Plato’s Cave, one of human civilization's most enduring narratives, is extremely relevant to understanding our celebrity-obsessed culture. A firm grasp of the meaning of illusion is crucial for our mental survival. Yet is our modern version all about illusion?
Plato‘s Cave: Version 2.0
In Empire of illusion: the End of Literary and the Triumph of Spectacle. Chris Hedges discusses the importance of the Allegory of Plato’s Cave to comprehending the implications of a culture awash in media entertainment.
In The Republic, Plato imagines human beings held prisoner in an underground cave: they are doomed to stare at a wall where shadows of carved animal figures are cast by a flickering fire.
These captives think that these shadow-images are reality. One prisoner is let free from the cave, goes outside, discovers the sun (actual reality), comes back to try to free the prisoners, but they are not interested. They prefer their illusions — their dark comfort zone — over the disturbing world of sun-drenched reality that blinds and disorients.
This Hedges says is like our modern society: “We are chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture [ and] the lies of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional, that have become the staple of news [ and ] celebrity gossip…”
The New Technology of Illusion
Certainly our modern cave is more hi-tech and wired. The Technology of Illusion has come a long way since ancient Greece. Gone are shadows, crudely carved puppets and fires, replaced by the internet, high-definition television, various personal digital devices (iPods, Blackberries, etc.), and other electronic gadgets that fill our lives with images of glitz and glamour.
There is even a freedom of movement and communication not granted to the Prisoners in the Cave. We are wired to a vast global network full of people, not chained inside an isolated hole in the ground with assorted, smelly fellow captives.
We live in a giant open-air theatre — a spectacle — surrounded by the latest audio and visual technology- a “real life” showing of the film The Matrix (that, in fact, one critic William Irwin, has compared to a latter day depiction of Plato’s Cave).
However, our electronic communication systems also bring us important information — even literature and philosophy — not merely gossip about the latest celebrity scandals. The web has many sites where interested people can explore philosophical and literary texts. This New Technology of Illusion seems to be more than just a hi-tech version of Plato’s Cave.
The Analogy of the Torture Chamber without Walls (but without pain)
Perhaps a more appropriate analogy -that would still capture Plato’s key point- is that of our hi-tech world of “Reality” programming is a kind of torture chamber without walls. If the prisoners in Plato’s Cave are suffering from punishment resembling sensory deprivation, then we are being tortured by endless sensory overload, bombarded by streams of celebrity images and facile entertainment: Reality Deprivation
But it is not about receiving excessive pain inflicted in dank dungeons, but being distracted by nonstop pleasures in a shiny pleasure dome without boundaries. Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future, as articulated in his 1932 novel Brave New World, seems to be advancing faster every day.
Social critic Neil Postman in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business argued that Aldous Huxley, not George Orwell, had been correct about cultural and social trends. In Orwell’s vision, people are controlled by inflicting pain while in Huxley's Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
No one would need to ban books as Big Brother did in 1984. People, distracted by trivial pleasures, would simply lose interest. Orwell feared that our Political Masters would ban information while Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
There is a further key difference: we are our own jailers and torturers because we choose to consume the images offered by the Master Programmers who manage our new Plato’s Cave. The internet offers, as noted, more than just distraction and celebrity gossip, but we prefer to remain in the shadows.
Thomas White - Thomas White’s poetry, essays, and fiction have been widely published in both online and print journals in Canada, United States, ...
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