills, Eddie is a blocked romantic, stuck on a novel whose mumbled premise — something about the role of the individual and the blah, blah, utopian society, blah — sails straight over the heads of the slack-jawed regulars at a neighborhood bar. Nothing, this brief scene implies, is more pathetic than a guy grappling with the big existential questions while visibly — if obscurely — poor. He should be ashamed of himself, and he is.

After he takes the pills, though, all the big questions melt away, and Eddie can finally focus on the practical ones. So what does this modern man do when he suddenly discovers he can do anything? Does he cure cancer? Retreat to a Tibetan monastery to contemplate the mysteries of existence? Reduce carbon emissions to zero? Broker world peace? No. He knocks out the novel, then does himself a real favor. He gets into shape, buys himself a new wardrobe, becomes a day trader, figures out how to game the system, gets rich, learns Italian in order to impress girls in restaurants, holds court at parties, drives recklessly through picturesque Mediterranean villages, does all his dishes and organizes his books and CDs in alphabetical order.

Given the recent hell-in-a-handbasket zeitgeist, you’d think we would all find more comfort in “The Adjustment Bureau” idea that control over our own destiny is just an illusion; that if it’s not God or fate or John Slattery in a fedora controlling what happens to us, then it’s something like luck, birth order, genetics, macroeconomics, the law of attraction, big government or your damnable idiot boss. But this is not so. Given the amount of time we spend thinking and fretting and dreaming about how to become more perfect, it’s clear we’re all living in a “Limitless” world. After the movie, a woman beside me sighed, “I really need that pill.” And I blurted out involuntarily, “So do I!”

“Limitless,” in all its pulpy glory, represents the logical terminus of a certain pattern of modern thought, endlessly fueled by the culture: if you can theoretically become perfect, then it follows that you should at least try. This idea (that man is perfectible and so should strive for perfection) has been around for 2,000 years, but it has lately been streamlined and turbo-charged: in its contemporary incarnation, it regards any unfulfilled human potentialities as a particularly sad and sclerotic form of entropy.

Carina Chocano is a former film and TV critic at the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly and Salon.com. Her book, “Do You Love Me Or Am I Just Paranoid? The Serial Monogamist’s Guide to Love” was published by Villard in 2002.

Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/magazine/mag-20Riff-t.html?_r=3&pagewanted=print