I’ve certainly never heard of rapper Wacka Flocka, nor do I expect his mouth dispenses much wisdom, but in a first here at MS I am going to quote a rapper:
“You are who you are when God made you, not who you became after he did,” the rapper said. “That’s how I just feel. You rebuking God, man. God didn’t put them feelings in you, man, that’s the Devil playing tricks on your mind. That’s a test from God. If you can’t outbeat that one task and you believe that, then you’re going to believe everything else.”
Unwittingly Mr. Flocka is on to something substantial here. He is rebuking existentialism without even knowing what it is. This is a popular topic for me, but allow me to review.
There is a world which really exists outside of the confines of your little mind. It existed before you came into being, and it will continue to exist after you leave this world. However much control you may think you have over your life, and however much control you do have over your life, ultimately you exist as a part of a larger world outside of yourself, over which you exercise only partial control. Now you may think that you have exclusive jurisdiction over, at least, yourself, but you do not. Sure you can control some things about yourself, like what you eat or wear, when you go to bed, etc. But you came into this world in a time and manner completely out of your control, in a body that you had no ability to choose. Boy or girl, tall or short, brown eyes or blue, black or white, these were determined for you decisively. The fact that you were born a human being, and not a gopher was decided without your permission.
Existentialists believe that existence precedes essence. That is, as Sartre put it, a man is what he makes of himself. That this is absurd didn’t seem to dawn on the man, but the idea is central to the insanity of our age. Only if we believe this can we try to say that a man is a woman and a woman a man. And this is exactly what this degenerate rapper is pointing out. God made us a certain way. Our essence precedes our existence. It’s too bad that this man who covers himself with tattoos and uses a false name doesn’t follow this to its logical conclusion, but it does go to show that even a man who can barely form a sentence is well aware of reality and its nature.
And Mr. Flocka finishes with my own favorite point! If you believe something so patently false as the idea that you can be a member of the opposite sex (nota bene: opposite!), why then “you’re going to believe everything else.” Exactly.
Rejecting your predetermined gender is ultimately a rejection of God, because it was God who decided when, where, and how you would come into the world, with a little help from your parents of course. If you say He made a bad decision, then you are questioning the eternal architect of reality, and reality itself. And then, nothing is really real.
Mors Sanctorum 