If someone were to tell you that our society is similar to a group of prisoners in a cave watching shadows and believing those shadows to be actual objects, would you agree with them? Or would you think they were blabbering nonsense?
One of the world’s best-known philosophers and famous thinkers, Plato, suggested exactly that through his iconic story Allegory of the Cave, found in Book VII of The Republic.
The story tackles themes of ignorance, power of knowledge, and closed-mindedness, which is why despite being written around 2,400 years ago, the lessons of the Allegory of the Cave, or Plato’s Cave, remain relevant in modern society and relate to the prevalence of fake news.
Plato’s acclaimed Allegory of the Cave reflects society’s potential to be a victim of blind ignorance and the dangers of lacking critical thinking.
The Allegory of the Cave explained
An allegory is a narrative medium that conveys a hidden or ulterior meaning. It is meant to be interpreted to see the story for what it is trying to say or represent. In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato narrates a dialogue between two characters: Socrates (his teacher) and Glaucon (his brother).
Life in the cave and shadows
In the story, Socrates asks Glaucon to imagine a group of people imprisoned in a cave. They have been there since birth and have never left the cold, damp cave to go outside. Additionally, they are chained, facing a wall, unable to turn their heads or walk freely. The only source of light is from a fire behind them.
Between the prisoners and the fire is an elevated pathway where people occasionally pass by, called puppeteers. They carry objects, figures of animals, and other items which cast a shadow on the wall.
The prisoners see these flickering shadows and classify them, wholeheartedly believing that what they see before them are the actual objects instead of just a shadow projection. The clouds were their reality and everything they knew about life.
Discovering the outside
Plato then opens the idea of one of the prisoners being able to go outside. The former cave dweller would experience natural sunlight for the first time, which would hurt his eyes. The new environment initially disorients him, but as he adjusts, he shares the reality around him, discovering only the objects he had previously known as shadows.
Sharing the truth and being rejected
With his discovery, he returns to the cave to tell his companions. However, the shift from brightness to darkness causes him to have a hard time seeing the shadows again, which makes him look foolish and unintelligent to the prisoners.
Despite his attempts to tell them about the sun, trees, and objects outside, the other prisoners mock him and call his ideas ridiculous. They believe the journey has blinded him and that he is only spouting nonsense. When he continues to tell them about how the shadows are only shadows, they increasingly become upset and plot to kill him.
The truth and how people accept it — or don’t
In the Allegory of the Cave, the sun represents reason, the prisoners are the masses who are not critical thinkers and only believe in their perception, and the prisoner who escaped the cave is an enlightened person who attempts to educate the ignorant living far from the truth.
Today’s society is similar to the cave and its prisoners. Mass media and the Internet have made it easy to broadcast anything, even things that aren’t truthful or are only half-truths. Without good critical thinking, the media you consume can create false perceptions. What you believe to be the truth may be a projection, like the shadows in the cave.
In 2016, an armed man stormed a pizza shop, thinking it was harboring juvenile sex slaves all because of an Internet conspiracy post. Instances like these highlight the importance of questioning everything and that with proper education and critical thinking, society can take off its chains and be closer to the truth.
Meanwhile, some are stubborn in accepting new perceptions to the point that they can get hostile to those who try pointing out their ignorance. The Allegory of the Cave reminds us not to believe in only the shadows, but to seek to explore the truth outside the cave.
