We are of caves.

We’ve found caves with cave paintings and ways of communicating over time and between people.

We’ve found underground cities where the caves became networked, like in Cappadocia, Turkey. There are underground cities all over the world.

And what are our homes above the ground but customized caves that we build of different materials?

And what so many workplaces but caves? What is most transportation but mobile caverns? They give us a false sense of security as we careen from one cave to another, hopefully avoiding other mobile caverns along the way.

Drinking and hurtling is not only not suggested, it is actually now Law in most places in the world.

Like all caves, we have these views of the outside. When people congregated in the same geography, they had similar views. When two neighbors look outside, they see the same thing from slightly different angles. The larger the distance between people, the greater the angles, the greater the difference in perspectives.

This could be pretty manageable once the view was not too far away. It helps if everyone’s looking at the center, at the same thing, but that’s not how it works usually and also seems pretty much like a panopticon: a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control.

Meanwhile, our world evolved.

It was pretty manageable. Then we got mass communications and installed another ‘window’ into the caves we run back to, and people within range could see and/or hear exactly the same thing at the same time.

That was pretty manageable.

Channels showed up, people followed their preferences, and things got a bit more complicated.

We have curtains in our caves, and we pull them when we don’t want the light to come in, or we want privacy which is little more than a sense of security for our secrets.

We change the channels in much the same way, sometimes forgetting we can close all the curtains if we want to.

Since people now can pick channels, from the radio to the Internet, we get people seeing the same ‘views’ from their caves despite geography. People who view the same content may be as far as way as possible on our planet, or right next door – but the probability that people are looking at the same things decreases the more channels we have. Echo chambers of indeterminate populations show up, and confirmation biases are fed to maintain the echo chamber because living in caves can be expensive.

We all want our own version of the ‘best cave’ after all. We want to be near the best food, not unlike our cousin primates that fight over fruit tree territory. We want the best stuff near us, and we want to have it but what we consider to be the best varies.

An advance here may seem like the opposite of progress there. A developing country’s citizens may see the rapid advances elsewhere and feel that they have no way to advance to the same level.

Broadcasts will have people believing that the ‘grass is greener’ in one area even though it isn’t, too. People may want to get caves where the grass is greener. This causes all sorts of fun immigration problems as people try to cross lines that someone drew some time ago.

Sure, people unite for good reasons, but sometimes they unite for bad reasons dressed as good reasons. Their views collide.

Here we are, staring from our caves, trying to negotiate the future from the comfort of these caves. We’re all watching different channels, we’re all more interested in some channels than others.

Somewhere along the way, going outside of caves was considered beneath some of us, and because of that the reality that the caves exist in is lost to them. A person worried about the affairs of some distant nations may not notice the garbage piling up right outside our doors because the view through the flat screens have a higher priority than one outside.

I’m sure I knew where I was going with this when it started, but it will be a stub for now. Think ‘Allegory of the Cave‘ clashing all over. Also, consider the following quote:

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”

Edward O. Wilson