“Hate” is a bad word in my family. I’ve only used it twice in my life—once to describe the vacuum cleaner (which deserved it), and once for a certain group of girls. I didn’t see these girls often, but everything changed when they showed up. All the other kids, including my friends, gravitated around these girls. They acted more rude and flippant, almost like different people. I realize now that I didn’t hate those girls. I hated the feelings I had when they were around. When I watched Wicked, I saw these same feelings mirrored in Elphaba—loneliness, insecurity, and a need to fit in. I sympathized when she tried to change her behavior to fit in, and I understood what she really felt when she pretended she didn’t care what others thought. Once upon a time, I did the same. C.S. Lewis called this Inner Ringism. It’s the urge to be one of “them” and get into the “in-group.” He compared it to peeling an onion. You might penetrate one Ring, but there will be another, then another, and another. And unlike a real onion, there is no center. You’ll never enter the Ultimate Inner Ring. Pursuing the Inner Ring is the fastest way to wear yourself out and lose yourself. In the quest to impress “them,” a person might do anything—from bullying to drugs to simply choking down who you are to fit in. It’s no wonder so many teens and young adults today feel confused and desperate. But there is another option. It starts with a seed of confidence and relationships not built on Inner Ringism. We see Elphaba genuinely connect with a few people, most notably Glinda. They became true friends, not just linked to each other through the Inner Ring. For me, the shift happened when a couple of new girls moved into my area. We became true friends, and encouraged each other to extend that friendship to others. Together, we built strong relationships that uplifted and strengthened all of us. Elphaba’s journey was more complex. Though she became true friends with Glinda, and others in the school stopped despising her, she still felt the need to fit in. To be “normal.” The Wizard pried into this weakness. Elphaba could join him and be accepted by everyone. If she let go of a couple of core values, she would be loved by the one she thought mattered most. It was all she had dreamed of her whole life. Lewis wrote that “The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it.” In that moment, Elphaba broke her fear of the Inner Ring. She realized that her value wasn’t determined by whether others accepted her or not, or what the Wizard thought. “Too long I've been afraid of losing love,” she sings. “I guess I've lost. Well, if that's love, it comes at much too high a cost.” She recognized that the Inner Ring paled in comparison to real connection—Glinda, Fiyero, Nessarose, Doctor Dillamond, and others who loved her simply for who she was. And with their support, or even without it, she could rise on her own. “And if I'm flying solo, at least I'm flying free.” I’ve felt the hurt of being excluded, and the need to be accepted. But Elphaba rejected the lie of the Inner Ring. She realized she was valuable in and of herself, and had true friends at her back. She chose confidence over insecurity. What’s right over what’s popular. Like her, I choose to defy gravity.

Selection from Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” (The Republic, Book VII) “Last of [all] he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is… He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold?” Plato’s Cave, the allegory of a cavebound prisoner who is forced upwards into the light, is often used as a metaphor for teaching. But beyond a story of a soul journeying to understand truth, this allegory is a declaration that there is a real world and absolute truth outside the cave—a message desperately needed in America today. In the allegory, prisoners are chained in a cave facing toward a blank wall. Behind them is a fire, casting uneven shadows on the wall. The shadows constantly change and blend together, a gray mix of light and dark. Sounds echo from one corner to the other, making it impossible to identify the source. There is no sunshine, only manmade light. To the prisoners, “...the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.” This is all they have known and all they believe in. The cave is the real world, and there is nothing beyond the shadows and firelight. America is in this cave crisis today, a morality crisis. Shadows on the wall declare “My truth, your truth,” and “This is me.” Truth is relative. Right, wrong, and conscience are purely the result of one’s upbringing. Any other belief is simple and naive, and doesn’t fit in today’s complex society. The idea of God, or Natural Law, or a universal set of principles, is an outdated perspective. This is postmodernism, where good and bad are subjective or irrelevant. It’s easy to get lost in this gray, shifting world. In the cave, any light that exists is created with our own hands. There is no greater source than what is manmade. The cave is all there is. It is the real world. In another cave, in C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair, we hear this same message from the Witch-Queen of the Underland. “The lamp is the real thing; the sun is but a tale, a children’s story… There is no sun.” But in both The Silver Chair and Socrates’s allegory, no sane person doubts the existence of the sunlight. It is clear that those outside of the cave are living in reality, while the prisoners in the cave are trapped in a fake world. One prisoner was forced up to the surface, and he came to understand and love the stars, the moon, and finally the sun. “Last of [all] he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is.” The cave that was once everything to him now seemed narrow and petty. The sun is not just a child’s tale or a misled idea: it is the center of the solar system. There is a real center, not just chaos, and that center is the foundation of everything that makes sense and feels right. “He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world…” The sun is the source of all life and truth. All things circle around God or Natural Law. The prisoner’s amazement grows when he realizes that even the shadows on the wall couldn’t exist without light, and the sun is ultimately the source of all light. “...and in a certain way [the sun was] the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold?” Every bit of logic or touch of emotion stems from something true, and it is only with the full context of the laws of God or Nature that we can understand how each reason and feeling fits into the world. Undoubtedly, that world exists. The purpose of leaving the cave is to reach the sunlight. Classrooms today tend to focus on the journey of a student: the ignorant prisoners, the absurdity of the illusions, and the pain of stepping into the light of knowledge. Yet teachers and readers often skip over the core wisdom of the allegory, the fact that there is pure light outside the cave. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis wrote that “You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.” Not all ideas melt into shadows—some are solid. Not all light flickers and dies. There is a real world past the shadows, past the fire, and up the stairs. Truth exists, and only the prisoners in the cave will deny its existence.