(This is for a childhood friend )

Remember the movie ‘Blast From the Past‘? The title of this blog post is the tagline from that movie. Described by IMDB.com “about a naive man who comes out into the world after being in a nuclear fallout shelter for 35 years”. On the surface a cheesy romantic comedy with a farcical premise. Yet there are undercurrents of existentialist themes addressed.

Which brings me to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. (Yes … via Plato of all people.) It is a fictional dialogue between Socrates (Plato’s teacher) and Plato’s brother. It is about a group of people chained to a wall in a cave, and the only reality they know is the shadows that reflect off the wall from passersby to the entrance of the cave. The only sounds they hear are echoes as they bounce off the cave walls. Their entire reality is based on reflections and reverberations.

Sometimes I can totally identify. Even several years removed from the cave.

Wikipedia sums up the story nicely:

“Plato imagines a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of the cave entrance, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to seeing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.

“Socrates asks Plato’s brother if it isn’t reasonable that the prisoners would take the shadows to be real things and the echoes to be real sounds, not just reflections of reality, since they are all they had ever seen? Wouldn’t they praise as clever whoever could best guess which shadow would come next, as someone who understood the nature of the world? And wouldn’t the whole of their society depend on the shadows on the wall?”

But then one man is dragged from the cave. The story doesn’t mention how this “dragging” takes place. Nevertheless, at first he is disoriented. He sees the sun for the first time and almost feels blind. For a brief moment he panics. But the sight of the sun and the disorientation is real, and questions begin to form. Instead of a hasty retreat to the cave where things are familiar, he tries to make sense of it all. Slowly he begins to acclimate. He begins to notice more things around him. He begins to understand seasons, and days, and things in nature that no one in his group had ever even bothered to question – mainly because they had never been dragged out of the cave like he had.

For someone like myself that tends to nauseate when forced to return to stale social norms – and my background being raised in a cult, this allegory touched me deeply.

After this guy is released from his chains, dragged out of the cave, discovers new truths and reality, he starts to feel pity for his poor friends trapped in the cave. Their lives are relegated to doling out awards and “privileges” for whomever can predict or identify the next shadow projected onto the cave wall. He tries to convince others to come join him and see what he has seen. They resist. Perhaps reasoning, “Why would someone who is a master at describing the shadows and echoes of voices against the cave walls want to leave his place of comfort and stature?” The cave dweller has respect among his peers. He has “a gift” if you will, of interpreting the shadows and sounds.

For example, the Wikipedia summary continues:

“Socrates next asks Glaucon to consider the condition of this man. Wouldn’t he remember his first home, what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow prisoners, and consider himself happy and they, pitiable? And wouldn’t he disdain whatever honors, praises, and prizes were awarded there to the ones who guessed best which shadows followed which? Moreover, were he to return there, wouldn’t he be rather bad at their game, no longer being accustomed to the darkness? “Wouldn’t it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it’s not even worth trying to go up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead up, wouldn’t they kill him?”"

Yes. The people in the cave he wants to help eventually begin to resent the guy who escaped! He is trying to tell them everything they believe is not reality, instead a projected reality. In many ways similar to what I have written about regarding The Matrix blue pill/red pill scene. Not only do they resent him for challenging the status quo, they actively seek to do him harm. (Coincidentally, “Clubbed To Death” by Rob D. just started playing here at the coffee shop. It was used in the Matrix movies. Weird.)

Plato didn’t have my situation in mind per se. He was actually attempting to explain the difficulty of being a philosopher in a world where the collective conscious didn’t really care to know. It also explains why large groups of people with certain belief systems like to label these sort of people as snobs, arrogant, elitist, and so forth.

The question is the beginning. Certain questions – once asked – cannot be unasked. Just ask Joseph K..

Notions of Progress
I’m not where I was
But not where I could be
Limbo is fun
When it’s only a dance
And we’re drunk
So lower the bar
And let the music play