Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

constant

2023-06-25 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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constant
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Explanation

The comic shows a person arriving in what appears to be heaven or the afterlife, where a divine figure explains: "The basic setup is constant sexual gratification presented in such a way that you can deny its status as the most important thing in your life." The person responds: "Wow, and you'll wipe my memory of this conversation?" The figure confirms: "Yep. Clean wipe." The caption below reads: "Heaven was even better than I expected."

The joke operates on multiple levels. On the surface, it's a darkly funny description of heaven as essentially being designed around sex while maintaining plausible deniability. But the deeper joke is that this description of "heaven" sounds suspiciously like regular human life on Earth. Human beings are biologically driven by sexual motivation to an enormous degree -- it influences our clothing, our social behavior, our entertainment, our spending, our ambitions -- yet we maintain an elaborate cultural fiction that sex is not the central organizing principle of much of our behavior. The "clean wipe" of memory is the mechanism by which this self-deception is maintained: we can't acknowledge the design because we don't remember being told about it. The comic suggests that if a benevolent God designed life to be heavenly, this is exactly what it would look like -- constant sexual motivation dressed up in enough complexity that we can pretend we're motivated by higher things.

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