There’s an anecdote (likely apocryphal) about a student running for class president who announced that if she were elected, there would be free ice cream.  She won in a landslide.  She never mentioned where the ice cream would come from, just that it would magically appear at no cost for anyone who wanted it.

Our first response is, “Well, they’re just kids, after all.  Adults would never be silly enough to fall for something like that.”  Really?  Then explain Zohran Mamdani.

This kind of wishful thinking has been going on for centuries.  People often prefer comforting illusions to stark realities.  It’s not just ignorance, but a willful surrender to expediency over virtue.

Philosophers identified this danger millennia ago.  Socrates relentlessly probed the soul’s complacency.  In his Apology, Plato described Socrates’s mission: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”  Questioning the comfortable assumptions of his society was Socrates’s death sentence, as the masses preferred the cozy myths of their prejudices to the discomfort of self-scrutiny.  He observed that people cling to “noble lies” — flattering fictions that preserve social harmony at truth’s expense. Why, you may ask?  Because truth demands accountability and forces individuals to confront their flaws and the world’s contingencies.  This aversion is magnified in groups: Shared delusions forge tribal bonds and turn vulnerability into collective strength.  Socrates’s murder was democracy’s verdict on discomfort — better a harmonious lie than a disruptive truth.

Plato expanded on this in his Allegory of the Cave, where prisoners chained in a shadowed cavern mistake puppet-shadows for reality.  One prisoner escapes into the sunlight and returns to liberate his fellows.  They mock and slay him.  The shadows are comfortable, predictable, and unchallenging.  They create a world where effort yields no pain.  The sun, meanwhile, is blinding and exhausting — a call to rise and transcend through reason and virtue.  The prisoners choose not to make the effort.

Plato warned that democracies eventually devolve into mob rule, when the people become seduced by illusions and elevate sophists who sell them feel-good fables.  “The people,” he wrote, “have always some champion whom they set over them ... and nurse into greatness ... until he becomes a tyrant.”  Here lies the conservative critique: Liberty untethered from truth breeds tyranny, whether of the state or the self.

And so here we are, in 2025 America.  Polls show that roughly half of Gen Z and Millennials favor socialism, oblivious to its murderous history.  Venezuela’s oil-rich paradise crumbled into hyperinflation and starvation under Chávez and Maduro.  The Soviet Union’s “workers’ paradise” sentenced millions to gulags, and Mao’s China devoured 45 million in the Great Leap Forward.  These were all inevitable.  Centralized control erodes incentives, breeds corruption, and crushes the human spirit.  The joke goes, “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”

Yet young voters flock to figures promising “equity” through redistribution, free college, universal health care, government grocery stores operating at zero profit, and universal basic income — deceptions wrapped in compassion.

The coddled crave comfort above all.  The siren song of socialism absolves personal responsibility.  Why grind away in a meritocracy when the state can guarantee equal outcomes?  It’s the shadows in the cave — utopian visions of fairness without the sweat of free markets that have, incidentally, lifted billions from poverty via innovation and trade.

We (conservatives) see this as intellectual and moral infantilism, driven by the media’s and academia’s leftist echo chambers and virtue-signaling herds.  Our youth are indoctrinated from K to 12, absorbing narratives that frame capitalism as “greed” and America as “systemically racist” while ignoring the uncomfortable truth: Our republic’s ordered liberty, rooted in Jewish and Christian ethics and the Enlightenment’s reason, has outproduced every collectivist experiment.

Plato pointed out that the indoctrinated masses crave demagogues who “tell the people what they want to hear.”  St. Paul tells us that “the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine.  Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.”  Leftist echo chambers like TikTok and college quads preach that dissent is “hate speech” and reinforce the lie that socialism failed only because it “hasn’t been tried right.”  We counter with stoic realism: Step into the light, and embrace the eternal truths of Judaism and Christianity, individual rights, and limited government.  Truth may not always be comfortable, but it’s freeing.  It demands that we build character through choice, not coercion.

Socrates and Plato teach that societies thrive when virtuous, educated individuals guide the masses toward the light, not pandering to the darkness of the lowest common denominator.  Our children deserve better than shadows: a revival of Socratic dialogue in schools, historical literacy over revisionism, and policies that honor work over welfare.  Only then can we vote for truths that endure.  Otherwise, we chain ourselves in the cave of comfortable ruin.

Image via Pixabay.