Allegory of the cave

^{There happened to be a time when a philosopher named Plato penned down an allegory in his book, narrated by Socrates.}

It is about people, the cave, and their beliefs.

Some people used to live in cages. They lived all their life in the cave and had never seen a world or light out of that cave.

Source

They were restricted from doing any movements because their hands and feet were tied with chains.

All they could do was sit backing the wall and see the wall in front of their eyes.

The wall was not ordinary, there was something peculiar with that. It was a magical wall, they believed, that could show different silhouettes of things.

You can imagine a reel of images playing on the wall and that too with voices. Those silhouettes could move and people started praising and taking inspiration from them.

They thought that those silhouettes were the only reality of their life worth obeying.

However, one of those men happened to break his chains and free himself from the confinement.

When he got up he saw that a fire was being lit behind the wall they were backing. And people were moving through the path in front of the fire. These people were holding long sticks with different objects on the crown.

The wall was high enough to only cast shadows of the objects and not of the people.

When that man saw this, he came to know It was the shadow they thought was the ultimate reality of life.

Those silhouettes were images of the objects passed through the light of the fire.

A visual or virtual reality

He went out of the cave crawling and fell on his feet again and again.

He somehow made it out of the cave where he was welcomed with bright light. It was a sunny day and the Sun was shining as usual.

This man felt pain inside his eyes as he was accustomed to dark his whole life. Now his eyes couldn't adjust with Sun's light, which is the actual reality of life.

He felt he had gone blind and wanted to go back to the cave and live a life he was habitual to.

But he didn't, he continued spending his time in the sunlight. After a while, he started seeing light when he became used to with bright Sun.

And what did he see in the world?

He saw an actual tree whose shadow was on the ground. The shadow that he had only seen in his whole life.

But now he was seeing the real objects.

He saw the Sun, trees, flowers and beautiful things present in nature's world.

He saw stars and the moon at night and thought how beautiful and different this world was from the one he was living in.

He thought to tell about this world to his fellows in the cave.

He went back to the cave showered in the dark. He couldn't see anything in the dark, Just as he became blind when he saw light after darkness.

He was habitual to light now.

He reached his people after great confusion and hurdles. He told them about the world he recently visited and asked them to come with him and see the real cosmos.

His fellows were seeing this man in great confusion and blind state. They thought what a jerk he was and what that world had done to him.

Now he wants the same to happen to us. They couldn't bear it and tried to kill that man to stop him from fooling them.

They thought that the cave was the only world with all the possibilities and ideas.

Their minds could only imagine the cave's vastness the only vastness ever possible.

Birds born in the cage think flying is an illness.

This allegory was taken with different meanings by different figures.

When you think about it deeply you will realize that we all are living in our cages of anxiety, depression, and worries.

We have become so immune to our ideas, beliefs, and worries that we think it is the only way out. It has become the only reality in our lives.

We have forgotten that there is a world with positivity and light, which will be hard but will bring meaning to our lives in return.

We are enslaved of our thoughts.

Another interpretation is social media enslavement. We have been made to believe that social media is the real world where we are asked to behave like herds.

Everyone is following the trends and fashion.

We have forgotten that a real world does exist consisting of mountains, forests, oceans, deserts, flowers, sky and the list goes on.

The same happens in politics, we are slaves of a certain narrative and group of people. If another person tells us that there is another way to see the situation, we hate that person and brand them as mentally retarded.

People have become too comfortable in their comfort zones that:

It is easier to make people fool than to convince them they have been fooled
~Mark Twain