Allegory of the Cave

The Allegory of the Cave is a fictitious story representing a metaphor for human existence. You can be told the "truth" without understanding it or questioning it. The inability to question the things were told is indeed the folly of mankind as we know it. How everything is perceived by the people of the world can be argued to be a truth in either direction. This is my interpretation of each metaphor used in the Allegory of the Cave.

My drawing that represents human nature

The Cave - Where it all takes place. The world. This is where sustainability needs to exist to survive.

The Prisoners - The vast majority of people in the world. The ones who are in the dark about the real truths, but are afraid to ask questions and only believe what they are shown or told.

The Light/Fire - The real truths. The intelligence behind the shadows and what they actually stand for. The images they are seeing after being brought into the light seem less real than the shadows cast by the actual image.

The Shackles - What pull us away from the actual truth. The things keeping us from asking questions or questioning the truths we know to believe. The inability to WANT to ask these questions.

The Shadows - The false perception of the truth. What we think is real, but is only based off spoken word or imagery, but not off experience.

The Puppeteers - The people who are telling us these so called "truths". The ones creating plausible scenarios for us to gobble up and consume without making us think of what could be going on. Keeping us "in the dark" about reality.

But what is a "truth" and how did we come to accept it? Some would argue that the concrete world in which fact exists is a truth, but without thinking about how these facts exist, we will never fully understand them. Some may argue that art is a sense of truth because it is ones interpretation of what they perceive. Honestly, "truth" is about perception. "Faith cannot be given, but must be experienced."