Pacific Views

"The Corpse Of Value"

I read Cryptonomicon during the internet boomtime, and before I lost a rather cushy job due to the rank incompetence of people who decided that it was a good business strategy to spend loads of money on consultants before taking the step of establishing a customer base. One passage has stuck with me in the back of my mind ever since, but I hadn't ever explored it quite the way this DailyKos diarist did, writing about "the corpse of value" and tying it directly to the Inconvenient Truth proposition that we can't buy back the health of the planet's ecosystems, or by extension, the lost value of lives destroyed by war or poverty. Below is the original quote from the book, I'd urge you to click over and read the whole thing for context and some good perspective:

"Gold is the corpse of value," says Goto Dengo. . . . "Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds." -- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

Amen.