With the modern invention of cinemas and movies, the directors of film added yet another layer of deception to our reality. In fact, cinemas are a "Plato’s cave". In cinemas, people have their backs toward the film projector behind them, and they stare at a blank wall that produces for them a completely fictionalized world. Our past, present, and future are being falsified. Though we may escape the cave, we'll have to leave the prisoners behind.
Speech
In his book The Republic, written almost 2,400 years ago, Greek philosopher Plato proposed his famous allegory of the cave, namely to explore “the effect of education and the lack thereof on human nature”. The allegory comes in the form of a dialogue between Plato’s brother and another Greek thinker, Socrates.
Socrates describes a group of people chained to the wall of a cave ever since they were born, facing a blank wall. Projected onto the wall in front of them, the prisoners watch shadows from objects passing in front of a fire burning behind them. These shadows are given names. The fictions are the prisoners’ only reality, but they do not represent the real world.
Plato meant that the reality we can perceive with our own eyes, with our sense, may still be such a fiction, and that we should resort to the natural sciences, to mathematics, or deductive logic instead to try to pry behind this sensory world in order to discover the real reality.
But with the modern invention of cinemas and movies, the directors of film added yet another layer of deception to our reality. In fact, cinemas are a “Plato’s cave”. In cinemas, people have their backs toward the film projector behind them, and they stare at a blank wall to produces for them a completely fictionalized world.
In the movie Titanic, for example, by director James Cameron, movie goers witnessed a historical drama of class struggle, a story about privileged upper classes who saved their own skin while letting the lower classes drown. That’s not what happened. In reality, the one demographic that saw most of its members drown were the rich, privileged upper class man, for they showed the greatest willingness to risk their own lives to try and save everyone else, including men, women, and children of the lower classes.
The invention of the television, too, turned our own living rooms into a “Plato’s cave”. Convinced that the news brings us objective facts, vetted by careful investigative journalists, common people buy into a completely falsified version of their reality. And this warping of the present, past, and future of our societies is further compounded by the many shows and movies that pass the review each day and night.
People who watch Netflix streams may believe that 1-in-5 Americans is vegan or transgender, 1-in-4 is Muslim, and in 1-in-3 is a military veteran. In reality, not even 1-in-100,000 people have gender surgery per year, 19 out of 20 people still eat meat, barely 1% of the U.S. population follows Islam, and only 6% of men are veterans.
One may forgive visions of the future such as in Star Trek or Star Wars as the works of creative minds, but the fictionalized past crafted by Hollywood’s screenwriters’ guilds have severe implications for our present survival. Having been raised on cinema, TV, and now online streams for several generations, most members of our people can no longer tell fact from fiction.
We are told to accept that all anatomically modern human beings share a single common ancestor, a woman living in Eastern-Africa. We are told that white Europeans are descendants of men coming out of Africa in several waves between 60,000 to 30,000 years ago, a tropical race entirely displacing the weathered and hardy Neanderthals, and driving this cold-adapted species to extinction whose ancestors had been living in Europe for over a million years.
There is another, less well known story to be told. This story says that European Neanderthals at some point mixed with Eurasian hominids, that many modern-day Europeans are still up to 40% Neanderthal, rather than merely 2%, and that what genetics we share with Central Africans is what they inherited from us when some of our kind, the Cro Magnon, ventured into Africa and mixed there with Homo Ergaster, an archaic ape-man prone to rape.
TV and cinema repeatedly remind us of the European Dark Ages. When Northern Europeans adopted Christianity around the 6th and 7th centuries AD, our culture supposedly collapsed and came to a halt for three centuries, during which only the light of Charlemagne, Charles the Great, shone to return Europe to progress.
But when scientists, real scientists, began scrutinizing the literary, the archeological, and the architectural record, they found bizarre anomalies ranging from about the year 614 AD to 911 AD. Namely, they found that the Germanic literary style of the 10th century simply continued where it left off in the early 7th century. They found that the building styles of churches and cathedrals told a story of continues, uninterrupted progress as though the 300 years of history had simply never happened.
Sometimes reality is as bizarre as it gets, and the facts force us to ask the question: Did the Dark Ages really happen? Or did someone or some organization insert about 300 empty years into our timeline in order to invent a history that never happened? To those dismissing this story as a hoax, the scientists counter: Find us the European bodies buried during the late 7th, 8th, or 9th centuries. There are none such bodies. They don’t exist.
Now, we may begin to doubt the true history of events such as the attacks on Pearl Harbor, the King James Hotel bombings, September 11, and many other such happenings that justified subsequent wars for empire. The explosions and the victims were obviously real but the stories journalists wrote about the perpetrators and their motives were made up.
Was the Apollo Space Program perhaps nothing more than a Stanley Kubrik film, directed at the site now known as Area 51? Did the deception serve to tax the U.S. public in order to fund a ballistic missile program aimed at fighting Russia during the Cold War?
As we watch what we think is history in the making in the Plato’s cave of our personal living rooms, it hardly occurs to anyone that what we are watching is cleverly directed fiction that follows a screenplay written by the owners of big media companies.
Another great theme in our cinematic culture is that of women’s liberation from men’s oppression. We are told that for centuries if not for thousands of years men barely able to sustain themselves as peasants somehow had the powers to restrict women’s lives. Only with the help of the feminist movement did women finally win universal suffrage and where they able to start voting evil men out of power.
The true account, once again, is so different from what we are told to believe. Among the ancient Germanic and Nordic peoples, for example, women carried the keys to their homes. When female seeresses spoke at religious gatherings, the men listened. And though, according to a poem by the name of Thrym’s Lay recorded in the Edda, women didn’t bother with small troubles, the Aesir goddesses of Asgard were invited to voice their opinion on important matters.
You see, throughout European history, most men refused to wage wars. Feudal lords relied on a standing army of voluntary, professional warriors. These armies rarely exceeded more than a few thousand men, much unlike the Chinese machinery that could musters millions of peasants to fight by decree.
Europeans were free, in this sense, to refuse to fight. In fact, American democracy may very well stem from this problem. By 1856, property ownership requirements were eliminated, giving suffrage to most white men. Of course, most men where white in those days. The point is, they were given voting rights in exchange for military conscription, namely to fight in American Civil War which helped the Wallstreet financiers crush an aristocratic South.
The women didn’t have to conscribe, nor did they want to, and were, therefore, left out of the vote. But later, starting around the time of the First World War, men started using their vote in order to vote for women’s suffrage. It was thanks to the men that women got the vote without having to die in wars to earn the right themselves.
Without a proper understanding of our real history, our people’s leaders cannot show the way. If we are ready to leave Plato’s cave, it means we must leave the prisoner behind. Irony has it that young women, today, may be drafted into the war against Russia, for now they are equal, and cannons don’t care about gender.
Share this post