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Plato's allegory of the cave
Before this information is laid out I think its important
to understand that we are what we see and are told. Once we develop our concept
of reality its difficult for us to be told we have reality wrong, we will
defend our beliefs .... especially if it was reinforced as .. faith. To think
that such a thing could occur all these years is even more difficult to
imagine, yet it has. Apparently its quite easy to keep the truth from people, to
occult history. You should think that is was only in the mid 1400's that the
printing press was invented ... and the custom was always not to give
information to others. Reading was a luxury that only the wealthy could afford.
After all we are selfish, and ... and we had a Church to make sure, by force,
that our thoughts were always in line.
This story is indicative of what we knew years before
Christ... that those that knew .. knew that we could be fooled.
The story is written by Plato some 400 years before
Christ as a dialog between his
teacher Socrates and Plato's brother Glaucon,
Imagine a cave inhabited by prisoners who have
been chained and held immobile since childhood: not only are their arms and legs
held in place, but their heads are also fixed, compelled to gaze at a wall in
front of them. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire
and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which puppets of various animals,
plants, and other things are moved. The puppets cast shadows on the wall, and
the prisoners watch these shadows. There are also echoes off the wall from the
noise produced from the walkway and the puppeteers.
Socrates asks if it isn't reasonable that the prisoners would take the shadows
to be real things and the echoes to be real sounds, not just reflections of
reality, since they are all they had ever seen? Wouldn't they praise as clever
whoever could best guess which shadow would come next, as someone who understood
the nature of the world? And wouldn't the whole of their society depend on the
shadows on the wall?
Release from the cave
Socrates next introduces something new to this scenario. Suppose that a prisoner
is freed and permitted to stand up (Socrates does not specify how). If someone
were to show him the things that had cast the shadows, he would not recognize
them for what they were and could not name them; he would believe the shadows on
the wall to be more real than what he sees.
Suppose further, Socrates says, that the man were compelled to look at the fire:
wouldn't he be struck blind and try to turn his gaze back toward the shadows, as
toward what he can see clearly and hold to be real? What if someone forcibly
dragged such a man upward, out of the cave: wouldn't the man be angry at the one
doing this to him? And if dragged all the way out into the sunlight, wouldn't he
be distressed and unable to see "even one of the things now said to be true,"
viz. the shadows on the wall (516a)?
After some time on the surface, however, Socrates suggests that the freed
prisoner would acclimate. He would see more and more things around him, until he
could look upon the sun. He would understand that the sun is the "source of the
seasons and the years, and is the steward of all things in the visible place,
and is in a certain way the cause of all those things he and his companions had
been seeing" (516b–c). (See also Plato's metaphor of the sun, which occurs near
the end of The Republic, Book VI)[3]
Return to the cave
Socrates next asks Glaucon to consider the condition of this man. Wouldn't he
remember his first home, what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow prisoners,
and consider himself happy and they, pitiable? And wouldn't he disdain whatever
honors, praises, and prizes were awarded there to the ones who guessed best
which shadows followed which? Moreover, were he to return there, wouldn't he be
rather bad at their game, no longer being accustomed to the darkness? "Wouldn't
it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and
that it's not even worth trying to go up? And if they were somehow able to get
their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead up, wouldn't
they kill him?" (517a)
The importance of this story is that we all are in this
cave. Some voluntarily, some because we are trapped economically and can not
afford education, and most because the truth and history has been changed by the
self interest of others. What
we learn from this that from about 400 years before Christ we knew how we react. We
become comfortable with the reality we are presented... we defend this reality
even if it is false and it harms us.
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