Upvotes and disagreeing comments.. hard to parse. Anyway, my understanding is that Plato’s cave refers to being bamboozled a core lie about the world, and then when someone tells you how you’re wrong they will reject it because they lack the ability or language to process the alternative view, or it conflicts with their identity that they’d rather stay in the world they know. In Plato’s cave, it’s iirc a former prisoner who tells the other prisoners, ie someone they previously trusted. Yet, they are still upset and violently reject his message.
Is that the same statement as Carl Sagan’s? No. I’m just casually associating. To me they both seem to cover the same aspect of human psychology, our core beliefs that basically cannot be altered later in life.
Moreover, it’s really interesting that people only seem to agree about this observation when it comes to other people–they are stuck in their ways, they are beyond salvation. Very few accept that they themselves suffer from this.
Forgive my dusty memory but I think the relation is that most people stay in the cave, not because they enjoy the experience or they're completely ignorant of the sky, they stay because they are unprepared, incapable, or unwilling to leave.
I doubt most people believe that TikTok is valuable to them but I'm sure many find it irresistible once they are hooked.
My understanding of Plato's cave is that it is about the disparity between the ideas in our head and reality. For example, you know what a triangle is, but there is no such thing as a triangle in the world, only imperfect shapes with three sides that approximate a triangle.
This means that it is not "most people stay in the cave" - it is, "we all stay in the cave because it is impossible to bridge the gap between theoretical construct and lived experience, but we all know about both".
