Letter #35: Experts and Idiots

But I Repeat Myself

Sponch.

Your excellent essay presents us with a question that is central to this onrushing transhuman moment.

What is this “body” everyone keeps talking about?

I’m always amused when some “expert” says something like, “People who overeat aren’t looking for food, they’re looking for love,” or “Rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power,” or “Being a woman isn’t just about the body you’re born with.”

I can see why they call these people experts. It’s because none of them is intelligent enough to find a real job.

I mean, eating too much has something to do with food, no? If you were just looking for love, you could have bought yourself a Golden Retriever instead of stuffing your piehole with Oreos.

And anyone smarter than an expert — a toddler, say, or a park bench — can see that rape actually is about sex. If power were all you wanted, taxation without representation would have sufficed.

And yes, every woman who is a woman was born a girl, as Mr. Rogers once tunefully explained. That’s how women are made.

What confuses these experts is that food and sex and the body are all imbued with meaning. Indeed, “every particle of the universe is aflame from the jump with meaning,” as someone once wrote, possibly your own dear self.

So of course, rape is more than sex — because sex is more than sex. And food is more than food. And womanhood is more than just a body type. And yet, nowhere in the material world are their meanings expressed without the thing itself.

And if the material world is suffused with meaning, it must be because it is the expression of the consciousness that created it. Consciousness is where meaning comes from.

Which is the problem. We have now convinced ourselves there is no Creator because — oh, I don’t know why — because science — or suffering — or because it turns out that angels aren’t really long-haired youths with feathery wings. And without a Creator, the only consciousness we’re aware of is our own. So we deduce that meaning is bestowed by us and we can reconstruct it any way we choose. Meaning is merely fiction, as the expert Yuval Noah Harari tells us.

But because this happens to be nonsense, true meaning pursues us as fast as we run from it. Though horrific, rape is, in fact, the perfect example. The physical actions of a rapist might conceivably be the exact same actions as those a lover takes with his beloved. Why is it a crime then? Well, obviously, because the rapist has stolen something of infinite value from his victim: her right to bestow herself and her love where she will.

That right and that self and that love and that will are all expressed in and through her body. Are they man-made fictions?

No one would say so except a fiend. Or an expert.

Your cantankerous

Dad