The excerpt “The Allegory of the Cave” is from Plato’s book called The Republic. In the allegory, prisoners are chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads. All they can see is the wall of the cave. Behind them burns a fire. Between the fire and the prisoners is a pathway, along which puppeteers can walk. The puppeteers, who are behind the prisoners, hold up puppets that cast shadows on the wall. The prisoners are unable to see these puppets, the real objects, which pass behind them. What the prisoners see and hear are shadows and echoes cast by objects that they do not see. Such prisoners would mistake appearance for reality. They would think the things they see on the wall, the shadows, were real. They would know nothing of the real causes of the shadows.
Our society is just like the prisoners in the cave. When we look around at the government all we see is a shadow on the wall. We don’t’ know what exactly they do, we just know there are a government and a president. There’s an idea we all have in our head of how they actually are but in reality we as a society have no idea what they do. The government and president present themselves as something, so we believe them because we don’t know any different. The war is a good example of how the government is a shadow. They show the war as something that needs to happen and that’s all we know. We know nothing else about it except for what they tell us or show us. There could be so much more to the reality of the war but all we have is information and images that are shown to us.
Knowing how the reality that we think we know could only be a shadow really makes one think. Is there a way we can see behind us and see what is casting the shadow or do we ha ...