Before The Matrix, there was Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
Plato asks us to imagine there are people in a dark cave, chained their whole lives and unable to turn around. They know nothing else. The only world they know is living in a dark cave. Behind them are puppeteers who pass objects in front of a fire, projecting shadow figures on to the cave walls. These shadow figures are taken as reality to the prisoners. We are then asked to imagine that a prisoner breaks free and sees reality for what it is, sees what’s actually being done and then walks out and sees the world for what it really is.
The freed prisoner sees grass, sees real animals, the sun and it’s light for the first time. Soon he understands. He would return to the cave to try to free the other prisoners, but not having any frame of reference they may think he’s simply mad, and with his eyes having adjusted to the light, he would be blind in the dark and so the prisoners would think his eyes have been damaged by the outside. They would attack him rather than allow themselves to be freed.
This is strikingly similar to the red pill experience. The addition is the return trip. When people wake up to the frothing anti-male bigotry within feminism, the factual inaccuracies and logical fallacies, they often try to go back to that cave to rescue other prisoners. Though, the freed prisoner is soon surprised to find himself attacked.
While you understand the perspective of feminism, they have no reciprocal frame of reference for explanations of social ills and phenomena outside the feminist paradigm. To ask them to consider something outside that feminist paradigm, they mentally snap shut. “No! Feminism is equality! You must be against equality and hate women!” They are absolutely determined not to leave that cave, not even for a moment to see what is outside.
When I woke up, I expected that all I needed to do was point out a few facts that made feminism crumble. I figured I was just needed to explain how, if you take a broad view of things, it was actually men who tended to have it worse. It’s just a misunderstanding, men’s issues matter, that shouldn’t be controversial.
The response was surreal. Anger, accusations of hating women, of supporting rape and the inevitable and puzzling insistence that my questioning of feminism was because of being angry at having a small penis. In one wild example, I was accused of raping my children. I don’t even have children.
After escaping the feminist cave, it seems we invariably go back to try to free the others. We try to tell them what we learned, share facts with them that don’t support the feminist paradigm. We make the mistake of thinking that male-bashing feminists care about facts, that just as we care about the truth, so do they.
That’s not how it is. If you argue with an angry feminist, you’ll notice as I did, that they always argue how men are bad, how they deserve bad things, bad things against men are good. If you say that men are good, the feminist prisoner can only hear that as “bad is good.” As much as they deny it, they see it as women vs. men, a zero sum game in which women must win. We see this is countless bigoted feminist examples downplaying the death and suffering of men and playing up the suffering of women. Simply put, you may think that feminists care about facts, they don’t. The just hate men and don’t give a rip about them.
When feminists become MRAs it’s without exception a one way trip. Feminists become MRAs, MRAs never become feminists. We never see MRAs take up residence in the cave again.
