Plato’s Allegory of the Cave  has endured for more than two millennia not because it offers answers, but because it describes a condition so familiar we rarely question it. In the allegory, prisoners are chained inside a cave from birth, facing a wall. Behind them, a fire casts shadows—reflections of objects carried past the light. The prisoners take these shadows to be reality itself. They give them names. They build meaning from them. They argue over whose interpretation is