De Facto Times

Growing sentiment among the general public and the pessimists tells us that we might be living in Plato’s Cave; that is, what we see before our eyes is merely an illusion, an artificial simulation of a distant natural world. Such claims are somewhat vague in their implications, but could mean that the public is generally uninformed, ignorant of some conspiratorial condition, or that our reality is encapsulated (and to some degree trivialized) by something which makes it fake. I am skeptical of these claims—perhaps in some semi-conscious regard due to their infiltration of mainstream zeitgeist—but in a more substantive regard due to their illogic. I shall explore the validity of the meanings implied by the claim in the following sections.

I

First, I will address the notion that the public is generally uninformed. Although such a statement lacks specificity, it is not unfounded. Misinformation and disinformation spread with ease through novel modes of communication, and although the individual has more opportunities to be informed than ever before, he also has an easier time remaining complacent. Thus, I find this argument for why people are living in Plato’s Cave to be rather unproblematic compared to the others.

II

To specify what is often meant by the second point, a conspiratorial condition denotes some greater ruling force that intentionally suppresses the knowledge of its power from the demos, often upheld purely by a hereditary nobility. These hereditary nobilities tend to have shared characteristics, such as religion, ethnicity, race, or language, often being a historically scapegoated outgroup. They are inclined to feed off of the detriment of the demos, whether they are suspected of benefiting from population control through resource concentration or the actual consumption of infants to retain youth. Claims of conspiracy tend to be plagued by a variety of logical flaws, such as the unlikely behavior ascribed to the conspiring nobility and the mathematical improbability of stability within the conspiring nobility once it has reached a large size.

One of these is the often-seen conviction that the nobility teases the demos by dropping hints, often manifesting through symbols, phrases, and actions (such as handshakes). The order of the nobility is considered too secretive to be uncovered in its entirety by any of the most competent people, organizations, or governments around the world that rise through their own merit, yet it is careless enough to tease the demos with symbols. What motive would the nobility have to tease the demos with emblems of their own oppression? Would that not just serve to inconvenience them via risk? Are we really to believe that they’re that much more sadistic than the average person? Such a circumstance seems unlikely. It is certainly the case that competent actors can arise independently, as there are too many successful actors for a secret to plausibly be maintained among them.

Additionally, the more people a secret is spread among, the more brittle its secrecy becomes. These conspiracies are often assumed to be very widely encompassing and not among small, concentrated nobilities, but instead over continent-sized swaths of land and diverse gatherings of many, many people, thereby rendering them too brittle for long-term stability. For example, a low 5% likelihood of members leaking the secret may mean it is relatively safe among a group of 100, but the more the number of members increases, the higher the number of people the 5% encompasses, and therefore the higher the likelihood that the secret is released. Additionally, with more people and rungs of hierarchy, those who are more removed from the top may feel less institutional pressure to maintain the secret, thereby increasing the likelihood of members leaking it. Thus, it appears practically inevitable that any conspiring nobility would shatter with time if it is too big. The only conspiring nobilities that can plausibly exist are small ones.

III

As to those who suspect our own reality to be a simulated artifice, I counter that such a hypothesis is infinitely suggestible and thereby meaningless, and that beauty is evidence of our reality. First, the suggestion that man is a sort of programmed test being run from a greater external source requires evidence other than scientific mystique to not be utterly meaningless. Otherwise, this becomes an infinite Matryoshka Effect. Who’s to say the simulators are not living in an external simulation? And their simulators as well? And so on, and so forth. This infinite series of Russian nesting dolls demonstrates the futility of a simulation claim without any positive evidence and therefore its illogic.

Furthermore, true beauty is positively correlated with realness. Beauty and realness are separate descriptors, but realness tends to strongly influence the perception of beauty. One may be quick to counter, “We intuitively consider certain paintings beautiful even if they are not realistic. In fact, some unrealistic, impressionist paintings are widely deemed more beautiful than some of their mundanely realistic brothers. Thus, how can we determine that realness is a factor in beauty?” Such an inquiry is fair, but overlooks the unilateral application of beauty—beauty can be a matter of appearance, but is not merely so. If that were the case, we would not consider bizarre collections of symbols on a collection of thin paper, something we call a book, to be beautiful, yet humans across all cultures tend to value literature as something beautiful. Thus, beauty can be gleaned from the measure by which it reflects the human experience. For example, a piece of media that feels corporate and devoid of any relatability, despite any apparent “quality,” can still feel instinctively ugly. The humanity and therefore the realness and beauty of a work tend to be diluted through excessive division of labor, or “too many cooks in the kitchen.” Personal effort and originality are often effective means of portraying realness and emotion, traits that tend to be lacking from profit-motivated corporate work. Francisco Goya’s famous painting Saturn Devouring His Son is, despite its clear stylization and diversion from realism, rightfully applauded as an emotionally evocative masterpiece.

Whether it is a visual or an emotional reality, nature is the source of beauty that humans work to replicate, albeit asymptotically. A Christian belief would say that God has made man in His Image, imbuing in him the ability to create. However, man is not God, the all-creator—he can only imperfectly replicate the perfection of the natural world. It is impossible for a painting to perfectly mirror nature, but humans will nonetheless try in their godly instinct. The tradition of landscape painting, such as the Hudson River School, exemplifies the human propensity to recreate natural beauty and therefore a realness in the world (perhaps this was most successfully accomplished by Albert Bierstadt). Humans carry an innate awe of nature, our historical home that we have been biologically evolved for and with.

Moreover, the disturbance of Plato’s cave is the perversion of the natural condition that the humans residing in the cave have been subjected to. If man was meant to reside in caves and look at fire-borne images on a wall, the hypothesis loses all meaning. It ceases to be disturbing, and the analogy falls apart. Alas, those who are in a “fake” environment must be missing what has been expected in their nature, and those who are in a “real” environment are intuitively able to prove it through its beauty. You can’t see the blue sky from Plato’s Cave. Because we can see the blue sky, the forests, the mountains, and the setting sun and intuit all of them as beautiful, we cannot completely be in Plato’s Cave.

It is logically possible, therefore, to say that people are only in Plato’s Cave insofar as they have been cast away from the natural world, and such circumstances are certainly plausible. It follows then, that the best argument for man entering Plato’s Cave is his divorce from nature; it’s the gray malaise of urban infrastructure which stomps over the delicate green, the smog that smothers our lungs from nature’s fresh inhale, and the mass draining of ecosystems from land to sea that once flourished before the apex predator of trade incentives enslaved them. There are too many ways to number in this space that man betrays beauty and suffers for it. After all, such is the reason why Plato’s Allegory of the Cave remains so resonant. Thus, contribute to the world what is real and beautiful, in your genuine expression and in your cultural output, and counter ugliness and fakeness in the most effective way.