Cages.
Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in
the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before
you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and
down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around
the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a
time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird
would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical
property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that
will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most
accidental way. It is only when you step back,
stop looking at the wires one by
one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you
can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment.
It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that
the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one
of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their
relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.
- Marilyn Frye, “Oppression,” in The Politics of Reality,
1983
