62. THE CAVE
I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.
- Cypher, from the movie, The Matrix
I’d probably be better rested if I pretended climate change wasn’t happening. Or if I quit writing. I could stop worrying about what life might be like for my daughters in twenty years and how to use my writing as an act of service and I’d probably sleep like a baby at night.
Except I’d be living a lie.
There’s a story about this, another tale that describes the challenge of going home, which is Plato’s allegory of the cave. In this story, Plato describes society as a group of people chained to the floor of a darkened cave and forced to stare at one of the walls. Behind the prisoners is a fire, and the light of the fire casts shadows onto the wall in front of them. Not knowing any better, the prisoners – for that is what they are – perceive the shadows as reality.
Now, let’s say one of the prisoners is freed and dragged outside. Accustomed to the dark of the cave, the light hurts the prisoner’s eyes. The sounds and smells outside the cave overwhelm the prisoner because they’re like nothing they’ve ever experienced. In fact, this sensory overload might cause so much pain and distress that the prisoner might try to fight their way back into the cave, anxious to return to the familiarity of their bondage.
The bad news is that we are the prisoners.
When I was on my military career path, I was a prisoner of sorts, kept enthralled by a programmed way to think and act, and distracted by the shadows of medals and citations and promotions. In general life, the shadows that distract us are celebrity culture, and reality shows, and athletes as cultural icons.
The shadows are the idea that owning more things and making more money equals more happiness, and the belief that we all have the opportunity to grow up to be millionaires or rock stars or movie gods and goddesses. The shadows are companies like ExxonMobil seeding doubt about climate change and framing climate action as an individual responsibility1. All fake, like gladiators fighting in the Colosseum of ancient Rome while the empire collapsed. This so-called normal life is built on lies, it’s built to keep people entertained and distracted as they stare at shadows on the wall while the rich fly around in their private jets, and go to space, and amass wealth by exploiting the environment and other people.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The good news is that if forced to stay in the open, the prisoner will adjust. Like Evey Hammond in V for Vendetta, the prisoner will awake to find that they’re free, though that journey might be full of pain. When they do, they might spare a thought for the prisoners still trapped in the cave and recognize a responsibility to help them see the light as well. ‘With great power comes great responsibility,’ as the saying goes and seeing the world for what it really is might be one of the greatest powers of all.
In turn, the escaped prisoner might decide to forsake the bright, vivid world they’ve come to know and descend back into the cave, to the world they once knew so they can share the knowledge of what they’ve experienced with the ones left behind. That is the challenge that faces us: to not just serve others, but to inspire others to follow in our example.
Why is it such a challenge?
Because we might not be welcomed back.
Remember, when the prisoner was freed from the cave, how hard it was for them to adjust to the light? How much the light hurt their eyes and how they may have even fought to get back into the darkness? That’s the state of everyone who never left the cave.
People reach homeostasis in their lives. They make sacrifices and they give things up and it’s hard to walk away from that. Those bankers and lawyers and CEOs making hundreds of thousands of dollars all get comfortable except in turn, that comfort starts to own them. It affects their perspectives. When I opted out of my military career, I had a chat with a colleague who was nearing the end of a thirty-year-plus stint in the army. Try as I might to explain why I wanted to diverge, he could not fathom why I wouldn’t want to follow in his footsteps. Maybe I didn’t explain myself well-enough, or maybe I was being childish or immature or selfish.
Or, maybe he’d already sacrificed too much, and invested too much to be able to question whether it was all worth it. Whether he, too, should change.
I get it, to a degree. Imagine a childhood friend who leaves home, then returns decades later to tell us everything we’ve known is an illusion. That we’ve been living a lie. Chances are we might not be too eager to listen, because then we might have to question our life choices. We might even have to change and given what we know about how hard it is to change, it might be easier to call into question whether to listen to this so-called friend. All in all, ignorance really is bliss.
So, if we can picture that, then we can understand how the escaped prisoner might be viewed not as a returning hero, but as someone coming to upend the known world. We can understand how the returned prisoner may find themselves ignored. And, in the worst case, the returned prisoner may even be attacked, like Malala was attacked for having the audacity to suggest girls deserve education too. Or how Greta Thunberg has been attacked for suggesting current economic practices are unsustainable.
The paradox the cave shows us, because that’s what it is, is that in our journey to help communities through our service, we must both strive to be of help while at the same time hardening ourselves to the possibility that others may reject us.
Geoffrey Supran, Naomi Oreskes, “Rhetoric and frame analysis of ExxonMobil's climate change communications,” One Earth, Volume 4, Issue 5, 2021, Pages 696-719, ISSN 2590-3322, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2021.04.014, accessed 6 Oct 2021.