Plato's Allegory Of The Cave

Title Part of being a human, a part of humankind, is the ability to establish ideas and beliefs, based on morals and ethics, among other things. Throughout one’s life, some of these aforementioned beliefs and ideas may remain constant, while others may undergo scrutiny or be challenged leading to the alteration of them; in high school, it is a belief that one begins to grasp what the real-world is like and their place in it. For me this was true; I thought I had my worldview under my belt, I thought I knew my place, where I belonged, and my own significance in our limitless society. However, after experiencing living away from where I spent my entire childhood, and being able to live and learn in a vastly different place, with other truly …show more content…
For eighteen years I experienced this lack of concern for those outside of our community, outside of the cave some sixty-thousand people called home. After reading Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, I was taken aback by the intense similarities I felt between the people watching the screen within the fable and the people within my community at home; the people in the darkness of the cave, watching the truth they know of the outside world unfold like “puppeteers show their puppets” reminded me of every single person in my hometown, watching the news, whether local, national, or international and thinking that was the true reality of the world [Plato 187]. For the people within the cave, they were too sheltered to understand the world beyond the screen, but for the people I know, they have …show more content…
While many of the readings built upon each other, the fable that influenced me the most was the Allegory of the Cave, for more than just the similarities I saw between my hometown and those in the cave, rather I felt a connection to the person dragged out of the cave. Despite my own choice to travel far from home for school, I was completely unaware of the consequences of such action, just as the person taken from the cave was. For much of the first few days of college, I was in utter disbelief of how different I was; I came from a pretty densely populated and diverse area but some-how I felt the least cultured and seemingly out of place. This in part, was due to the expansive differences between Bozeman and Fort Lauderdale, but mainly due to the overall open-mindedness of the students and faculty on campus. I truly felt like I was one of the more closed-minded people and that all of the people around me had experienced so much more than I had and understood the world in the right way, in an empathetic and kind manner, while I was apathetic toward anything not specifically related to me. But, after talking to those around me and being in an honors seminar and being able to fully express myself without a

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