201. the sky is falling

If the power went out for a week, and we didn’t have access to the news or social media, would we still think the sky was falling? Eventually, someone would venture outside and look up to either confirm or deny. Chances are, if that person could go out and look up, the sky isn’t falling. Either way, how would anyone know differently if they kept all their attention on the continuous stream of messages and images telling them about the sky falling?

It seems that our perception of reality is no longer our own, but developed for us instead. Unlike the prisoners in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, we aren’t chained to the wall, forced to look upon the shadows thinking they’re real, instead, we welcome the stories about the shadows, all the while giving up our freedom to investigate. We reserved ourselves to the same fate because we’ve come to blindly believe what we’re told, making it part of our narrative and the way we see the world. The most troubling part is that we don’t actually believe what we see, but see what we believe. Therefore, if we believe the sky is falling, then that is all we will see.