“Imagine people living in a great underground cave, which is only open to the outside at the end of a steep and difficult ascent.
The people in the cave are prisoners chained facing the back wall of the cave so that they can neither move nor turn their heads.
A great fire burns behind them, and all the prisoners can see are the shadows playing on the wall in front of them.
They have been chained in that position all their lives.”
Imagine now that those cave dwellers in Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ are spot on exemplars of the human condition and the story itself is a good approximation of our place in the wide, wide world.
If that’s so, the odds of 1) seeing the world as it is, 2) breaking free of the chains, 3) climbing from the cave, and 4) making sense of what we find once we’ve escaped are long odds indeed.