|
A Controlled Peasantry
[American Thinker] In his "Allegory of the Cave," Plato’s character, Socrates, paints a striking picture of people kept in chains from birth deep in a cave chained by the neck and the legs so that they can only see the back wall of the cave. As a consequence, they only "know" the shadows cast by a fire behind them on the back wall of the cave. There are other people, the "puppet masters", who are not chained and manipulate these prisoners. Some puppet-masters carry objects, such as a sword, between the fire and the prisoners and say the word "sword" when its shadow flickers on the back wall of the cave. Since the prisoners never see a real sword they come to associate the word "sword" with the flickering shadow on the back wall of the cave. The same is true for all objects. Thus, they do not even know what their own words mean. The word "sword" actually means a metallic weapon but they think it means a certain flickering shadow on the back wall of the cave. Having been in this condition since birth, they do not even know they are in a cave or even have a concept of a cave. They do not, therefore, even know that they are prisoners. Their "reality" is an insubstantial parade of flickering shadows dancing before their eyes. The "puppet masters" have kept them in a state of complete illusion about both themselves and the world.When Glaucon says these are strange prisoners Socrates says, "They’re like us." We are the prisoners in the cave. The fact that Glaucon finds the image strange shows that he does not know himself. He may even think himself free, but he is a prisoner in a cave being manipulated by puppet masters. He does not even have a concept of the kind of prisoner that he is. Plato’s allegory is not a strange fancy. It is meant to describe the human condition. We have no idea what reality is. We don’t even know the meanings of our own words. Plato’s point in the Allegory is that tyranny is not an aberration. Rather, tyranny is the normal state of human life. After all, Plato does not reside in Sparta’s military dictatorship but in ancient Athens, the first democracy in the world, peopled by glorious figures like Pericles, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Aristotle and so on. If even Athens in "the Golden Age of Greece" is a disguised tyranny, then tyranny is everywhere. It is not as if there is tyranny over there in China but we are free here in America. The nature of the control may be different here but the methods of control are so diabolical that Americans who fancy themselves the lucky citizens of a free Republic are so deluded they don’t even see the chains on their necks. In 2016, the United States was thrown into turmoil when they were told that the elected president was "Putin’s puppet." Massive expensive investigations were needed to "save our democracy" from the orange Russian asset. What passes for our "news" media daily chanted in lockstep: "The walls are closing in. Trump will be led out of the White House in handcuffs." In fact, that was all theatre crafted by our puppet masters. It was Trump’s opponent in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, who bought a dossier of fake accusations, ultimately from Russians no less. The following four years were filled with orchestrated eye-bulging hyperventilating hysteria by the puppet masters and their minions, none of which really accomplished anything except to frustrate the agenda of the democratically elected president and make the United States look like a "banana republic" around the world, all engineered by the Party that says it wants to "save our democracy". Posted by: Besoeker 2022-10-21 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=647366 |