Let me get this straight...

thenoobyorker:

politicalprof:

Gold is a naturally occurring substance that human beings choose to dig out of the ground or pick up on the surface, usually in or near riverbeds in which running water has exposed previously subsurface gold. It has historically been valued for its perceived beauty, its malleability, and its comparative scarceness. It is because of this last condition, its scarceness, that some economic systems have decided to use gold as a medium of exchange.

In any role—as a pretty object, as a thing that can easily turned into something else, or as a medium of exchange—gold’s value is socially invented and enforced. Gold is not money in some ontological sense of the word.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Relevant to this poem,

After reading this piece and in the subsequent moment of higgledy-piggledy, I am reminded of Timon of Athens:

“Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? 
No, Gods, I am no idle votarist! ...
Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair,
Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.
... Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads:
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed;
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee and approbation
With senators on the bench: This is it
That makes the wappen’d widow wed again;
She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To the April day again. Come, damned earth,
Thou common whore of mankind, that put’st odds
Among the rout of nations.”

The poem is William Shakespeare’s but I borrowed the inspiration from The Power of Money by Karl Marx.