Spelunking with Ideas

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato taught an allegory about prisoners in a cave that appears in his seminal work, the Republic. I’m not a student of philosophy. I’m not smart enough. But sometimes an idea will pop into my heard when I’m reading—if you want to call my struggle with philosophical texts reading—that causes a digression and generates a synthesis of several different possibilities, mostly incomplete socio/political thoughts related to the world around me.  

It took me several readings to figure out what Plato was getting at in “The Cave” and that’s just my simple understanding. Basically, he seems to be saying that most of us define truth through our five physical senses. What we touch, see, hear, feel, and smell create a perception in our mind that we call knowledge, and that knowledge becomes our truth. In fact, Plato says, that truth is merely an opinion. There are people in the world who see “truth” or, I guess, reality. But they are on a different level than most of us. Here’s how they get to it.

There exists a cave. Inside the cave are prisoners, which I take to mean most of us dumb asses. These prisoners have been tied to big rocks since birth in such a way that they can’t turn their heads or see anything but a large stone wall, kind of like a movie screen, directly to their front. Behind the prisoners outside the cave is a fire and between the fire and the immobile prisoners is a raised walkway. People outside the cave prance along this walkway and carry on the daily business of life. Their motion casts shadows on the big stone wall. This is what the prisoners see and nothing else. The shadows of the people and the objects they carry are all the prisoners know. It is truth to them.

I’m going to shorten old Plato’s story a bit and get to the thematic stuff that has caused me some serious reflection. One of the prisoners escapes to the outside and sees the real world (i.e. truth). Real people are doing real things and carrying real objects. The truth of this is easily discerned, including what the objects exist for and what is being done with them. Truth is no longer created from mere shadows and guesses. In his joy and excitement, he rushes back into the cave to tell his friends what he has found and to free them. Their response is unbridled fear, and they make a plan to murder him for lying.

The application of this analogy in modern times is made obvious every day with the cable news media, some channels more than others. This is what makes ancient writing valuable to me. If it is perceptive enough about what it means to be human, including our weaknesses and flaws, then it is applicable throughout time. Technology grows, advances, and elevates our lives in some ways. How we use that technology, for good and evil, seems to remain basically the same because what we are as a species regarding our attitudes and actions hasn’t evolved all that much from Plato’s day, or even before.

We now have cellphones instead of smoke signals, but the messages sent remain the same essentially. I love you; I hate you. I want to sell you something, you need to go somewhere, or something bad is coming. We now have bombs, guided missiles, machine guns, and various poisons capable of mass slaughter instead of rock and swords. But our motivations for using these weapons is either some kind of offense or some kind of defense against perceived threats by other humans. Remember when they stuck leeches on people? We have medical procedures that are miraculous and medicines called miraculous by big Pharma for profit, existing for the same reason the leeches and the snake oil salesmen did.

I could probably extend these comparisons for many pages, but you get the idea. Let’s get back to those smoke signals. Communication itself has developed considerably because people like Plato and other philosophers created and honed languages into a weapon called rhetoric that goes beyond simple communication. Technology gives us a way to use that weapon bloodlessly. Yet, the use of language can now be focused in a way as to cause great bloodshed and misery. It gets to magnify and motivate and spin our own flaws such as selfishness, greed, violence, fraud, etc. by manipulating millions of prisoners into accepting a false reality that benefits only a few elites in the world. Why, because those elites own the corporate chains that bind us in front of TV sets and social media. By exercising control of the shadows we see and hear on our screens, they control a major means we have at our disposal to form our opinions of truth. 24/7 cable news that is bought and sold by corporate interests has become our Platonic cave. The difference is we remain in chains as prisoners of our own vices, our own bias, and own limited perspectives. We choose the chains that bind us.

Most of us have a friendly relationship with one channel of communication and a morbid distrust of all the others because that channel reinforces our own opinions. We are prisoners, joyful in our chains. Mark Twain has some observations that point this conundrum out:

“Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot.

Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.

If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.

“It’s easier to fool people than convince them they’ve been fooled,” may be my personal favorite. How many millions of people listen to idiots like Tucker Carlson and swear they are hearing the truth when five minutes of actual research would correct that assumption? How many people believe to the point of destroying our freedoms as citizens of this country, or in some instances kill us, like the prisoners in the cave, if the truths—that Donald Trump is a liar, that corporations are amoral and not people, that some Christian pastors and priest are perverts and thieves, that theories pointing out our flaws and ideas correcting our history make us better not worse (i.e. through education and critical thinking) and that all humans and animals deserve to be treated with compassion first and foremost—are presented to them objectively?

I’m not making the case here that our society has no redeeming qualities. This country is full of articulate, honest, kind, generous, and moral people, and they show it by their actions every single day. What reading the cave has shown me can be summed up simply. For those people these attitudes and actions are a product of discipline, education, experience, and desire to do the right thing. They exist because fear doesn’t govern their lives. Escaping the cave became possible for them through effort and an understanding that the chains holding us back, while provided by others, are locked inside us and each one of us has a personal key.