Gold’s uselessness made it a false absolute value sought by a functionally minded society

Evidence

Although the discoveries of gold mines and diamond fields in the seventies and eighties would have had little consequence in themselves if they had not accidentally acted as a catalytic agent for imperialist forces, it remains remarkable that the imperialists’ claim to have found a permanent solution to the problem of superfluity was initially motivated by a rush for the most superfluous raw material on earth. Gold hardly has a place in human production and is of no importance compared with iron, coal, oil, and rubber; instead, it is the most ancient symbol of mere wealth. In its uselessness in industrial production it bears an ironical resemblance to the superfluous money that financed the digging of gold and to the superfluous men who did the digging. To the imperialists’ pretense of having discovered a permanent savior for a decadent society and antiquated political organization, it added its own pretense of apparently eternal stability and independence of all functional determinants. It was significant that a society about to part with all traditional absolute values began to look for an absolute value in the world of economics where, indeed, such a thing does not and cannot exist, since everything is functional by definition. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 491

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt frames the imperialist gold rush as the pursuit of an ‘absolute value’ — a concept useful for the toolkit on how superfluity and functional logic drive empire.
• XREF: connects to: The word ‘waste’ conceals an act of rendering the valuable useless — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1196