Narratives and perspectives block out some of the light coming from the fire in the cave. Not only don’t we actually see reality–something actually determines which parts of objective reality get projected onto the wall. Those holding the partition that blocks out some of the fire’s light have themselves grown up in the cave but may hold a quite different agenda from other cave dwellers. We are relating specifically to the blockers and often consider them to be experts or even friends.
There is yet another character in our contemporary cave. This is the interpreter, reporter or analyst. We actually don’t have enough time in our busy lives to look directly at the wall to see the shadows that are projected from the fire (which we assume is the “real” world). The cave has grown very large. We often can’t even see the walls of the cave and the shadows. We wait for the interpreter to tell us what is being projected on the wall and what the implications of these images are for us in our lives.
The interpreter is often personally unknown to us. They might be newscasters or those who post blogs. Regardless of their identity, we are now removed three steps from reality. We believe that the shadows on Plato’s cave are “reality.” We fail to recognize that someone or something is standing between us and the fire. They are selectively determining which aspects of reality get projected onto the wall. This is the second step from reality. At the third step from reality, someone else is situated inside the cave offering us a description and analysis. These three steps are all embedded in our relationships with other people—be they people we know or people from distant sources that we trust.
There are now, in mid-21st Century life, multiple fires burning in the cave and projecting multiple shadows on the wall. The so-called grand narrative (of Western European and American origins) which defined much of our reality during the 19th and 20th Century is now collapsing. We now have multiple, conflicting narratives—and multiple conflicting narrators– that make it difficult for all but the most xenophobic people in the world to see only one set of shadows.
There is a second major change, with the advent of social media and reality television and with the purchase of goods and services directly from the source. We might now be moving back to a time when there are no “middlemen” or interpreters. All relationships are in some way “intimate” –even if they are distant and digitally-based. The term disintermediation is being used to describe this potentially seismic change in our interpersonal relationships, societal acquisition and framing of knowledge. Regardless of the shifts now occurring in our world of knowledge, we seem to remain confused about what is “real” and often don’t trust our direct experience or our relationships with other people that we had once trusted.
With great reluctance (and considerable grieving), we move to a recognition that reality is being constructed for us. We need to attend not only to the constructions, but also to the interests and motives of those who tend the fire and block images on the wall of the cave. We have to be cautious in relating to and trusting those who offer us their interpretations. We must move, in other words, from an objectivist perspective (whether it be static or dynamic) to a constructivist perspective. An initial question might be posed given these changes: how do we face these challenges to objectivism—especially if we are Extraverts who wish to gobble up experiences and establish a breadth of relationships? How do we deal with multiple narratives and the disintermediation of images we are receiving?
