A World of Shadows

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The Allegory of the Cave
"Some 2,500 years ago, Plato warned us of the invisible chains tying us to a distorted world of deception, ignorance and powerlessness.
In the beginning of book 7 of The Republic, Plato explains how people chained to the dark floor of a Cave can only look ahead of them. They cannot turn around. There is a lighted fire, a narrow path, and a stone wall behind them. The chained Cave dwellers see shadows of what is going on behind them. Those broken and disorienting images become the truth and reality of their world.
Some outsiders entered the Cave. They cut the chains of a prisoner in order to enable him to see who manipulated the images behind him. The liberators  then dragged him out of the Cave to the Sun-bathed surface of the land. The exciting challenge, Plato said, was for the enlightened and free Cave dweller to return to the Cave to convince his colleagues to  abandon their dark, imaginary, and distorted world. There was a new world out there. This world was real and was illuminated by the Sun.
21st Century Mall
Our 21stcentury world fits Plato’s Cave parable. Most people today live in a gigantic Cave-like Mall. Immoral leaders have been manipulating images and information for the brainwashing of the populations of the planet.
Systematic propaganda (from television, radio, education, politics and religion) has been convincing the vast majorities of the world population they need petroleum, coal, and natural gas as much as air. They would have no job without the machines, factories, cars, airplanes and defense establishments fueled by fossil fuels. What the bosses fail to report is that fossil fuels are threatening their health and the health and viability of the planet.
Tiny Organisms, Huge Effects
For example, scientists recently (June 18, 2019) published a consensus statement in which they put humanity on notice about the crucial role of microorganisms in regulating climate change. These one-cell organisms are essential to life. They are also affecting climate change.
Marine phytoplankton fixes as much carbon dioxide as terrestrial plants. This means that human activities that disrupt and diminish marine microbial photosynthesis, say pollution of the oceans, disturb the global carbon cycle and, therefore, exacerbate global warming. On the other hand, microorganisms are responsible for greenhouse gases in a big way.
The key to balancing these positive and adverse effects of microorganisms is for humans to abandon the Mall: get their energy from the Sun, and raise their food the way their grandparents did. In other words, diminishing and eliminating our anthropogenic footprint on the global environment will make the beneficial effects of microorganisms all that much more sustainable in adapting to and diminishing the consequences of global warming.
The Trump Factor
However, the message of the scientists has yet to reach the brainwashed population in the global Mall.
Billions of powerless workers earn a miserable living in factories and agricultural enterprises fueled by petroleum.
The owners of fossil fuels, meanwhile, keep spreading misinformation, denying global warming and convincing world leaders to dance to the sounds of their music.
In the United States, for example, the fossil fuel magnates have president Donald Trump in their pockets. He denies global warming. He hired billionaires for running the federal government. It’s as if thieves were installed in the national treasury.
But Trump is doing much more harm than licensing medieval barons in the looting of the country. His “deregulation” is not a program of abstractions but a program of extractions. It is raising the stakes of who lives and who dies.
Polluters now have a dear friend in the White House. They ignore the flimsy protective laws enforced by Trump’s predecessors. They open the spigots of pollution all over America. Their deadly effluents now seep into groundwater, aquifers, rivers, creeks, lakes and seas.
When I was teaching at the University of New Orleans in 1991-1992, the students in my class from Baton Rouge (capital of Louisiana) were telling me the petroleum refineries used to dump their wastes into the Mississippi River after eight o’clock in the evening. . ."

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/26/a-world-of-shadows/

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