The Cave: Are Shadows Better Than Reality

anarchoaahabb (39)in #life • 6 years ago

If, for his entire life, some poor fool was exposed to a false reality and conditioned to believe this fallacy would it be better to enlighten him of the actual knowledge and wisdom of the world around him or would the shackles placed on his perception cloud any chance of real understanding?

In Plato's allegory of the cave found in his work The Republic he descrides a group of people in a cave bound so their heads were always facing the same cave wall. Behind them is a fire that casts shadows on the cave wall. These shadows are made by statues infront of the fire manipulated by a hidden group of people.

This ignorance of the world just outside of their view made them blind to reality around them. They believe the shadows to be the most real things in the world.

One day a man broke free and saw the fire and the statues. He then thought those to be the realist things on earth. He was then drug out of the cave to see the sun and thought this to be the realest thing in the world.

The point of this is to keep dragging yourself, and others if possible, out of the cave of ignorance into the light of knowledge.

But how can we do this if all we ever hear are ad hominem attacks and fallacial arguments that defend the confirmation bias of a person unwilling to even entertain alternate viewpoints without bursting to spew the latest propoganda they heard from a talking head on TV?

The mechanisms that have been put in place for over a thousand years have been working to keep people complacent by watching the shadows on the wall and manipulating the scenes to suite their own gains and aspirations at the expense of the willing participant who need only turn around and see the pupermasters for who they really are.
The only thing that we really know is that we dont really know anything.

Stay vigilant and keep learning
-Aahaab