These artefacts, human statuettes, and animal models carved in stone and wood and all kinds of materials stick out over the wall and as you’d expect, some of the people talk as they carry these objects along, while others are silent … they’re no different to us … do you think they’d see anything of themselves and one another except the shadows cast by the fire on to the cave wall directly opposite them.’ ‘Imagine also that there are people on the other side of this wall who are carrying all sorts of artefacts. Here, awareness of the world is mediated by mainstream culture: television, movies, celebrity’s Twitter feeds and Instagram accounts. This is the experience of many brought up in contemporary Western culture.

They are kept captive ‘since childhood’ and only allowed to look in one direction.

They’ve been there since childhood, with their legs and their necks tied up in a way which keeps them in one place and allows them to look only straight ahead.’ ‘Imagine people living in a cavernous cell down under the ground at the far end of the cave, a long way off, there’s an entrance open to the outside world.

Plato introduces the allegory as ‘an analogy for the human condition – for our education, or lack of it.’ Although written in around 380 BC, the allegory (and indeed the rest of the Republic) has strong relevance today for men unplugging from conventional thinking about women and society – in fact, it could be taken as a metaphor for this process. The allegory is presented as a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon, Plato’s brother. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave appears in a section of the Republic called ‘The Supremacy of Good’ where he stresses the importance of goodness as a universal goal.

Socrates allegory of the cave