Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the diaspora ‘innocent fraud’

Turnout in the latest legislative elections was low among Greek diaspora voters. [Shutterstock]

John Kenneth Galbraith in his book "The Economics of Innocent Fraud" portrayed his lifetime of experience in the public and private sectors with a scathing critique of matters as they stand today. Notably, he sounded the alarm for the increasing gap between reality and "conventional wisdom" and how we have reached a point where we have surrendered ourselves over to self-serving belief and "contrived nonsense" or, put more simply, innocent fraud. This has come at the expense of the economy, effective government, and the business world.

There are some parallels with his thinking and Plato's Allegory of the Cave, which is one of the greatest stories of philosophy and explains the existence of the two worlds, namely the sensible world (which is the one known through the senses) and the intelligible world (which is perceived through knowledge without the intervention of the...

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