The truth may set you free but to others, it is only delusion.
The Allegory of the Cave is one of Plato’s most famous allegories.
The Allegory (simplified) goes as follows:-
Prisoners are chained in a cave, facing a wall where they can only see shadows cast by objects behind them.
They perceive these shadows as reality because they’ve never seen anything else.
When one prisoner is freed and sees the outside world, he realizes the shadows were just illusions. He is temporarily blinded by the light as he adjusts to the outside world.
After the freed prisoner discovers the outside world and returns to the cave to tell the others, they don’t believe him and resist leaving the cave themselves.
While this may seem to be nothing more than an interesting tale not unlike one of Aesop’s Fables, it contains a powerful message regarding the nature of truth and how we and others are changed by it.
Because each and every single stage of the freed prisoner’s story in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave represents the changes we go through once we discover truth:
1. Chained in the Cave:
Prisoners are chained in a cave, facing a wall where they can only see shadows cast by objects behind them.
The prisoners being chained in a cave represent our ignorant state of mind being stuck, unable to grow beyond the confines of what is truly possible.
2. Perceiving Shadows as Reality:
They perceive these shadows as reality because they’ve never seen anything else.
This stage shows the limitations of basing our perception of reality based on just our lived experiences. By doing that, we perceive things that are only a vague approximation of reality as reality itself.
3. Freed Prisoner Sees the Outside World:
When one prisoner is freed and sees the outside world, he realizes the shadows were just illusions. He is temporarily blinded by the light as he adjusts to the outside world.
The freed prisoner realizes the actual state of the world was not as he has believed all his life. He has discovered that the shadows which seemed real to him were not as real as the things he has seen outside the cave. A period of adjustment occurs in which the freed prisoner slowly realizes what is real and what is not.
4. Others’ Resistance to Truth:
After the freed prisoner discovers the outside world and returns to the cave to tell the others, they don’t believe him as he is temporarily blinded as he returns to the cave and so they resist leaving the cave themselves.
When the freed prisoner comes back to the cave to tell the others, the prisoners do not believe him due to his blindness upon returning to the cave and so proceed to conclude that going outside has in fact harmed him. This represents the struggle between those who have seen reality as it is and those who have not.
The Double-Sided Nature of Truth
Through a religious/spiritual standpoint, the Allegory of the Cave represents the journey towards enlightenment and the dark night of the soul.
Yet one need not view the Allegory this way.
Through education, whether through a formal system thought by a mentor or by self-education – one is able to free themselves from the jaws of ignorance yet be shunned or estranged from others.
Tales of those who have left their old communities behind to explore new pastures only to return to see others remain the same is one example of this.
The Allegory of the Cave represents a pivotal mental model by which we can use to understand the struggles we face and to empathize with those we don’t understand.
We are both chained by Truth and freed by it.
For we are either the freed prisoner who has seen the Truth.
Or we are the prisoners stuck in the Cave, shunning those who have seen the light.