someone who by most or all accounts will act against everyone’s best interest through advocacy of his or her own agenda. In other words, supporters could not and did not make their decision about who should lead them freely. This in-and-of-itself puts an interesting
spin on how to interact with and converse with such supporters, something about which will be discussed later.
The Allegory of the Cave
It is interesting, if not ironic, that some three thousand years after there was a recorded conversation about what constituted an “enlightened” leader people would still be debating the proposition. Have we not learned anything across time?
The conversation just mentioned about enlightenment and leaders was recorded around 375 B.C. by Plato in The Republic of Plato1 and it involved the allegory of the cave. The conversation involved Socrates (who was Plato’s teacher) and Glaukon (a colleague of Socrates). According to Plato, Socrates asked Glaukon to imagine a group of prisoners who sat chained in a cave before a blank wall where they had lived since infancy, unable to move or turn their heads, staring directly forward, where they interacted only with shadows of people and animals carved from stone and wood and other materials that were projected on the wall from a fire situated behind the prisoners. In the situation presented, where the captives experienced only what was put before them, the captives would consider truth to be nothing but what was revealed through the shadows of the carved objects projected before them.
Socrates then asked his peer, Glaukon, to imagine a case where one of the prisoners is unshackled and set free. Socrates noted the prisoner would first turn around to face the fire and probably suffer pain from the bright light and heat of the fire, which, having experienced
nothing like it before, would most likely cause him to run back to the things normally perceived (the shadows) which did not produce such pain. More importantly, Socrates suggested the individual would most likely understand the shadows to be more defined and clearer after seeing the shock of the fire light and flames – a claim to which Glaukon agrees. But then Socrates asked: what if the prisoner were to be forcibly dragged out of the cave to view the open sky above? He asked Glaukon whether the prisoner wouldn’t experience something of the same when confronted by the sun, being at first unable to see much beyond outlines of shadow; but then, as his eyes adjusted within a much larger environment than offered by the cave, his perspective would change and he would be able to see the sun and stars not as phantoms but as they really are. Seeing things as they truly were, the prisoner would then be able to reason his way to the truth – ultimately, feeling sorry for his fellow prisoners who remained bound to their illusions. Again, Glaukon agrees.
But Socrates pushed the argument further, suggesting that the prisoner, should he return to the darkness of the cave, would once again struggle to gain his sight. Seeing him struggle, Socrates suggested the prisoners would mock him for the time wasted going outside the cave, possibly even wishing to kill him for trying to liberate them as his search for the good and true would seem both ridiculous and
Individuals who desire change must not condemn others but work with them to realize that what is right and proper exists inherently within themselves – whether the individual is a teacher or leader.
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