Page 76 - Liberating Liberals V2

The God-shaped Hole in the Soul
It’s true that some rocks have non-decorative properties that are inherently valuable. But paying $100,000 because it’s a big diamond, or agreeing
that gold is the most stable commodity in a crashing economy — these aspects are immense irrationalities. Only food and water, heating fuel, shelter, good will and weapons provide any security if the economic scat really hits the end-of-civilization fan. Once some level of civilization is restored gold may become important again because some medium of exchange is needed. But the medium just as well could be hard-to-obtain kinds of shells, or baseball cards, etc.
Hold up the “meaningless standard” to precious stones and they quickly return to what they were: chemical compounds with a high refraction index causing them to reflect lots of light. Fool’s gold, cubic zirconium and colored glass all reflect light
well enough and, except to experts, can appear about as bright. We are trying to find and break up these imposed logjams of meaning so we are free to choose our own.
A much more serious example of imprisonment by prefabricated meaning is the Cold War. Both sides super-glued themselves to their meanings so strongly that they promised to destroy all of humanity with nuclear weapons rather than compromise. In part, it was an example of people being ready to die and take everyone with them, rather than compromise what meaning they’d found.
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