I just happened to run across a reference to Plato’s Cave, a philosophical allegory for society and its relationship to truth. And I was struck by how relevant its message is to what we’re up against today.
Quick refresher on The Cave (I know I needed one, it’d been a long time): In Socrates’ retelling of Plato’s allegory, a group of people, the prisoners, sit inside the cave, facing away from the light source, so they can only see the cave’s back wall. Another group of people, the shadow-makers, are between the prisoners and the light source, and everything they do casts shadows on the back wall, which the prisoners watch and interpret. Beyond the shadow-makers is the cave entrance, with all of reality and truth right there for all to see, if they go out and look. (I’ve simplified the setup slightly; the original is, I think, unnecessarily tortured.)
The idea is that the prisoners don’t know about the real world. All they know is what they’ve been able to extrapolate from the shadows cast on the wall by the shadow-makers. It’s a murky view of reality at best, and the shadow-makers can, and do, easily deceive them for their own purposes.
Now the fun part: One prisoner escapes from the cave. He sees the shadow-makers and what they’re doing, but he doesn’t stop there. He leaves the cave and sees the absolute truth of the real world. It’s a revelation that brings him great joy, and changes everything for him.
Then he remembers how ignorant he had been as a prisoner, how small his world was, and how he had been deceived for so long by the shadow-makers. And he feels pity for his fellow prisoners. So he goes back into the cave, sneaks past the shadow-makers, and finds the prisoners still sitting there, watching the shadows on the wall. And he tells them what he has seen. He tells them about the shadow-makers, and about the brilliant light of truth that exists outside. He frees them, and offers to lead them out of the cave.
But the other prisoners don’t want to follow him. They are comfortable in their ignorance, and invested in their beliefs of what the shadows mean. They refuse to believe him. They won’t budge, and when he persists they threaten to kill him. In the end he has to leave them there.
And so it is with the evangelical conservatives of today. Their worldview is tiny and dark, restricted by the boundaries of their faith. They are easily deceived by any shadow-maker capable of tapping into their shadowy little world, and can be led to believe any hateful, small-minded, ridiculous and absurd thing that serves the shadow-maker’s purpose. As evangelicals they are already conditioned to believe the unbelievable, to accept what their rational mind would reject. Massive conspiracies by the democrats to steal their freedom, by the Jews to replace them with immigrants, by Satan-worshipping elites to rape and eat their children, no conspiracy is too stupid or too outrageous for them. And if you try to expose them to the truth, yes, they will threaten to kill you.
What was true in the age of Socrates is still true today. Two thousand years of enlightenment, social advancement and science hasn’t even made a dent in the wall of willful ignorance that is the evangelical conservative movement (“movement” being a misnomer, of course; nothing in the conservative worldview has moved in centuries). None are so blind as those who will not see.