And yet a certain egalitarian principle seems to resist the harsh elitism of Plato's totalitarian state. Despite Socrates' implied knowledge of the outside world, here he is, with us, in the cave exploring the depths of our own humiliation. And what is more, here he is explaining the limits of our own mythical thinking by creating a new myth of his own. Socrates shows us that we are living in the world of illusion by means of the elaboration of another illusion. The cave itself. Ultimately,even Socrates cannot escape the analogies that we all live by. We all need myths to explore the limits of our own knowledge. The best we can hope to achieve is to 'know' , as Socrates did, that we 'know nothing'. In the end,the prisoner and guardian alike fall well short of true knowledge. 'They are' in this respect, as Socrates says, 'no different from us'