Seeing the Light: the Terrible Freedom of Truth

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“The truth is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.” When Albus Dumbledore speaks these words to the eponymous character in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, he is referring to the acute nature of truth – it brings both pain and freedom to those who learn it. This theme is recurrent throughout literature, and is explored in the philosopher’s ascent to the World of Forms in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” in Neo’s realization of the artificial nature of his world in The Matrix, and in Oedipus’s discovery of his wretched fate in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. The truth is often painful, but this pain allows one to self-actualize and pursue a meaningful form of happiness. Knowing the truth about one’s environment, history, and self allows one to adjust actions, behaviors and beliefs to be in accord with reality, and it is this process of adjustment that leads to a grounded sense of satisfaction and happiness. While proponents of ignorance would argue that bliss is desirable, bliss based in ignorance is necessarily ephemeral and superficial, and the perpetuation of this blind bliss is both unsustainable and ultimately harmful. The truth is often painful, but with this pain comes clarity. Kafka would describe this pain as a blow to the head – it is a sharp, deliberate pain that forces one to grapple with reality. Plato describes the trauma of sudden exposure to the truth in “Allegory of the Cave,” where he depicts one of the prisoners being “set free and forced suddenly to stand up, turn his head, and walk with his eyes lifted to the light; all these movements would be painful, and he would be too dazzled to make out the objects whose shadows he had been used to see” (Allegory.46-53). The pain the prisoner feels is twofold – the physical pain from sudden movement, and the psychological pain from realizing that everything he

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