Pain, Rage and Blindness

"I didn't see the light until I was already a man...
By then it was nothing to me but blinding"

   
       I love the allegory of the cave. Every time I have read it, it strikes me anew as a powerful analogy. This time, the thing that spoke to me the most was Plato's emphasis on the violence with which the Prisoners will resist their own liberation.

       In the allegory, men who have known nothing but the dark prefer the comfort of the familiar because they are ignorant of the good that comes from enduring the painful ascent and transition to liberation. This phenomenon is not difficult to understand, as it is common in both my own life and in my interactions with others. When confronted with something that challenges my perspective, my first instinct is rejection. If the threat persists, this rejection can become forceful and even aggressive, with my reason quickly falling by the wayside to be replaced by trite and unexamined dogma.

     It is insightful also, that the Liberator must fight the Prisoners if he is to help them. He recognizes the good that comes from enlightenment and the duty that it imposes on him to share with others. For this reason, the Liberator braves the resistance of the Prisoners. He knows that had someone not liberated him in the first place, he too would be in their place. This picture is remarkably similar to the Christian narrative of the Gospel, and, really, the savior archetype in general. Any time there is a story in which a character is chosen, granted more knowledge than they ever wanted, and saddled with the responsibility of saving people, there is often an accompanying theme of ignorance, ingratitude, or occasionally anger of those being saved. These people are characterized as lacking perspective or knowledge of the truth, and it is the hero's compassion, empathy and dedication to his or her duty that leads them to continue with their mission.

      This is an important observation. Not because I think all of these fictional or theological themes are the result of imitating Plato's work, but because I believe all instances of the Savior archetype, whether manifested in Socrates' philosophic analogy or the Wachowski brothers' The Matrix, are tapping into something that is true about humans, that we recognize our weakness, our complacent preference for an undesirable status quo, and our need for someone to pull us out of this suboptimal state.