Members of the bizarre Weatherfield sect lived a very secluded life at St Hilda Hogden House. All but the leader were forbidden any contact with the outside world and were taught that reality was the world portrayed in soap operas – the only television programmes they were allowed to watch. For the Weatherfieldians, as they were known, Coronation Street, The Bold and the Beautiful, EastEnders and Neighbours were not works of fiction but fly-on-the-wall documentaries. And since most of the members had been born in the commune, the pretence was not hard to maintain.
One day, however, disciple Kenneth, who had always been a touch rebellious, decided to leave Hogden’s and visit the places he had seen so often on the altar box. This was, of course, strictly prohibited. But Kenneth managed to escape.
What he found amazed him. The biggest shock came when he managed to get to Coronation Street and discovered it wasn’t in Weatherfield at all, but was a set in the Granada Studios.
But when he furtively returned to Hogden’s and told his fellow disciples what he had discovered, he was dismissed as a lunatic. ‘You should never have left,’ they told him. ‘It’s not safe out there. The mind plays tricks on you!’ And with that they chased him from the commune and forbade him to enter again.
Source: The allegory of the cave in The Republic by Plato (360 BCE)
The story of the Weatherfieldians is clearly an allegory. But what do its various elements represent?
There are many ways of translating the parable. There are some who claim that the world of ordinary experience is an illusion, and that the doors to the real world are opened by sacred drugs or practices of meditation. People who claim to have seen the truth this way are usually dismissed as dope-heads or wackos; but they think it is we who are the fools, trapped as we are within the limited world of sense experience.
More prosaically, the real-life Weatherfieldians are those who don’t question what they are told, and simply accept everything that life presents them at face value. They may not literally believe that soap operas are true, but they do accept uncritically received wisdom, what they read in the papers and watch on the television. What exactly this is depends on how they have been socialised. So, for example, some people think it crazy to believe that the President of the United States could be guilty of terrorism. Others think it equally mad to maintain that, actually, he’s quite a smart guy.
This raises the question of what the real-world counterpart of St Hilda Hogden House is. We do not generally isolate ourselves with bricks and mortar, but we do confine the ranges of our experience in many subtler ways. If you only ever read one newspaper, you are severely limiting the intellectual space which you inhabit. If you only ever discuss politics with people who share your broad opinions, you are erecting another metaphorical fence around your own little world. If you never try to see the world from another’s point of view, let alone walk a mile in their bare feet, you are again refusing to look beyond the walls of the small, comfortable world you have constructed for yourself.
Perhaps the greatest difficulty we face in this regard is spotting the Kenneth within. How do we distinguish between the deluded fools who have mad worldviews and those who have genuinely discovered an unseen dimension of life that has eluded us? We can’t give everyone who believes they have accessed hidden truths the benefit of the doubt. For one thing, since they all claim contradictory things, they can’t all be right. But if we dismiss them all too readily, we risk being like the naive, foolish Weatherfieldians, fated to accept a life of illusion instead of one of reality.
See also
| 1. | The evil demon |
| 49. | The hole in the sum of the parts |
| 51. | Living in a vat |
| 61. | Mozzarella moon |