Plato in Modern America

So let's talk about Plato, even though I'm writing this the day before we discuss the "Allegory of the Cave" in class. What's the situation? People are chained and only seeing the images depicted by shadows on the wall of the cave. This is considered to be "truth". However, one prisoner manages to free himself and make it to the outside world. Although he is originally blinded by the sun, he adjusts and is able to see what the truth actually is, and it doesn't just consist of these images cast on the side of the cave wall. However, like most thinkers who are wise before their time, he is ridiculed upon his return to the cave by his fellow human beings because he can no longer adjust to their ignorance.

Now, I don't know about you, but I don't see a lot of caves around Ann Arbor. Furthermore, even if I were to find one, I don't think I'd likely find prisoners in them. So, my question is, what does "The Allegory of the Cave" look like in a modern context? How can we update it? What are our caves, our chains, our fellow prisoners, our sun, our ridicule? Of course, with November 6th right around the corner, I couldn't help but think about it in terms of the election.

The easiest of these symbols to compare is the symbolism of the prisoners. We, the American public, would have to be considered the prisoners. Don't take offense! As Plato contends, the prisoners are like us; they're just normal people. Besides, we are the ones who are the targets of the election.

Next up, what is the cave? I would like to argue that the cave is media. Look at our major news sources, for instance. Fox News tends to be more conservative, whereas The New York Times just endorsed Obama. As much as it would be nice to have unbiased sources, we really don't. So many news outlets have some sort of political stake in these elections, and that of course influences what news each paper reports and how it is presented, which in turn influences the people reading the newspapers. This means that the people are not being encouraged to create their own opinions; instead the facts on which they base their opinions are in the "shadows" of these news sources' opinions.

If this caption from Fox Nation isn't biased, I don't know what is...

In addition to this type of media, there's also the influence of social media on the election. Scrolling through my Facebook feed on the nights of the debates, for the most part I did not see complicated analyses of the candidates' policies. Instead, what I got was jokes about Big Bird, binders full of women, and horses and bayonets. And judging from the tweets at the bottom of the debates (if you were watching on Youtube), Twitter was not much better.

Interestingly enough, the Fired Big Bird Twitter is becoming one of the more serious political Twitters

And the Vice Presidential debate...well, you could let Biden himself speak for that...

That's a bunch of malarkey!

So what do these parodies show? To me they show that people are not paying attention to the issues at hand. There are certain key phrases that stick with people and that's it. When Mitt Romney made the Big Bird comment, what was he really talking about? Does everyone fully realize the full impact cutting PBS would have on the American public? Is this something they support or not? I'm curious to hear opinions, not just recycled jokes. These jokes are also impressions. 

Of course, this doesn't apply to everyone. There are many people who are becoming more and more politically informed, and as a result are forming their own opinions. This would be turning towards the sun. And this sun can definitely be blinding. Someone who supports Obama might be "blinded" and incapable of dealing with how he's managed the drone strikes. A Romney supporter may be taken aback by some of his previously more liberal positions concerning abortion. These are realities a politically conscious individual may have to deal with. And then comes the ridicule. I would say nowadays, it's not primarily ridicule, but more suppression. Once you are adjusting to the light, people try to undermine your new-found opinions. People continue to say, "I don't really care about politics...it's so boring", or even "I'm not voting". And then they try to make you stop talking about politics because it's just that "boring". For people who have been newly enlightened, this attitude can be frustrating, but considering how omnipresent it is, it drowns out the single voice trying to share his or her opinions. It may not be outright ridicule, but it is a form of being ostracized.

Then my last question is what are the chains? Why do we stay ignorant? Besides the answer of just plain laziness, I wanted to think about it slightly differently: We're ignorant because of our two-party system. We're ignorant because in the system we'll be voting in in under two weeks, we're forced to pick a side. We do not get much of an opportunity to vote on individual national issues. Instead, we have to choose the candidate who gives us the best impression, and who we hope will do the best job based on what they've spoon-fed us and how the news covers their positions. Our individual voices our stifled, so people lose interest in participating in a system in which they are not truly represented. People become apathetic because they "don't like either candidate", and due to our two-party system, voting for any third party candidate is not a feasible possibility. And so, all of us, to some extent, are stuck.