If Plato were to come back today and see for himself what the modern world has become, he would be amazed at how accurate his description of reality was with his Allegory of the Cave. In it, he wrote that everything we see is just like shadows that are cast on the walls of a cave by a fire and that it takes stepping out from the cave in order for a person to see what is real rather than the artificial reality of shadows.

It was Immanuel Kant who further elaborated on Plato's cave in his seminal book Critique of Pure Reason as to what we can ultimately know based on Reason and that which we can't. In his book, Kant breaks down reality into two categories: phenomenon and the noumenon. The phenomenal realm is the visible and material world in which we all live and go about our day-to-day activities guided by Reason and science, those things that make world work for us, whether driving our car, watching television or surfing the internet. It is the only world we can ever really know and understand. The noumenal world is the invisible and transcendent world, the realm where God resides and an objective moral order. Although Kant believes this realm exists, it's not worth paying attention to because it is invisible and unknowable, and beyond the reach of Reason. In essence, Kant is saying that living in the cave and accepting the shadows as our reality is the only one worth knowing because it is futile to do otherwise. And with that, Kant laid down the foundations of subjectivism where man has become the measure of all things and places himself at the center of his universe. and where moral relativism triumphs over an absolute and objective moral order -- and ultimately truth itself.

Fast forward to the present. We live in world where everything is manufactured, and not just products coming off of an assembly line. There is of course the fake news everyone has heard and read about where the mainstream media has dropped all sense of objectivity in reporting the news and in many cases now openly admits that it is advocating for one political party and ideology. This ideology known as liberalism is coming to be more known as a fake religion. When Kant determined and proclaimed for the world that the transcendent is unknowable and not worth even trying to understand, the vacuum was filled by a materialist worldview that man can save himself by creating heaven on earth. This is what the liberal high priests proclaim with every utterance while preaching to their flock on the campaign trail: "Vote for me and I will usher in the utopian paradise you have been seeking."

When everything becomes subjective everything becomes subject to manipulation. This is the essence of the Russia Collusion Hoax, a fake conspiracy concocted by Deep State actors. It originated with an unverified dossier created in order to first impede a presidential campaign and then to bring  down a newly-elected president. It may have been the most successful public relations campaign ever concocted. The man who invented public relations, Edward Bernays, wrote a highly influential book titled Propaganda, that describes how one can persuade a person to one's point of view through manipulation. When you have the media on your side, all you have to do now make an accusation and it will stand as truth without questioning.

With the triumph of political correctness we now have fake self-righteousness and outrage, also known as virtue-signaling. In essence, liberalism has weaponized compassion and the subjectivism of feeling good about oneself by using its belief system as a kind of human shield where it has effectively closed off any competing ideas as cruel and uncompassionate. This is why any debate over the efficacy of the welfare state have long ago died. Anyone who questions its vast number of programs and associated costs and suggests either cutting back on them and their expenditures is immediately labeled a racist, cruel and uncaring.

Even sex has become fake. Pornography was one of the prime movers for mass adoption of the internet back in the mid-Nineties and now pornographic websites regularly dominate the top sites in the world in terms of daily traffic. And a new industry has emerged that is on the brink of going mainstream: sex with extremely realistic humanoid robots known as sexbots. Rather than having sex with a female, in Europe there are now brothels where a man can pay for it with a sexbot. Sexbots can also be purchased online. 

Other kinds of sex that are fake outside of that with a fake person is homosexuality that includes the synthetic marriage between two men or two women along the artificially created alphabet soup of genders known as LGBTQ. The contrivance of the gay/transgender movement has further removed the world from reality with the arrival of fake sports. Recently a biological male who now identifies as a female won a NCAA Division II track event and actually claimed he/she was at a disadvantage to the female runners due to the loss of testosterone he/she is losing while still in transitioning to a female because of hormonal treatment. 

The best metaphor for the modern world might be summed up with the Fyre Festival fiasco in the Bahamas in the spring of 2017. It was a classic case of manipulation by creating a false reality. Thousands literally bought into a luxury music festival being held on a Caribbean island that turned out to be a complete scam. People who could afford the astronomical cost ended up just paying for flickering shadows on the wall only to find that once they saw the light they had been scammed by being manipulated into believing they were in for the time of their lives. 

This is what happens when we accept reality only for its shadows and live only within the phenomenal world of the modern era cave that's evolved into one of nearly universal fabrication where everyone becomes subject to manipulation and scams. Not only does the political become fake, but so does everything else making it nearly impossible tell what is real anymore.