The lesbian bar outrage shows why Donald Trump won America

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is the notion that none of us can truly perceive a world beyond our availability heuristic, which shapes our perception of reality. In simpler terms, Plato imagines that if people are chained in a cave and can only view those shadows, those shadows become their reality. The best pop-cultural manifestation of Plato’s Allegory was The Matrix, where all unfree characters are in a dream-like sleep and have no idea they are living inside a computer programme.The real-life analogy is anyone who consumes so much propaganda that no amount of rationalising, to borrow a line from Dr House, would change their opinion.Perhaps the most extreme version of that is the epochal tale of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier stationed in the Philippines at the fag end of World War II, who “fought” for thirty years and refused to lay down his arms.Once the island was overtaken…