Wednesday, May 17, 2006
(1:33 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Left Behind
When the Rapture comes, we will all be left behind. It is money that will be taken up into heaven -- all of it. We all know, deep within our hearts, that the world is not worthy of money, its endless self-replication. We have caused money to suffer, through taxing it, through exhorbitant labor demands, through declaring bankruptcy. At one point it seemed as though money somehow required human beings, or at least natural resources, but now money has finally reached its highest point of development, the point at which it finally breaks free from humanity altogether, revealing what had really been the case all along: money was never "about" us, never "about" the merely human. It alone has turned a profit, and the Father that sees in secret will reward it by entrusting it with greater things -- giving compound interest, the only truly new force to have developed throughout the history of the universe, infinite space in which to grow and accumulate value.Or is it the other way around? Will we all be taken, leaving money to range across the surface of the earth, unopposed by national borders or the antagonism of labor? Will we have been the "vanishing mediator" of the natural world, the accidental site where the "noo-sphere" called money emerged? Freed of the constraints of biology, the economy will be able to expand into the uttermost reaches of the universe, endlessly approaching an infinity of value. Thus God will have saved what was constitutively valueless.
