Plato's Allegory of the Cave

Imagine a group of people born inside a cave.

They’re imprisoned in this cave and chained in such a way that they can only face a wall and aren't able to turn their heads back and forth.

Behind them, there’s a fire. And behind that fire, people pass by carrying objects which cast shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners.

To them, those shadows are reality. They can’t see the fire. They can’t see the people carrying the objects. So the shadows and the echoes in the cave become their whole world.

But then, one day, one prisoner is set free.

He turns around, and for the first time, he sees the fire. The light naturally overwhelms him, it hurts his eyes. While he’s still adjusting, he stumbles outside the cave.

The sunlight is even more blinding. He’s overwhelmed again. But slowly, his sight adjusts to the outside light and suddenly he begins to see the world as it really is. The colors, the depth of the trees, the sky, the birds…everything.

And in that moment, he realizes: the shadows on the wall were merely illusions and the real world is out here right in front of him.

Overcome with joy, he runs back into the cave to free the others. He wants to tell them what he’s seen, that the shadows are merely illusions, that there’s a whole world waiting beyond the cave.

But once he steps back into the darkness, he stumbles. His eyes, now used to the sunlight, can’t readjust. He looks half-blind and delirious as he rambles to the other prisoners about all that he's uncovered just outside the cave.

The other prisoners look at him and laugh. They call him crazy. They say leaving the cave must have blinded him. 

They mock him, dismiss him, and become very hostile to everything he has to say.

And that’s Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

It’s one of my favorite stories. Simple, but it says a lot about how uncomfortable we are with the truth. How hostile we can be to it.

I’m guilty of it myself, and I’m sure many of you are too.

We are often willing to further reinforce any belief system that we may have and are just very dismissive of anything that comes to us that may challenge those beliefs.