To invert the Platonic cave is to displace the centuries old topology of appearance and truth. In our psychotic and paranoid counter-allegory, what presents itself as the open-source “outside” — the luminous surface of the world — is not the domain of the real but the theatre of information and meta-media, a regime of visibility sustained by cybernetics, surveillance, and deception. Relative truth does not dwell in this supposed openness but in the subterranean, beneath the strata of appearances, where it withdraws from immediate apprehension. Illusion is expansive, airy, and seductive, an infernal multitude of desires — it is what ensnares us in the infinite feedback loops of Capitalism III. Truth, by contrast, is compressed, concealed, and accessible only through descent into the underground: the esoteric strata, the levels and stages of gnostic knowledge — though no longer in the recognisable form of mysticism or religion. The task of thought, therefore, is not ascent toward the Sun but a labor of rouge and revolutionary excavation: disputing and negating the inherited dichotomies of light and dark, surface and depth, and cultivating precisely the noisy atmospheres necessary to disrupt their circuits. It is a turning downward into opacity, where the real persists as that which resists the dazzling falsity of surface light, of “illumination.”
What in antiquity appeared as religious mystery became, in modernity, the state secret, and today it has further mutated into the military and corporate secret, buried in the “depths” of servers, databanks, and encrypted networks. A curious parallel emerges: the guardians of such secrets present themselves as defenders of the people, the state, and security — thereby placing themselves beyond the very laws that bind others. (A Licence to Drill.) Former CIA operatives routinely describe their work conditions as indistinguishable from those of a cult or sect: a severance from the outside world, with all life organised around the acquisition, stratification, and preservation of knowledge. The categories of “Classified,” “Official,” “Confidential,” “Trade Secret,” and “Top Secret” are not merely bureaucratic designations but initiatory thresholds, regulating access to fragmented and never fully possessable layers of knowledge. In our inverted cave-topography, secrecy is no longer sacred but procedural, yet it performs the same function, separating the elect from the profane multitude, while the Dominion of the Normies decays into the hyperreality of our desiring-machines.