Allegory of the Cave

In Plato's book The Republic, there is a passage "Allegory of the Cave" in which Plato describes a scene in a cave, which is a metaphor for many things. He depicts people in a dark cave that have shackles around their neck that only let them see shadows of certain symbols that the fire behind them projects. Plato uses these objects/people as symbols to represent a bigger picture. The fire in the cave represents knowledge or the ideas in which we have to relearn, both the cave and the shackles represent the lack of knowledge or being closed minded. The people who are shackled in the cave are us, or the people in a society that are lacking knowledge. The allegory of this passage is that as a society we sometimes find ourselves very closed minded, and we have to "free ourselves from the shackles" in order to seek the knowledge in which we wish to relearn.