The Cave and the Cave Escapee

Socrates' allegory of the key is meant to be an image of our education. It's showing us how human beings are generally speaking. All human beings are prisoners in a cave, chained there from childhood. We have somebody distorting reality for us in a very intentional manner and we mistake these distortions for reality itself. The sun blinds us by some compulsion or necessity, we can't live in the real world without returning to the cave. Once we're out of the cave, it's painful to be out of the Cave. You know, aerosol says the beginning of the metaphysics that humans seem to cut against because they don't want to know things as they really are.