face value - part 6

If you read War and Peace at a sitting, you clearly have the stamina to scroll down to the beginning of this series. For the rest of you, clicking here will take you to face value - part 1.

Unlike my earlier posts on Facebook personality types, this one doesn’t try to explain how or why the Plato-on-a-plate type is the way it is. This is a struggle to preserve my last shreds of self-esteem when I read this type’s updates.

Plato-on-a-plate-type

This is possibly the most misunderstood personality type on Facebook. I mean misunderstood in the truest sense of the word – because most of us can’t understand what they’re saying.

Here’s an example from the person after who this category is named.

When Plato wanted to talk about the nature of education, he could have sung ‘we don’t need no education’ accompanied by brilliant guitar work.Or he could have joined a peace protest.

But naah, that would have been too simple.

He told a story about a group of people who spent their lives chained up inside a cave. He then brought in a twist by having one of them escape. In a role reversal of Tom Hanks in Castaway, the freed man spent hair raising weeks learning to deal with the real world. Once he succeeded, he went back to the cave to rescue his buddies, but got derided by the lot as he was temporarily blinded by the darkness inside.

What’s the connection with lousy schooling? I haven’t a clue. But I remember loving Plato’s allegory of the cave when I first read it. I thought it was a collaborative movie plot by Lewis Carroll and Guru Dutt, till someone explained how foolish and shallow I was.

Well, Plato died over 2000 years ago, but his type continues to make us feel inferior and foolish by prowling around the status boxes of Facebook.

Here’s my defence.

The more complicated you get, the simpler we’ll get.
When you say Timothy is seeped in acid sunshine (thanks Five Wise Men for that one), we will assume that Timothy ate spicy food for dinner and there was no antacid at hand.

If you use vague metaphors, we’ll laugh at you with clear meta force.

When we read - Walker is wondering why the second step often precedes the first, we will scoff at the fact that Walker has tripped on his first jog ever.

The higher your feet are from the ground, the more easily we will see your underwear.

Iftekar is imagining a world without hypotheses. Ha Iftekar, doesn't this mean that you have decided to control your embarrassing saliva spray habit by dropping all ifs from your conversation? We will also wonder if you will call yourself Tekar from now on.

If your meaning is unclear, we’ll attach our own. And it may not be flattering.

When Sighmona feels that life is one rough draft after another, we will understand that Sighmona was stupid enough to wear a strappy dress without a jacket on a windy evening.

End of vent. This analysis may not have made sense to those of you reading it, but aah, it felt great writing it.

Next: The Atlas-of-the-mind type