All Knowledge Is Fruit
The Garden of Eden isn't a farmer's market.
I was recently reminded I cannot genuinely transmit information to anyone. It can’t be done. They don't catch it in a baseball mitt and ingest it like syphilis. Knowledge isn’t a baseball, either. People hear or see something and do whatever they want with it. In my experience, they get pissed off and run to the cops with it because they're snitches.
It’s not like copying a tape cassette. You remember those, right? They’d get stuck in your Chevy Sprint for six months so all you could listen to was Blink-182’s Dude Ranch album or suffer conversation with your insane girlfriend three years your senior. Mine bought me cigarettes and I mistook it for love. I guess that’s growing up.1
This isn't immediately apparent. Our inability to transmit knowledge, I mean. Not psychotic women robbing my high school aged cradle. Everyone watching that happen knew what was going on and approved. I suspect observers felt she could only civilize me. Jokes on them. We ate acid in the YMCA hot tub on our first date.
Gods. I keep getting distracted. This is supposed to be about knowledge. I think I miss drugs. Cigarettes mostly, but some of that traditional ecstasy from the 90s would go a long way, too. The good shit. H-bombs or Mitsubishis. That's a heroin or mescaline cut, respectively, for folks who aren't brain fried drug addicts. Paired with some Vick’s.
I bring this up as things are about to get weird and italicized and it may be best to go get some drugs before continuing. Also, if you know a guy, please let me know. Mine all died from this or that thing over the years. I used to buy all kinds of stuff behind the Fox Theater in Spokane, but they’ve since cleaned it up or something.
Anyway, go get high kids. I’ll wait. Know-fruit takes time to grow, after all. Here’s some intermission music to enjoy.
High as balls yet? Excellent. Let us continue this epistemology2 lesson.
People like to pretend words are solid. As solid as a club. But currently, science people don’t consider them to be made of matter. Words are more like spirits, but you know, real. This is why when people get accused of breaking the spirit of a law, people shrug. No victim no crime. Just like blasphemy or vandalizing a courthouse.
Heresy, on the other hand, is a political crime. Heretics are guilty of growing different knowledge than the status quo allows. Typically, heresy is an overinvestment in some small portion of an acceptable doctrine. Like the question of whether Jesus was of the same or similar substance as his dear old dad.3 Worth rioting over, no doubt.
The idea sound waves are as solid just doesn’t compute. Speech isn’t violence. Or, if it is, it’s a mind game played by two where one is a masochist who loves getting beat up while rubbing their nipples. Hurting someone with words requires their consent. That’s what My Man Epictetus claimed in between being a slave in Rome.
Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must believe that you are being harmed. If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.4
This is mostly true with words. It's half true with clubs. If only the Gracchi had read Epictetus, they wouldn’t have felt a thing.5 Sadly the lazy slave hadn’t gotten around to being born yet.
Some people love being hurt. They love it on a level deeper than surface interaction and emotion. They don’t like the pain, but the hurt seems to give them a purpose. Anger makes them feel strong, like they somehow didn't disappoint their fathers when they got caught getting a hand job in the Fox Theater. I hope this makes sense.
Your mileage may vary because I cannot upload this nonsense straight into your brain. If I could, I doubt I would, though. Not when some people haven’t seen The Faculty6. I have my priorities and everyone seeing that movie is far more important than anyone understanding these words. Josh Hartnett takes advantage of a vulnerable teacher.
But let me try a functional example.
Since we are all humans, we mostly process the waves involved in speaking the same way. We hear the words as they’re said. So long as a language is shared, there is a baseline of meaning. We know what they refer to. When Trump says he has big hands for some reason, I understand what he’s lying about. Hands. Size. Possession of. Easy.
I can do this, as I also have hands of a diminutive size. But if I didn’t know what hands were, his statement would make even less sense than it does. I need a referent7. The idea itself doesn’t lodge in my brain through my ear. The basis was already there, and my brain grew it in response to the statement made by another.
His statement met my consent, and some know-fruit grew in my mind regarding his micromachine manus. In his mind, those hands are gigantic. Truly spectacular. Best piggies in town. When he walked into the Fox Theater, he said, “Big hands. Beautiful hands. The kind used to non-work. I love non-workers, and I tell you, they love me."
As neither of us can read the other’s mind - I assume - we have different ideas of his hands in our heads despite the same statement being made. Words are not so solid as clubs, so we interpret them however the hell we want. Otherwise, brainwashing would be a much simpler affair than just having Rachel Maddow babysit your kids.
And this very point is why there is no such thing as a dangerous idea. There are only stupid people, just like me, thinking and saying what they like in response to sound waves. Whether it is stupid or not is quite irrelevant. But it remains quite a mess.
What we tell someone is not what they hear. In any given conversation, ironically, the listener does most the heavy lifting. They have to create an entire world in their mind, stringing together pieces of references and referents to grow some know-fruit. If they love being hurt, they’ll find a way to make any statement suffocatingly stupid.
This is why people say things like, “When you say border agents, I hear Nazis.” They are proud to have contributed worse than nothing to the conversation by conjuring a Nazi existing only in their mind. No one put that Nazi there but them. Not Trump, not Biden, not Congress, no one but the dullard admitting their brain is broken.
There is a fix, but politics precludes its application. Hate is real strong currently. But try to take charitable interpretations of what your fellow fools are saying. If they think we should add more agents at the border, don’t assume it’s due to nascent Nazism. Ask why they hate me buying drugs behind the Fox Theater so much, instead. Pricks!
I will mercifully close this thing with a personal story.
That older girlfriend I mentioned earlier. The one who did acid with me at the YMCA. We also once carried on an entire conversation without saying a single word. With my being a stupid child and her a predatory, adult woman with an ID and pretty hair that felt like strawberry silk on a summer day, it certainly seemed the case, at least.
We simply looked at each other occasionally with full understanding and said, “Yep.” Such was our bond. Without words, we knew what was up. We didn’t need them. We were so certainly confused we were convinced we understood each other's thoughts without even attempting to communicate them. We read each other’s minds.
The problem was we didn’t. We weren’t thinking the same things. She was thinking about Titanic while I was thinking about wanting a hand job at the Fox Theater. But the acid sure made it seem like we were having a conversation. Our minds were power lifting bullshit. All of it was nonsense, every word we never said to each other.
American politics is mostly mindreading manure at the moment. People assume their neighbors are nefarious devils with the outcome being no one is getting a gods damned hand job. Not me. Not you. No one. This seems tragic. If we’re going to be beasts to each other, we should at least do it like they do on the Discovery Channel8.
Not whatever it is we think we're doing now. I don't claim to know what that is. But I know what a not-hand job looks like when I see it. I bet you do, too. And it's a shame. I suspect my little boy wiener looks huge with the President-Elect's power-hungry paws wrapped around it, choking it out like the Serpent in the Garden of Eden.
You know. The one that tricked people into learning something for themselves. Huh. Maybe that Adam and Eve story is a metaphor.
Sic vivitur.
Epistemology is the study of information. What even is information, man? Like, all I know is I don’t know, Scoob. Uhuhuhuh.
The Arian Controversy of the 4th century, not to be confused with The Aryan Controversy of the 20th century. Amazing what a difference a single letter can make.
Epictetus the Stoic, The Art of Living
Roman aristocrats had the Gracchi brothers murdered a long time ago for standing up to them on behalf of the Roman people. This act kicked off one hundred years of civil war, ultimately destroying what little dignity the Roman aristocracy had left.
The Faculty is a 1998 movie about communist aliens who are defeated by a drug dealing high school flunky.
A referent is the object a reference refers to. Words are references, the thing they describe are referents. Ignoring this makes all language irreferent.
Bloodhound Gang, The Bad Touch
The referents in this article are Fox Theater, and drugs; I have no clue what knowledge-fruit's meant to grow from *that*, but hilariously informative article as always. It does often make me wonder about the extent to which all communication is just comprised of simulacrums, like a botched game of Chinese whispers.
Maybe that's what the fluoride treatment in water's meant for, anyways.