Please enjoy this contemporary rendition of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, originally published in my first book, The Art of Being Human.
When you were born, you were transported directly from the womb to a seat in a movie theater. It’s where you live, and where you’re supposed to grow old, and die.
(Just go with it.)
A film endlessly plays out on the screen. It is a movie full of love and hate, fear and courage, lifelong grudges and soul-healing forgiveness. There are flashy images accentuated by catchy music. The drama is intense, the action is like Michael Bay meets the Wachowski siblings on the fourth of July, and the story twists and corkscrews unpredictably. And the movie never ends, at least not while you’re alive.
You don’t know it’s a movie. You have no concept of what a movie theater is. This is just life. You were born here. Staring into the moving pictures is the only reality you know. It’s all there is.
Every seat in the theater is full of people just like you. Birthed into chairs, hopefully comfortable ones. None of the people look at each other, or look anywhere but towards the screen. The film is the only reason to be here. The only reason to be anything.
After decades of this, you feel unsettled. Something is off. You feel empty. You feel like you’re missing something.
“And how have I been here for so long without having to get up to pee?” some critical thinkers may be wondering. To which I reply: “Don’t think. Thinking is dangerous.”
In a bizarre, bewildering moment, your neck turns just inches to the left. The first time you’ve ever moved a muscle. The sensation is intoxicating, dizzying.
Suddenly, your eyes have a slightly new angle of the screen. The possibility, or even the concept of this, had never occurred to you before now. Not only does your focus shift away from the screen’s center, you also see the right sides of the faces of people sitting in the rows ahead of you. Before, you’d only seen backs of heads, indistinct silhouettes. Now you can make out details illuminated by the film’s eerie blue light – you see earrings, glasses, beards, varying skin tones. What was once indistinct and uninteresting is now fascinating and unique.
This is an absolute revelation. Your entire perception of your world changes, and you wonder:
What else am I missing? What else is there to see?
Determination builds. After much deliberation and apprehensiveness, you turn your head some more. First all the way to the left, then to the right. Up. Down. You see walls. Ceiling. Motionless people all around you, their eyes trained strictly and lifelessly to the screen.
What is this?
The movie doesn’t seem interesting anymore. Your attention has shifted to comprehending the space outside the movie. You cannot tolerate sitting here anymore. It’s time to learn to use your legs.
“Aren’t my muscles atrophied beyond repair by now?” you say. “How have I survived this long without eating?”
“Shhhhh, don’t even think,” I reply. “I said do not think.”
You ignore me and stand. You glorious rebel. You wander about the auditorium, viewing the audience of zombies. None of them make a peep, lest you stand between their eyes and the screen. Then they protest with startling, gnarly, incoherent snarls.
Your most fascinating discovery yet arrives when you notice that the images on the screen seem to be projected from a light that’s source is a small window at the upper back wall of the room.
What does it mean? Is the light God?
You find your way through a set of double doors at the room’s rear. As you cross the threshold, your mind is shattered from the overstimulation of bright lights and surreal colors. Scents and sounds you’ve not imagined vividly permeate your senses.
How could this be? What is real?
After some exploring, you discover the entrance to the room on the other side of the window from inside the theater. The source of the light. You peer through the window to the theater below, and see the movie still playing out on the screen. It seems much less engrossing from here. Small. Artificial. Meaningless.
Without warning, the screen below goes dark, and you instantly hear voices from the auditorium below, snarling and growling grotesquely. You observe your surroundings and realize that you’re standing directly in front of the light that projects the movie, blocking it from reaching the screen. You quickly step aside, allowing the projection to sedate the grumbling and groaning from the chamber below.
Now you investigate the source of the light itself. Decidedly, it’s not God. It’s just a machine. A box.
We’ve all been had. Tricked. Those people down there, they have no idea. I need to tell them!
And so you return to the theater. You tell the patrons what you’ve uncovered. They rip into you with their empty, stupefied eyes. They can’t comprehend what you’ve seen. They know only the world on the screen. Any other concept beyond what they know is foreign and unbearably uncomfortable.
They hate you for interrupting their movie. One of them aggressively lashes out at you, tries to force you to the floor. Another bites and claws at you like a beast, drawing blood from your arm. Several figures stand together and walk towards you.
“Lies,” they chant. “Heresy.”
Not wanting to see what happens next, you sprint towards a door at the front of the theater, labeled, “EXIT.” You thrust into it, opening it, spilling yourself out into a bright white hallway. Another door awaits at the hall’s end.
You stop a moment to catch your breath and realize that no one is following you. You peek back into the auditorium. No one is even standing anymore. Everyone is quiet. Just watching their stupid movie.
You reflect on how you’d gotten up and explored by your own choice, due to your own curiosity and drive. Nobody else could have made that choice except you. And now you cannot make that choice for anyone else. You cannot make them see the truth, or to understand that which their minds have formed no prior framework to comprehend.
So you pivot back towards the door at the end of the hall.
What could be on the other side? you wonder.
Each step you take brings you closer and closer as the anticipation builds. With a push, the door opens.
Utterly blinded by sunlight, you fall into a heap on the ground and die.
Well, who you were before now dies, anyway.
Your eyes slowly adjust, your vision returns. You see the sky for the first time. Clouds. Trees. Cars. There is grass and pavement, rocks. Mosquitoes and birds. All of this, beautiful beyond anything previously fathomable.
Once again, you wish you could tell the others. Show them. But they’d kill you or worse.
You’re alone in the light. Lonely in reality. Isolated by shedding away the delusion, the deception.
Your heart hangs heavy in desolation, but your soul soars at the taste of fresh air.
Is there anybody else out here?
You take your first awesome, defiant steps into the real world.
