The Allegory of the Cave video reminded me of something we touched on in class. I can’t remember exactly what we were talking about, but we said something about leaders with foresight typically don’t last long. It sounds cruel out of context, sorry about that. But this video makes that point ring even truer. Like we have established, humans are bad with long-term planning. We’re bad at thinking ahead. Therefore, when the occasional human who is good at thinking ahead appears… we typically aren’t going to like what they have to say. This is why, in the video, the unchained prisoners kill their releaser. They didn’t like the change, they liked what they had before, the outside world was confusing and overwhelming and they couldn’t understand why they were there. So they kill their releaser. People are not usually receptive to change, and that’s what the first article talked about.
In Leaders and Followers, the author states that the relationship between leaders and followers is not as black-and-white as people think. The followers aren’t just mindless drones, but rather are active participants. “[A leader] can be given subordinates, but they cannot be given a following. A following must be earned” (186). And part of that earning process has to do with the state of the country/group/whatever. People are not usually receptive to change, but when they are, that’s the time that loyal followings are made (this is pretty similar to the “situational theory” mentioned in the second article, but I’m not trying to lean entirely in that direction). Yes, a good charismatic leader is helpful to the process, as is a proper cause, but… honestly, it’s about what the followers want. They have to feel that the leader can help them. And that’s where the releaser in the Cave Allegory fails. He broke the chains of the other prisoners, he brought them outside, but how could they be expected to be grateful when they didn’t ask for the freedom to begin with? They didn’t even know they weren’t free. The releaser could be considered a citizen leader of sorts, he was chained once too, then freed, then he returns with knowledge… but he forgot the values of the people he meant to rescue. Simply because he had seen “the great beyond” doesn’t make it effective to discredit their little… cave society. As we’ve read for today, it really does boil down to the followers.
This is gonna sound weird but my mom is one of those people to does not like change. Every time we update our desktop at home or if apple drastically changes stuff after updates, she freaks out. I think it is the same thing that you said about the prisoners and I totally agree that change is a scary scary thing. So when the prisoners were confronted with the idea of change, they freaked out.
I completely agree about how people are so prone to resist change. Humans tend to fear the unknown and not accept things that do not make sense to them and so from the Cave story, the prisoners who encountered the person who escaped thought he had been brainwashed or corrupted or something and between accepting the fact that there was a whole world outside and their lives were basically not the only important thing anymore OR to just ignore him and put those “rumors” to rest, they obviously wanted to not have some kind of mid life crisis and that really hinders us because it’s like what else are we missing out on?