Cave Politics

We’ll break from our normal MM moratorium on contemporary politics to discuss the national election through the lens of (click:) Plato's Cave and the Stubborn Persistence Of Ignorance. Ignorance. The session is meant not to change any minds at this late stage but as a way to reexamine and apply Plato's allegorical rendering from over twenty-four centuries ago. It might just as well have been yesterday.

The basic set-up:

The most memorable image of ignorance occurs in what is probably the most famous passage of all philosophy: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in “The Republic.” Recall the scenario: human beings dwelling in the darkness of an underground cavern, bound at the legs and neck so that they cannot move, even to turn their heads. They have no other memory of life, since they have been imprisoned in this way since childhood. Before them, they see only moving shadows that are cast by objects unknown to them, illuminated by a flickering fire that we are told lies somewhere behind them. They know nothing of this except the shadows and hear only echoes from the voices of their keepers, whom they have never seen. In such a benighted state, they pass their days.

Surely you jest. Of what possible relevance could some bizarre cartoon image of captive humans – chained prisoners, immobilized since birth, locked into straight-ahead stares at the front wall of some dark cavern illuminated only by a backlit fire casting shadows of unseen objects – have to do with anything . . . let alone to do with our divisive politics? Maybe everything. Plato ends the allegory with a chill, “They’re like us.”

The entirety of the prisoners’ world is garnered, not from the reality of those unseen objects, but from the shadows they cast. Unaware of the circumstances of their confinement i.e. the cave, the fire, and the keepers, the prisoners live in a state of ignorance (distinguished from stupidity) to the extent they know not even of what they don’t know. To the outside observer, the cavern is a place of profound ignorance, lacking in truth and sustained by deception. To the prisoners, reality is the flickering shadow on the wall.

And so it seems in this virtual cave of political theater, enveloped in screens and featuring curated propaganda packaged as news. Two figures appear in the cave as shadow-like projected holograms. The first is a fascist. The second is a screeching, demented, totalitarian narcissist calling the other a fascist. No wonder we are on the brink of collective insanity with the sort of manipulation we discussed in MM 11/6/17 Gaslighting. “Get out!,” comes the cry from the cheap seats.

The allegory continues: a prisoner does get out. It would be a mistake, however, to call it an escape as escape would suggest an awareness of the confinement itself. No, the prisoner is totally ignorant of any life beyond what had been. The horror of his ignorance lies in the very incapacity to know what he does not know.

What we know of the prisoner is that “one of them was freed” and, once freed, is “pained and dazzled and unable to see the things whose shadows he’d seen before.” As understanding eventually flows into him, he counts himself “happy for the change and pity for the others.”

We each are now that prisoner at the mouth of the cave taking pity on the others about the way we’ve all been played. Are you not entertained?