How to Win the Race for Authenticity

In Plato's Allegory of the Cave, the released prisoner was forced to see a whole new perspective of his world, vastly different from the one to which he had become accustomed. What once was assumed to be silhouettes of some real things turned out to be merely shadow puppets. The prisoner was left with this agonizing knowledge that the shadows, and his experience with them, just might be more real than reality. Plato postulated, of course, that the physical world was not true reality, but rather a simulation or a copy of the ideal. The ideal being the true reality.