The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

Sitting here in the Appalachian mountains watching the sunset, thinking about our modern communications dilemma, I feel like I’m surrounded by people who are so uninformed about reality that they resemble the chained up prisoners in Plato’s cave.

If you’ve never heard the story, watch the video of Orson Welles narrating it with images below.

The story is an educational, philosophical allegory, which seems particularly relevant today with a significant portion of the population kept in the dark by watching the only reality they ever know, Fox News.

The people who still support Donald Trump as president of the United States are like those prisoners who watch shadows on the wall, lit up by a fire as people on a path outside the cave whisper news of the world, which the prisoners can’t quite hear accurately. But they jump to conclusions about the meaning of it all anyway.

This is like the alt-reality created as a propaganda tool by Rush Limbaugh, Rubert Murdoch and the likes of Steve Bannon at Breitbart News. Trump has just seized on the shadow reality to gain power.

I feel like the prisoner who was allowed to escape the cave, only to return and be scoffed at when trying to tell the people in the cave what the world is really like.

I grew up in a world where religion and ideology were more important than scientific facts in the American South. Somehow I was able to escape, get an education and find a calling, a craft and a profession that made me one of those trying to inform the people about the truth. It was a field that still had value to people back in the 20th century, but it seems lost on many folks today.

A whispered rumor of a clickbait headline on Facebook or Twitter will do, now, so what people are really saying on the path of enlightenment outside is irrelevant.

We can publish the facts about the coronavirus pandemic, the economic disturbances and the need for a reliable government response. But if a third or more of the population believes the whole thing is a hoax and that government itself is not necessary to solve problems, how can we hope for a semblance of democracy to survive or the planet to avoid world-ending catastrophe?

I can’t fix it all by myself like Prometheus. I can only tell stories to try to get people to understand what’s really going on. If that has no value anymore, we may as well give up the ghost.

Orson Welles Narrates Animations of Plato’s Cave

You’re held captive in an enclosed space, only able faintly to perceive the outside world. Or you’re kept outside, unable to cross the threshold of a space you feel a desperate need to enter. If both of these scenarios sound like dreams, they must do so because they tap into the anxieties and suspicions in the depths of our shared subconscious.

As such, they’ve also proven reliable material for storytellers since at least the fourth century B.C., when Plato came up with his allegory of the cave. You know that story nearly as surely as you know the ancient Greek philosopher’s name: a group of human beings live, and have always lived, deep in a cave. Chained up to face a wall, they have only ever seen the images of shadow puppets thrown by firelight onto the wall before them.

To these isolated beings, “the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.” So Orson Welles tells it in this 1973 short film by animator Dick Oden. In his timelessly resonant voice that complements the production’s hauntingly retro aesthetic, Wells then speaks of what would happen if a cave-dweller were to be unshackled.

“He would be much too dazzled to see distinctly those things whose shadows he had seen before,” but as he approaches reality, “he has a clearer vision.”

Still, “will he not be perplexed? Will he not think that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?”

And if brought out of the cave to experience reality in full, would he not pity his old cavemates?

“Would he not say, with Homer, better to be the poor servant of a poor master and to endure anything rather than think as they do and live after their manner?”