i did learn one important thing about the allegory of the cave from reading Plato's Republic: the Socrates character presents the allegory to argue that normal people observing the real world are actually not observing anything because anything real is fake and imaginary compared to the... imaginary pure versions of them that philosophers are able to "see" by thinking really hard about them.
it's a point of controversy as to whether Plato was writing this seriously or ironically. the way it gets repurposed now in our discourse about mass media, disinformation, VR, LLMs or "AI", etc is a good example of how you really need to be explicit when you are joking about making the Torment Nexus.