Getting out of Plato's cave

We need to be free to invent Freedom

The “real” world we have built outside is the result of our “thinking”. But we are building a MAD World, based on Massive Assured Destruction. If we want to make a wise move from a MAD to a NO MAD world, we need to change how and what we think.

We need to get out of Platos cave, i.e. open the doors of perceptions. We need to see, challenge and escape the “prisons” of our “taken for granted” representations - our familiar way of looking at things, the rules we obey, the practices we find “normal” - and dare to imagine radically different Futures.

We need to recreate Freedom in our relationship with the world as it is and with the world as it could be.

That's what Shapership is about. The power and freedom of everyday and everybody to change the way we look at “reality” as it is and as it could be.  

“Shapership” is the Fosburry flop of the Mind

It is an invitation to dare a leap of Imagination and intentionally shift from one paradigm to another:

• From “Business as usual” to “Business as the world needs”
• From doing things right to doing the right things to build desirable and viable Futures for us all on this planet.

How ? By actively repatterning and reperceiving the world, allowing each one of us to see and escape patterns at will to shift systems.

The free man is the one who knows that he is in chains.

Here is an Extract from our book

In some cases, our Reality is our own “prison”

Remember Plato’s famous “Allegory of the Cave”!

Imprisoned men are chained in a cave and can only see the shadows of objects moved by puppeteers and projected on the wall in front of them. Those men confuse the “shadows” with the “real things”.

We are like those men, imprisoned by what we BELIEVE is Reality, trapped in our representations of the world, in our habits, our prejudices, our usual and known answers. If we don’t know that “another world” is possible, we certainly believe that what we see is Reality.

But, in this Allegory, Plato tells us that, one day, a man is freed (he could also have heard an interior call and freed himself).  Anyway, he takes a few steps and discovers that what they are given to see is false. It is not Reality but an illusionary representation of it. That’s what some people - who hold “power” - want them to see, think and believe.

Quite similarly, what we see on the “screens of our minds” might be what others – television, media, politicians, leaders – wishes us to see, think, believe, consume. Power and Paradigms maintain us in a certain representation of what the world is. In time, that Reality may become our own preferred television channel. Or we may stop trusting it and prefer to shut down the television set.

Plato’s man is called to move on, he climbs up to the exit. He emerges at the surface of the earth, is blinded by the sun, then gets used to light and starts to discover Life: animals, vegetation, minerals and probably other men and women with whom he starts another life.

Then, one day, he remembers where he came from. He remembers the cave and his fellow prisoners. He has the desire to tell them what he has discovered since he left, that there is another world out there. He goes back into the cave and sits near the men to whom he was chained. He tells them about the Reality outside. He tells them everything about this other world, its beauty, the sun, the animals, the people.

But the others don't believe him. They say he is crazy. As Friedrich Nietzsche once said: “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music”. The men who remained in the cave cannot hear the music; they cannot imagine another world. The free man insists. But his Truth disturbs them. It is an “inconvenient Truth”. He becomes a threat to the Reality they are used to believe in. He becomes a “heretic”. The power threatens him. He is going to be eliminated because he holds another “Truth”, another vision of Reality.

What will happen is unknown. But the prisoners have heard him. The seed is planted, although not visible yet. And maybe, one day, they will remember and free themselves too. The free man is the one who knows that he is in chains.

Thinking is creating the possibility of a bifurcation to an “alternative” Future.

“Creating is resisting”, said the great French Philosopher Gilles Deleuze. More precisely, he said, “Creating is resisting Stupidity”.

Putting Imagination at work is resisting “Capitalism Realism”, the Repetition of the Past, Hopelessness, Fear and Cynicism. It is resisting the dominant worldviews of Neoliberalism, the “normal” way things are and the story of Scarcity, Separation, Competition, Efficiency, infinite Growth, Power over others, etc. It is not that they are good or bad, but they are just stories: Ideas, Concepts, Things we can decide to question, to challenge and chose to stop to believe.

This of course, is easier when we have created alternative options.

At a time when a discourse unpolluted by “bullshit” comes as a surprise, it is more needed than ever to resist “functional Stupidity” [1] : the incapacity to intelligently mobilise cognitive capacities, an absence of reflexivity, a refusal to use intellectual capacities in other than myopic ways, the incapacity to question evidences, routine approaches, conventional Wisdom that lead us to multiple disasters. (…)

In fact, there is an imperative to resist and escape everything that maintains us in our “prisons” or in the cave of our representations: Denial, Ignorance, Dogmatism, Conformism, Fatalism, blind Rationalism, rigid adherence to wishful Thinking.

This is what is expressed below.[2]

We move vertically to increase our discernment: from “’Plato’s cave” to Submission, to the exit, to Freedom.

This is also symbolised by a move from Ego consciousness to Eco-consciousness.

Step by step, we overcome mental states (on the left) and emotional states (on the right) that limit our discernment to reach more integrative Thinking and consciousness.

That's what allows us to move from FEAR to desire.

From being locked into the Regression Forces to free with the Opening Forces

All the stages up to Rationalism and Irrationalism maintain us stuck into the Past. We are locked into the regression and preservation forces

1.     Fear

2.     Ego needs

3.     Lack of Imagination

4.     Conformism and Conventional Wisdom

5.     Reductionism, Separation, “rigid Rationalism”

6.     Search for Certainty, Control, Power and Predictability

7.     Repetition of the Known

8.     Small and sluggish Thinking

Once we start questioning what we take for granted and detach ourselves from our habits, we can access new forms of Thinking and knowing such as Intuition and Inspiration.

This is possible thanks to the opening and regenerative forces

1.     Courage, Desire and Hope

2.     Soul Compass and Inner Rightness

3.     Imagination

4.     Courage and Unconventional Wisdom

5.     Broadened perspectives and “integral Thinking”

6.     Search for ways to tango with Reality

7.     Exploration of the Unknown

8.     Big Thinking as a way to transform Reality

Imagination is one of the main Opening Forces, a force with the immense Power to change Reality, right now, by making counter and preferred stories of the Future “visible”.  Those “maps” of the Future become a “lens” through which we reconfigure our “maps” of the Present.

Let’s use our individual power and freedom to change the way we think, so we can shape desirable Futures.

https://www.shapership.com/shapership/our-book

[2] Scheme made by Aline, partly inspired by a conversation with Physicist Philippe Guillemant