Natural Freedom

We all know the story of Plato's cave. If you are here reading my work, I'm sure this isn't your first rodeo with someone using this reference. The fact that you found me already means you're knee-deep exploring the waters of the unknown.

I am also sure you've heard it used as a way to describe the screen you're reading this on.

A story of prisoners of their own making, chained to the illusions of the monsters they created and the imaginary world they live in, preventing them from exploring the very real world outside of the cave.

Plato wrote that story after watching the government of Ancient Greece put his teacher, Socrates, to death for the crime of asking too many questions. He sat down and drew that cave to explain what he had seen. The 'Allegory of the Cave' is filed under ancient philosophy, but it really isn't an allegory...

It's a live documentary humanity has been living in for god knows how long.

The most current version of the shadow is, again, the screen you are reading this on. We look into it for hours every single day. Shapes move across it, and we call those shapes the news, the world, what's going on, real life. And behind us, something is throwing them.

When a prisoner becomes brave enough to leave the cave, they realize there is a world beyond the shadows. Then they do the thing that gets them killed. They go back down to tell the others.

Plato wasn't guessing about that last part. He had just watched it happen to Socrates. Ask questions that make heads start to turn, and the cave will kill you for it.

Why?

Change is never welcome.

Our brains are wired to prioritize survival, which requires predictability and energy conservation. When things change, we face the unknown and feel loss aversion. What goes against the conceptual norm gets deemed a threat. In modern times, words like heretic, a conspiracy theorist, a danger to the community get thrown around. Your public execution takes place in the court of public opinion online.

Plato used the 'Allegory of the Cave' to tell his story in the safest possible way he could.

Wrapping the same truth inside a bit of entertainment is the only way to get people to see it. Nobody tries to kill you for telling a fairy tale. And the truth slides into people while they think they're only being entertained.

That is what allegory is actually for.

Aldous Huxley hid it in a novel called "Brave New World." Everyone is grown in a lab, sorted before birth into ranks from the clever down to the ones bred dull on purpose for the mindless jobs, and taught in their sleep, ten thousand times over, to adore the exact life they've been handed. And whenever anything aches, there's a pill called soma that melts it. Nobody in Huxley's world bans the truth. They just make sure no one wants it.

Huxley had a brother, Julian, who ran UNESCO, the global education body set up after the Second World War. In the paper he wrote to launch it, he said its job was to make eugenics, deciding who is allowed to have children, respectable again after the Nazis had ruined the word. He ran the British Eugenics Society. He coined the word transhumanism, and he meant it as a good thing.

"Brave New World" was written by Aldous as a parody of H.G. Wells' "Men Like Gods": a scientific elite runs a flawless world, and everyone is grateful for it. In 1928, Wells dropped the fiction and published "The Open Conspiracy." A world government ran out in the open by one class of scientists, engineers, and enlightened men, quietly steering the rest of us for our own good. Aldous' mocking of "Men Like Gods" was actually a response to his brother as much as it was Wells, as two years before the two men had co-authored a book arguing that science should take the human future in hand.

Like his brother, Aldous shared the dream of engineering a better human. Brave New World wasn't a rejection of it. It was a warning about who ends up holding the controls.

Another dystopian fiction that used allegory to hide its message is George Orwell's "1984." Screens on every wall that watch you back while you watch it. The Ministry of Truth goes back through old newspapers to rewrite them, so that what the shadow said last year always matches what they need it to say today, and yesterday is forgotten. He even had them shrinking the language on purpose, deleting words year by year, because a word you no longer have is a thought you can no longer think.

"Who controls the past controls the future."

While both Huxley and Orwell explored totalitarianism and technological control, they held fundamentally opposing views on how society would ultimately lose its freedom: Orwell feared oppression by pain, while Huxley feared oppression by pleasure.

Both Aldous Huxley and Orwell rejected the idea that the person who left the cave is entitled to rule over those still inside it. The monsters projecting off the cave wall are nothing but the insecurities of people who fear death and view intelligence as a justification for technology working as Maxwell's demon, sorting the rest of us into lives we did not choose because we are not deemed worthy enough to be able to intelligently make proper choices for ourselves.

What makes any person think they have that right?

Fyodor Dostoevsky tried to answer this in 1880. He wrote a scene where Jesus comes back during the Inquisition, and the old cardinal running it has him arrested, then visits his cell to explain why he burns in the morning.

People don't want to be free, the cardinal says. Freedom is too heavy. They want bread, and miracles, and someone to tell them what to think so the fear stops. So divine rulers, governments, and now the technocrats do that for us. They rule us with lies, keeping the gates for those who get curious and feed us pseudoscientific slop so we stay happy, like children.

The cardinal in Dostoevsky's story isn't a villain in his own head. He thinks he's a saint. He looked at you, decided the shadows are kinder than the sun, and made himself your keeper out of love.

"To the monsters, we're the monsters"

Most of the shadows on your wall are thrown by software now, sorting billions of people every second into who sees what. The faces out front get swapped every few years.

Trump.
Soros.
Thiel.
Musk.
Epstein.
The Rothschilds.
Hitler.
The Jews.
Freemasons.
The Jesuits.
The Church.
Aliens.

Villains change, but they are just shadows on the cave wall. The fire, the machine that projects the shadows, continues to run.

Philip K. Dick was one of the most influential science fiction writers who ever lived. Even if you have never read a word of his work, you are most certainly familiar with it. From the 1950s into the 1970s, Dick wrote dozens of novels and stories. His works were later turned into movies and television series: Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report. My personal favorite, The Man in the High Castle, came out in 1962. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the story behind Blade Runner, in 1968. For twenty years, Dick wrote one book after another, all worrying at the same nerve. A world where nothing is what it seems, where machines pass for people, where your own memories are forgeries someone else planted, with the history you were taught being a cover story laid over the real one.

Then, in February of 1974, something happened to the man. Dick said a beam of pink light hit him and poured information straight into his head, and after that he stopped calling any of it fiction.

He spent his last eight years writing one final book before his death. Eight thousand pages completed, but the work was unfinished. He called it the Exegesis, it was his attempt to write down what the light had shown him. Dick believed time secretly stopped in the first century, around the year 70. Everything since then, all two thousand years of it, is a false overlay printed on top of a world that never actually left ancient Rome. We are all still living inside the Roman Empire, locked in what he called the Black Iron Prison, and we simply cannot see the bars.

It broke him. He died in 1982 with the world calling him crazy. He wasn't.

When you strip away the androids, the pink light, the eight thousand pages, what's shown is a much clearer picture. Dick spent his whole life circling this one argument: the Roman Empire never ended.

So set the man and his visions aside, and look at the argument alone.

Rome didn't fall. Half of it did, the western half, in 476. The eastern half kept running as the Roman Empire, out of Constantinople, for another thousand years, until 1453. And the western half didn't vanish either. The Church replaced it. The Pope's own title, Pontifex Maximus, was a Roman office. Julius Caesar held it. The Church kept Rome's language, Rome's law, Rome's map of provinces, Rome's capital city, and changed the sign on the door from emperor to pope.

The title itself never even stopped. Caesar became Kaiser in Germany and Tsar in Russia. There was a Caesar sitting on a throne somewhere in Europe from Augustus until 1946. Two thousand years, almost unbroken outside of a few multi-decade gaps. Moscow crowned itself the Third Rome. The Sultan who took Constantinople called himself Caesar of Rome. Roman law is the spine of European law right now. The Vatican is its own sovereign country. The bundle of rods on either side of the Speaker's chair in the US House is Roman; the word senate is Roman; two of the months on your calendar are named after Roman rulers. All of it still here...

The Empire never ended. It just stopped calling itself the Empire.

The machine runs itself. The faces change. Caesar, pope, kaiser, tsar, president. The fire behind them never once went out. That fire that has been burning behind the same wall for two thousand years, throwing a fresh shadow whenever it's needed to keep the cave dwellers from seeing the exit.

The modern-day public execution doesn't have to harm a body, just the name. You can achieve the same result with the court of public opinion that you could with a guillotine while keeping your hands clean. Dick simply forgot the lessons taught by Plato's cave allegory. He told the truth to people wired to treat the truth as a threat, and they did what fear of change makes people do. They tore him apart.

You can leave breadcrumbs for others inside the cave, a trail to help them to find the exit, but you can't force them to see it.

"You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink it"

Charles Dodgson understood this. He was an Oxford mathematician who taught logic for a living. In 1865, he wrote Alice in Wonderland under the pen name Lewis Carroll. We all know the story of Alice and how it ends. On the surface it's a little girl lost in a silly dream. Underneath, it's a logician's map of how arbitrary power actually works.

Alice falls into a world where nothing obeys its own rules. She keeps changing size, growing and shrinking against her will. When the smoking caterpillar demands to know "who are you?" and she can't answer, because the place has resized her so many times she's lost track of herself. The Queen, drunk on power, calls for sentences first and the verdict afterward, with punishments settled before a word of evidence is heard. If that sounds familiar, it should. It is every mob that brands you a heretic first and goes looking for the crime later.

It was the death of Socrates, and the public execution of Philip K. Dick.

The story ends at Alice's trial, where the entire court rises against her, and she looks down at the mad little kingdom that has been terrifying her the whole time and says the truest line in the book.

"You're nothing but a pack of cards."

That is what a logician buried inside a fairy tale. The rules were never real. The authority was never real. You shrank yourself to fit a game that is absolute bullshit. Shadows on the cave wall.

Douglas Adams left his trail of breadcrumbs to the cave exit using comedy. Adams, a self-described "radical atheist," flatly did not believe the universe came with a purpose. In 1978, he started a radio show for the BBC called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and a year later turned it into a novel I look forward to reading to my daughter when she's old enough to comprehend the story. If you have ever heard a person say the answer is 42, or seen the words Don't Panic on a meme, that is his work. This is where they come from.

In the story, a race of beings so advanced they built the greatest supercomputer that has ever existed, a machine they named Deep Thought, and they asked it the biggest question there is: What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything? Deep Thought asks for time to think and computes for seven and a half million years. When the day finally comes, the whole civilization gathers to hear the machine's findings. Before answering, the machine warns them they aren't going to like the results. It is then revealed that the answer to all of life's biggest questions is forty-two. Deep Thought then explains to the upset crowd why that answer is useless; they never actually knew what the question they were asking was.

Without working out the question, an answer is meaningless.

Deep Thought then reveals a second computer, one so vast and subtle it is very nearly alive, with living creatures running as part of its circuitry, to spend ten million years calculating the actual question. That second computer is the Earth. And five minutes before it finished the job, Earth was bulldozed to make way for an interstellar highway bypass.

Adams spent the rest of his life swearing 42 meant nothing. Asked over and over what was special about the number, he said there was nothing special about it at all. He needed a dull, ordinary number; he stared out at his garden, and he decided 42 would do.

But 42 is not an empty number. The light that bends into a rainbow leaves the sky at almost precisely 42 degrees. That's hard physics. I do not believe Adams was reaching for that number as a random gag. He was one of the most computer-literate writers who ever lived. In 1984, he bought one of the first Macintoshes sold in all of Europe. He spent his life fascinated by how machines think, how information moves, and how a system can run on rules the people living inside it never see.

Write 42 in binary, the ones and zeros a computer actually runs on, and you get a clean, alternating pattern of 101010. Write it in ASCII, the code every early computer man used, and 42 is the asterisk. The star key is the wildcard, the character you type to tell a machine anything and everything. The answer to life, the universe, and everything, chosen by one of, if not the first person in all of Europe to own a Macintosh, is the computer's own symbol for everything.

Adams buried the real thing inside a joke and laughed at the punchline until the day he died. He never panicked. He saw the shadows on the cave wall, laughed at the absurdity of them, and left a trail of breadcrumbs for the curious to find.

That is the lesson sitting under all of it. The answer was never the prize. The question is, and so is the walk you take to reach it.

An answer provided to you is just one more shadow on the wall. It does not even matter if it happens to be true. If you did not turn around and see it for yourself, you do not own it. You are only repeating it. The experience is what matters.

"Life is about the journey, not the destination."

No one can hand you the answer to any question you're looking for, and wise people know better than to try. They just leave breadcrumbs from their own journey out of the cave. They do not run back and try to save the rest of the tribe.

There is a film from 1973 by Alejandro Jodorowsky called The Holy Mountain. In one scene, a crowd gathers at the base of an enormous tower. A rope lowers a container down to them; they fill it with everything they have and send it back up, and the container comes back down heavy with gold. Nobody looks up. Nobody asks where the gold comes from, or who is at the top holding the rope. They just make the trade, no questions asked.

Eventually, the hero of the film's journey, a fool, comes along and instead of taking his gold and going home like the rest, he grabs the rope and starts to climb up the side of the tower to see for himself where the gold comes from and who has been sending it down.

That begins his journey of enlightenment. His escape from Plato's cave began with his choice to climb the rope. The alchemist inside the tower did not make him do it. It was an act of choice and curiosity.

All one can do after climbing the rope is to lower it for the next person, or you'll end up hanging from it like Socrates and Philip K. Dick, strung up by the very same people they were trying to save.

I have to be honest about where I fit into all of this and why I chose to write this piece. Way too much of my time and energy is spent screaming about, and at, those casting the monsters onto the shadow wall.

I think it's time to stop.

Life's better when you laugh at its absurdity. Douglas Adams was right; there is nothing to panic over. Humankind will find the breadcrumbs when it's ready.

All one can do is to continue to leave them.