I have a easily distracted and wandering mind. Sometimes this is quite nice, useful even, other times it is deeply annoying as I find it hard to focus and concentrate on one thing at a time. The thing I enjoy most about my brain is that it leads me towards interesting things ands help me make sense of my life and my work. On Monday my mind’s attention was drawn towards Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ and with all the populist horror that is surrounding us at the moment (flags, people being murdered for political reasons, genocide being allowed to happen in plain sight, pointless wars, billionaires concerned more with power and making more money than people etc, etc, etc, etc…) I find it reassuring to know that these problems aren’t actually new. Plato was talking about them thousands of years ago in a way that applies to the modern world as much as it did in ancient times.
We like to think that we are an ‘advanced’ species, but we are still in our infancy, and I think that is clearly reflected in the fact the world seems to be run mainly by sociopathic or psychopathic white, old men and the masses around them seem largely incapable of affecting change at this point in time. This has been the same since ancient times, old, powerful simple men having too much power and control has always been a problem in the human sphere! Anyway, I am drifting off topic there a little bit.
Back to caves!
In the aforementioned allegory, Socrates is having a chat with a dude called Glaukon (sounds like a pharmaceutical company, don’t see many Glaukon’s round these parts!), and Socrates asks Glaukon to imagine a race of people who are chained up in a cave from birth. They are only able to look forward and all they can see are shadows dancing on part of the wall in front of them. Their whole lives are spent watching the shadows in front of them and making sense of the shadows as best they can with the people around them. Some of these chained people speak, others stay silent, but as a group they start to assign meaning and truth to the shapes and shadows in front of them. This is human nature, this is how the brain works. It takes the available information around it in and then the brain and the psyche tries to make sense of what is being experienced. Despite the fact that it doesn’t have all the information, it is designed to do the best it can and find a way of making sense of what is around it so that the person can survive its experience.
Socrates then asks his pal what he thinks would happen if one of the captives was released and was able to leave the cave and enter the wider world of sunlight, wind, flowers, fresh air and all the things we perceive as being nice, comforting and calm. Glaukon correctly surmises that this person would struggle to get accustomed to the light, their eyes would hurt, they would fear the flowers, the space the calm and they would miss the darkness and the shadows that they have known their entire life.
They then discuss what would happen if the freed person stayed outside for while. That person might become curious around their new surrounding and become accustomed to the light, they might find joy in the flowers, they could marvel at the moon and the stars and eventually be able to look at the sun (don’t do this kids, it is very dangerous!) and appreciate its warmth, energy and bright light.
This person would literally have gone from restricted darkness and unknowing misery, to bright light and hope.
Socrates goes on to discuss what would happen if the freed person returned to the cave, full of hope, full of the lightness and wanting to share it with his fellow captives so they could see the light and be free like him. How would the people he has been living with his entire life receive him?
They surmise that on returning to the darkness, the freed captive would struggle to see in the dark, his fellow captives would interpret his blindness in the dark as meaning the outside world has harmed him and therefore it would harm them if they went outside. They would become fearful of moving outside into the light and kill anyone who then tried to drag them kicking and screaming into the light, happy, healthy, joyful world.
This can directly be linked into my experience of most of my clients. They come to me at first, still trapped in the darkness of their past experiences. Their home environment, school, friendship group, past relationships were such that everyone was pointing in one direction and seeing only the shadows that were permitted or able to be seen by them and the people around them.
When the client starts to see that there is a light beyond the shadows of their past it can be incredibly difficult for them at first. They have to accept the reality of the darkness of their life at times in the past and then find a way to embrace to light, which is another challenge in itself.
I find that people generally fit into two groups. People who sit in the darkness and embrace the shadows. They are the vocal ones in the allegory, they make sense of the shadows that dance around them. The create a group delusion that helps keep them safe, but also means they are trapped forever in the darkness of negatively and small-mindedness. They limit their own existence at the cost of taking risks and pushing themselves into new and difficult situations.
Then there are people that see the shadows, but question about whether that is all there is to existence. They are the ones likely to leave the cave and try to find a different, deeper meaning to life. They will walk into the sunshine and be terrified, but they will persevere and stick with it because they don’t want to be trapped in a dark, dank cave, surrounded by shadows and illusion their entire life. They would rather embrace the complexity, difficulty and imperfection of being in the real world, rather than sit, rotting in the dark.
People who sit in the dark and talk loudly rarely come to therapy in my experience. On the odd occasion they do and they meet me, they don’t tend to engage and embrace the process. I think psychotherapy is for those sat in the dark for years, but were never content to do so. They experience the darkness, feel the anger and frustration, but dont embrace it. On some level they know they deserve better and the are just lacking a little bit of help finding their way to light. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, I firmly believe that love is much more powerful than hate. Hate is much more energetic and those that speak loudly are often the ones full of it. I believe there is more good on this planet and in humanity than bad though and eventually I believe this goodness and love will start to overcome the hateful and weak who shout the loudest.
At the moment politicians, media, social media and billionaires all round the world want us all to sit in the dark, watching the shadows that they are projecting onto the wall in front of us. Billions of people are now sat in the dark, loudly talking about the shadows, putting two and two together to make five and reaching the conclusions that the daily mail, twitter, nigel farage, trump, musk and all the other powerful morons want them to reach.
I will leave people who read this to draw their own conclusions about populism, fascism, patriotism and nationalism from this. As I said earlier on, I think what was true thousands of years ago in human society is still true. We might have AI, technology and believe ourselves to be really clever and advanced as a species, but everything that has happened over the last twenty years is clearly showing we have learned nothing as a species from the last five thousand years of history. This is the saddest thing of all for me. As a species we just keep making the same mistakes over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. I am afraid I don’t have the solution to this. I am a mere psychotherapist who battles my own personal demons everyday and keeping myself healthy and functional for me, my family and my clients has to be my main priority. Something has to change at some point though. Sadly I just don’t know if I will be here to see the bright light that shone for a brief period in the 90’s again, I hope I am wrong.