Plato and Batsmaglion 2: The Log Flume.

"They will begin by taking the State and the manners of men, from which, as from a tablet, they will rub out the picture, and leave a clean surface.  This is no easy task.  But whether easy or not, herein will lie the difference between them and every other legislator--they will have nothing to do either with individual or State, and will inscribe no laws, until they have either found, or themselves made, a clean surface.

They will be very right, he said.

Having effected this, they will proceed to trace an outline of the constitution?

No doubt.

And when they are filling in the work, as I conceive, they will often turn their eyes upward and downward: I mean that they will first look at absolute justice and beauty and temperance, and again at the human copy and will mingle and temper the various elements of life into the image of a man; and this they will conceive according to that other image, which, when existing among men, Homer calls the form and likeness of God.

Very true, he said.

And one feature they will erase, and another they will put in, until they have made the ways of men, as far as possible, agreeable to the ways of God?

Indeed, he said, in no way could they make a fairer picture."

Plato, The Republic

They were sitting as it were, in an AMC location, watching some Aviator 2: The Log Flume or Batsmaglion or something of that nature, and all of the real world they were aware of was the shadow of their own heads on the bottom of the screen, that of himself and his peers, and those were the only elements of the world proper that encroached, elseways it ways that dreamtime held sway over all.

It was as it were, top-up bottom-down ideology, people that kicked against anything of organization, except for the one company in Middenorftino, anything of the usual kind that reeked of efficiency or was abundantly common, but they could be lulled by the muses, and beauty spoke many a dialect into even the most ignorant of ears.

"You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.

Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows..."

Plato, The Republic