Like it or not, we cannot describe gold merely in terms of its physical and chemical properties, production statistics, or its market value. Like oil, so aptly called “black gold,” but exerting a far greater influence, the sun-metal transcends its own substance.
What is there so surprising in that? After all, gold has been at the origin of conquests, set thousands of men on the move, changed the map of the world; it has lain at the basis of monetary systems, established the power of nations and fostered trade, bringing men together to the same extent as it has opposed them. How could this substance be any longer a mere metal? The way in which nations continue to stuff their coffers with this gold, which they themselves formerly excluded from their monetary systems, already provides some kind of answer.
It is doubtful whether we have saved the world’s finances by freeing them from gold; is this banishment to be eternal?
One thing is certain, though; we have added another paradox to the many already contained in the history of gold. Never has so much gold been extracted from the earth as during the last decades of the twentieth century. Never, in the case of the majority of its usages, have these quantities of gold been less crucial to man. By depriving the king of metals of its powers, in attempting to reduce it to its very substance, are we not in fact endowing it with its greatest property; that of a myth? From TOTAL Information, a publication of Paris-based TOTAL Compagnie Francaise des Petroles.
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