This is part of new series where I will explore in deeper context all of the mental models. Breaking them down to basic understanding and providing additional links to learn more.
First up is Plato's Allegory of The Cave.
The Cave is an allegory from Plato's Book 7 of The Republic.
In this story, men are chained to the wall in a cave in a way that they can not move their heads or bodies and are forced to look at the back wall.
Behind them are a fire that is casting a shadow on the wall and a walkway. People are then walking by the fire, behind the prisoners, and holding up objects and their shadows are being projected onto the walls.
These images, statues, animals, and various other objects, are the objective reality of the prisoners. The prisoners are told this is reality. The images you see are in reality. It is all they know. They have no reason to believe otherwise.
After some time one of the prisoners is freed and is shown the outside world. His eyes are subjected to the sun and at first, he is blinded by the sun - which represents enlightenment or truth - when his eyes adjust he is able to see reality clearly for the first time. He can see what a flower is really like not just the image of the shadow displayed on the wall.
Upon learning that his experience in the cave is not the reality he returns to warn the remaining prisoners but they do not want to hear. Now unable to see the shadows because his eyes are not readjusted to the dark, the remaining prisoners are convinced he has gone insane and plot to kill him.
This is an allegory. The sun represents enlightenment or truth and the cave is our world.
We are the prisoners.
We are all ignorant of the world around us. It is impossible to know everything. Even the things we think we know are only constructed from the reality we know. Things we sometimes understand are nothing more than the objective reality - or in this example - the shadows cast on the wall. It is only through true understand that we can transcend and truly understand.
A classic example of this in pop culture is The Truman Show.
How is this information useful?
The Cave is a mental model.
In a famous speech in the 1990s, Charlie Munger summed up the approach to practical wisdom through understanding mental models by saying:
“Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience both vicarious and direct on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.”
If we understand that our objective reality is nothing more than a construct in which we created to explain the things around us to the best of our ability given the information we have at present we can then begin to ask questions that challenge these assumptions and work to find the truth.
Let's take a sales rep for example. When a sales rep is working to close a deal this rep can make a lot of assumptions about what "reality" is and is not.
They may assume...
- The prospect will sign the contract this week
- The price is competitive
- The person I am talking to is the decision-maker
Resources on Plato's Cave
Wikipedia
Read The Allegory of The Cave (PDF)
The Socratic Method
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