PLATO CAVE ALLEGORY: DO YOUR DUTY

If Evolution theory is a fact, then maybe as man was rushing out of the cave to finally land on the moon, he might have moved so fast that he left his brain lagging behind trying to catch up with him. In short, our technological advancement does not reflect our social advancement, as Isaac Asimov puts it “the saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." We have gained so much information that can direct us to the truth but we have lacked capacity to apply it in our lives.

Plato in his allegory of the Men in the cave illustrates this. In this allegory, four men sit in a cave; they are chained in such a way that they can only face and gaze at the wall and nothing else. Behind them, is a flame emitting light and between the flame and the chained men there is a platform where people walk through carrying some object. When people walk on this platform, due to the light of the flame, the shadows of the object they carry are cast on the wall the chained men are looking at.

When the chained men see the shadows, they engage in an act of naming every shadow that passes before them. They even award each other to the one who names the most shadows. To them the shadows are real objects, the shadows are their reality.

One day, one of the chained men becomes free and his chain fall off from him and is able to get out of the cave. He discovers that the shadows are not real but manufactured reality; that the shadows are just a blurred image of the real objects. He discovers all that he deemed to be true all his life (since he knew no other life) was a shadow. He gets out of the cave and sees the sun, the source of natural light, the brightness of the sun hurts his eyes as they are not used to so much light after being in a cave for so long. Finally he is able to see clearly and see the real things as they are.

He then decides to go back to the cave to free the other prisoners so that they can also see the light. But the chained men protest, they refuse to believe him, they consider him a fool, crazy and they laugh at him and even conspire to kill him.

A quote wrongly attributed to Harriet Tubman an American who escaped slavery and made immense effort to help other people escape from slavery says "I freed a thousand slaves; I could have freed a thousand more if only they know they are slaves". No man is a monopoly of wisdom and in one way or another we are in a cave of some sort and we may not be aware of our own ignorance. To get out of the cave we must accept our own ignorance. We may have accepted something as facts and they have survived without questioning, things regarding our view of  justice, democracy, economy, Culture, religion, money, education, fame, love etc. and have viewed their shadow as the reality due to how they have been projected to us by various entities. And when we are told the truth we never bother or we get annoyed and yet it is the truth.

But the good news is that, in one way or another, all of us have come out of the cave in a given aspect of life. Our uniqueness, our individual world view are our information out of the norm and we have a duty to share this knowledge and subjected it to debate and its validity tested. For years people believed the earth was the center of the solar system saying otherwise was considered blasphemous. It took courage of a handful of people like Nicolas Copernicus to break this chain of thought, it took the stubbornness of people like Martin Luther to question the necessity of the sale and purchase of the prayer of indulgence which was a misuse of the moral authority of the church, it took the persistence of people like William Wilberforce to question the justness of slavery, it took to steadfastness of people like Wangari Mathaii to safeguard every single tree.

In modern times entities like the media, government, education religion, culture and others have tended to project shadows to our mind and chain people's minds to make them view things in a particular way. This is normally called "Brainwashing". They have vilified the truth. Telling the truth is seen as a rebellious and revolutionary act worth punishment for disturbing the status quo. People like Socrates were sentenced to death in the process on questioning and telling the truth as far as they understood it. In Modern times Things are seen from the lens of competition to get richer or more fame or to satisfy greed by all means including destruction of the environment, selling food and consumable products laced with poison, causing violence and instabilities to accumulate power, stepping on other people to get ahead and seeing people as pawns. Majority of this selfish agendas have led to squandering of opportunities making them scare, living mediocre and meaningless lives and nobody realizes how much more can be realized outside this cave of shadows, greed, delusion and illusion.

we all start from the cave, but we must not stay there, as Thomas Paine says "it is the duty of every man as far as his ability extends to detect and expose delusion and error" and to question and punch holes to any assumption made so that a glimmer of light may shine on them and cast them out with truth. We are all in pursuit of truth. It’s our duty to break out of the cave, get out of our comfort zones, own up our ignorance, discover new and unique solutions to solve our problem and we shall have made one giant step for humanity. We must cause trouble today so that our children will live under truth and justice, for fear is always a creation of ignorance and delusion. "To the captives, get out! To those in darkness, be free"(Isa 49:9, NIV)