thiis

Most BA students and pseudo-philosophers alike can tell you all about Plato’s allegory of The Cave. However for those readers who are unfamiliar to this bastion of human philosophy I will gladly summarize it. Plato hypothesised about a cave in which from birth prisoners were chained to a wall and their heads also fixed, so the only image they could view was one of the cave walls. Behind them and out of their sight burnt a large fire, which caused the shadows of the free villages moving in and out of the cave to be displayed on the prison wall.

Plato went on to suggest that if these prisoners were forced to watch the shadows on the wall this would become their reality. So much so that the prisoner who could best predict and interpret the shadows would be seen by the others to be the most gifted and soon enough every shadow would be interpreted to have great meaning. Plato further hypothesises that should one of these prisoners be unchained and rescued from the depths of the cave, the first time said prisoner would witness the flame that casts the shadows it would certainly be blinding. Furthermore if this same prisoner were to witness firsthand the people whose daily meanderings were the source of the shadows, he would be in awe and would not take these figures to be real. For the prisoner’s perception of the real version of the villagers would be their shadows and their real self only a hollow form. Without getting too confusing , the beauty of Plato’s allegory lies in its depiction of what we as people take to be real and its most evident truth is that all the world that we as humans encounter is an illusion.

Made real only by our own societal and individual perceptions of the illusion. The Cave stood tall in its explanation of this phenomena but I believe had Plato been alive in our day he would have easily found a more elegant and succinct platform to place his hypothesis. Where you ask, is this ideal milieu, put simply I believe it would be the Internet.

Human beings are one of the most destructive and fascinating creatures on this planet and I believe our duality of intrinsic good and evil is caused by a single phenomenon: the fact that the rate of our physical and psychological evolution is far slower than that of our mental evolution. Behavioural Psychologists often say that in our social habits and instincts we are still just highly evolved chimpanzees roaming around our concrete and galvanized steel worlds. This is evident by our still basic primal needs of physical stimulation, food and sex.

However the world that we have created is so complex that I often think that our primal (circa 10000 BC) brain processors are slightly, make that very overwhelmed. Just the other day there was quite a loud outcry in London England when a man was caught on CCTV camera pushing a woman he did not know onto the train tracks of the London Underground. The man who was never found* had no previous criminal record and thus could not be tracked by his picture or fingerprints alone. That kind of senseless behaviour only reaffirms the existences of this evolutionary disconnect. But how does a random act of violence in The Tube relate to Plato all his friends and the ever-ominous Internet Age? I believe that we are living in a digital cave, and at our hands the most powerful machine of illusion known to man. If the radio was the mind numbing equivalent of the discovery of fire, television would be akin to dynamite and the Internet put simply would be Hiroshima. Never before could we slip into the deep recesses of our minds and be hypnotised than in this Internet Age of ours. Within the digital world, much like our real world (I use that loosely), there are places for social spaces, entertainment, violence, bigotry and sex. I think that if it were possible that the Internet had some physical manifestation like a city or country there would be good areas, bad areas and a lot of pollution, much like our terra firma.

There even are wars raging online from the cyber war against drugs to cyber terrorism and of course cyber bullying. So what now, what does this all mean and why is the knowledge of the danger of this illusion relevant to any to us, (I include myself because as I am writing this I am also online researching a –, oh shoot notification, friend request, yes!). Basically I think that the answer is to not try and hide away from the delights of the worldwide web, its duality is its greatest strength just as complexity is ours. The fact of the matter is we now live on the Internet and it in us.

However it is key that we never forget that it is all just an illusion, a Facebook profile has no real value, except that which we bestow on it, every time we put up a status, add a friend or upload a picture. It is like the Voodoo in The Skeleton Key that could only affect the people that believed in it. The sooner we equate tweets to flickering shadows on Plato’s Cave Wall the sooner we can free ourselves and perhaps even get to the source. Finally emerging from our caves and feel the light of the real sun for the first time. At this moment of pure enlightenment and truth, as I would gaze out onto the real world, basking in the warmth of the sun ensuring to not forget the feeling.  I imagine I would then slowly reach into my pocket take out my iPhone – the last shackle of Internet obligation… and mobile upload the shit outta that sunrise.