Plato’s Cave
P. Schultz
Some rather
interesting passages from the novel, In
and Out, by Barry Eisler, who is a former CIA officer.
“Come on,
Hurt, Republicans and Democrats . . . . they hate each other, right? There’s
competition.”
“Hurt
laughed. ‘That’s not competition. It’s supposed to look that way, so people
think their interests are being looked after, that they have a choice, that
they can make a difference, that they’re in charge. But they don’t.’”
“That
doesn’t make sense.”
“I’m afraid
it does. You see, there’s more money to be made in cooperation than in
competition. It’s the same dynamic that leads to cartels. You can argue that
cartels should be competing. But they don’t see it that way. Their profit
motive enables them to rise above the urge to compete. In the service of the
greater good, naturally. People who think there is actual friction, and real
competition, between Democrats and Republicans or between the press and
politicians, or between the corporations and their supposed overseers, they’re
like primitives looking at shadows on the wall and believing the shadows are
the substance.”
Of course,
the reference here to shadows on the wall is to Plato’s Republic and his allegory of the cave. In that allegory, Socrates
represents life for human beings as like life in a cave, where there is a fire
behind the many humans and other humans who project images or shadows onto a
wall that the many humans take to be real. The philosopher is the one who
climbs out the cave, sees the sun lit world, and realizes that what most humans
believe to be real are merely shadows on a wall.
It is
necessary to make one emendation to what Hurt says, namely, that Plato knew that
this phenomenon of mistaking shadows for reality was not a “primitive”
phenomenon. In fact, one could speculate that those we label “primitives” would
be less likely to mistake shadows for reality than those who we label
“civilized” for the simple reason that such behavior would be far more
dangerous in primitive than in civilized conditions. Those who chase or react
to shadows would be more likely to overlook real and immediate dangers, “clear
and present dangers” as some like to say.
In fact,
“civilization” could be one of those shadows on the wall, something that is
more evident to the likes of a Huck Finn than the likes of a Tom Sawyer. Tom
pursues and achieves what we call “success,” that is, wealth, fame, and the
best looking girl in town, while Huck ultimately has “to light out for the
territories” in order to be content. Huck won’t be “sivilized,” as he puts it,
because that means wearing shoes, not smoking, attending church, and abiding by
the likes of Aunt Polly. It’s just not
for him. And we can ask: Who is pursuing a shadow, Huck or Tom?
Of course,
the more relevant aspect to these passages concerns our political order. Is our
alleged two party system a shadow on the wall or is it real? And if it is
merely a shadow on the wall, what is the reality that that shadow covers over?
It could be something like the cartels that Hurt talks about or it could be the
collusion that some have noticed in the behavior of our “two” parties. And it
doesn’t seem unimportant to figure this out.
