As much as I loathe math (as anyone who’s ever watched me struggle to add anything with 2 digits can attest) I’m gaining a new respect for it. Why? Because it’s one of the few things in the universe that humans, as much as we try, can’t fuck up. It exists separate from us, and its rules are unchanging. There’s no possibility for spin or interpretation. Two plus two equals four, whether you think it does or not. If the entire borough of Queens thinks it’s five? Still four. Warren Buffet? Still four. The Pope? Definitely still four.

Unfortunately, just about everything else is not quite so infallible — meaning that we can (and do) mangle, maul, and distort it all til it’s near-unrecognizable. Be it the solution to the AIDS crisis or the importance of monitoring volcanoes, we can knead it, beat it, douse it in flour, and wring out anything resembling actual truth. All by saying so. It would be remarkable, if it wasn’t leading to so many people getting royally screwed.

The main problem is language. Math doesn’t care about lexicon or context or syntax. Call it nine in the shower, or seven at gunpoint — it’s still four, asshole. The same cannot be said for just about every other concept. “Love,” “insanity,” “crisis” — these things all have completely relative meanings. We let the “smart” people make up meanings for them, and then go along with whatever the crowd says.

Take “experts.” It’s a funny word, with a strangely-placed “x” slapped on before the “pert.” But that makes no difference in actual practice. Call someone an “expert,” and suddenly we believe everything they say. We look at them in a new light, superior beings that have tapped into some existentially pure well of knowledge, despite the fact that they’re really just shmucks like us who may or may not have read a few books.

Experiment with it — watch what happens. “This is my friend Ty, he’s a Japanese fetish porn expert.” Ohhh, ahhh, how impressive! He must be so smart! Sounds a lot better than “he spends his days watching YouTube videos of men wrapping their faces in schoolgirls’ dirty socks.”

The only problem, of course, is that because we’ve all agreed that experts are so vastly smarter and we should listen to them, we do. Which causes slight problems, because while many of them may be quicker than your average Cheetos-swilling couch jockey, they’re hardly omniscient. Or even all that quick, sometimes. (Or most of the time. Or all of the time.)

So here we are, in this raging shit tempest, sprinting away from the semi-apocryphal fall-of-modern-civilization. Who will we turn to as the voices of reason? Who will end the cycle of greed, corruption, inefficiency and more greed? Who will guide us out of this river of economic sewage into the gummy candyland of capitalistic progress?

Oh, right — the experts. Crap.