The Mystique of the Connected Dots

Experts are always connecting dots. There is this mystique about dots. Of course, everyone has their own Almighty-Me idea of which dots are the important ones, and which connections are the right ones. But since the game is open to anyone, here's one more player with nothing to lose except -- well, except for a few dots!

How about money as the dot-in-chief here? Eventually every society in history develops some. Economists call it a unit of exchange. People call it what makes the world go round. Looking at the record, I'd put my dots on that second definition, because it's hard to find anywhere in this record where the plot didn't involve money.

Anyone with a world map can draw the connecting lines from country to country, from age to age. Of the many thousands, just a few will make the point. From the cuneiform tablets of the ancient Middle East and the cowry shells of ancient China....to the Drachmas of ancient Greece to the Sesterius of ancient Rome...to the Florins and Pounds of medieval Europe...right up to the free-wheeling dollars that have become the currency of today's global economy, nothing of consequence happens without the motivation of money.

The obvious examples range from great farmlands to great cities to great universities to great economies to great wars. Oh, you noticed the sequencing there? Well, yes, there's an almost inevitable connection from the first to the last. Somehow as any society grows great. its national appetite for greatness suffers rivals poorly. And so -- as with each of the above national examples and every other example in history -- success begets success. And begotten success only whets the success-appetite for more success, even at the expense of rival appetites.

Some will say there is more to mankind than his money. For those dot-connectors who believe in a God or in the inherent goodness of the human spirit, we want that to be true. But if mankind is more than his money, his history is not. Somehow, when all the dots are on the table, we eventually tend to fix our appetites on the ones marked money. Not that we express it quite that crudely. We prefer attributes such as "the right to a job," "having a decent wage," "balancing the budget," and that old-time, all-time favorite "keeping ahead of the rest."

Throughout the history of dot-connecting, folks have traced the motives of money in many peculiar ways. Some look for conspiratorial cabals like Jewish Bankers...the Knights Templar....the Vatican....Wall Street. ( Right now that last one has a lot of angry people connecting a lot of angry dots around the circled wagons of a lot of worried New York hustlers!). But there have been other dot-connectors over the years like Karl Marx who found the evil of money deep inside the system of capitalism or like the writers of Genesis who found this evil deep inside the original sin of of our pride.

The latest dot-connectors are the G-20 nations who are meeting to see if the ancient blessing/curse of money can somehow be sublimated into a global solution. The trouble with that devoutly-to-be-wished-for scenario is that each of the players on this stage see their own role and their own lines as the starring ones.

Which brings us right back to where all these dots began in the first place -- the Almighty Me.