Plato's The Allegory Of The Cave

The Allegory of the Cave In Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave, he touches upon the ideas and beliefs of how humans perceive reality. In the story, Plato describes that the chained prisoners in the cave believe that the shadows casted on the wall are reality simply because that is all they have ever known, and thus have never questioned if the shadows are real. The prisoners have been left in the dark to make out what is truth with only the light defused from a fire behind them. However, when one of them comes out of the cave and returns to share their new knowledge of truth, the prisoners shun the person because the persons’ beliefs are too different to understand. In a similar sense, society today is much like the prisoners in the cave because we shun the ideas that are too different from our own while we mindlessly follow …show more content…
One form of human perception is stereotypes. To this day, we use decade old perceptions to stereotype people and places into categories we think they belong in. As modern as we are today, one would think that we would’ve already learned by now that labeling people is something of the past, but this isn’t the case. Much like Plato’s prisoners, we use second hand ideas to justify what we think is real, just as the prisoners never questioned the reality of the shadows on the wall, and never desired to know more. In African author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s lecture “The Danger of a Single Story”, she uses her idea of how influential a single story can be when shaping the perception of a person or place as a whole. In her lecture, she describes the experiences with stereotypes she had in the States while studying at her university. Her roommate pitied her for being African, and she frequently heard how African characters needed to be “authentically African” by her professors when she tried to portray her realistic