“The Cave,” a parable in which men are chained inside a cave and, given shadow-puppet displays by their captors, become convinced that this is all that reality consists of, is a potent symbol of self-imposed mental restriction and delusion. We are all in the cave, convinced of a mere simulacrum of reality, to the point that we feel threatened when anyone tries to enlighten us to the beautiful world just beyond our view. When one man goes out of the cave and learns of the true beauty and complexity of the world, he hastens to tell his fellow captives. The story ends with the troubling line:” And if it were possible to lay hands on and to kill the man who tried to release them and lead them up, would they not kill him?” Plato, a great follower of Socrates, was no doubt influenced by Socrates’ untimely death at the hands of the state for supposedly corrupting the youth. The symbolic death of the truth-bringer rings true in our Christian era, as well, and the theme has run through the course of human history. Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, to name a few of the freethinkers who proposed a new order and a new way of thinking, were all assassinated or executed. Their legacy and a little of the light they saw live on in the world, but the fact remains that many people feel mortally threatened by people who see beyond the status quo. Plato believed that everything in the world was an imperfect copy of a perfect idea and that objects derived their essence and form from this heavenly model. What makes a small tree different from a large bush? A tree is a copy of the perfect (“Platonic”) tree; a bush was a copy of the ideal bush; ideas predate objects. A carpenter must know what a chair is before he makes one; he must have an idea of the perfect chair in his head, then make a model of it. The captors’ shadow puppets simulate the world, but come nowhere near to its blinding beauty.