Sometimes, truth emerges refracted through the kaleidoscope of pop culture.

Wonder Woman’s Golden Lasso of Truth … almost … takes on the quality of a parable.

As summarized in the Wikipedia:

Empowered by the Fires of Hestia, the Lasso forces anyone held by it to tell the absolute truth. … The fires are said to even be able to cure insanity, as they did in the case of Ares, God of War, when he attempted to incite World War III. … The lasso possesses incredible strength and is virtually unbreakable. ^… It has easily held beings with tremendous superhuman strength such as Superman, Captain Marvel, who has the strength of Hercules and the Power of Zeus, and Power Girl, as well as gods such as Ares and Heracles. 

The only times it has ever been shown to break was when truth itself was challenged. … Elsewhere, when the backwards-thinking monster Bizarro was caught in Trinity, he was horrified by the very idea of truth. As the antithesis of reason and logic he was able to break the lasso. …  A storyline in the Morrison-era JLA comics by Joe Kelly depicted the lasso as an archetypal manifestation of universal truth, and, once broken- when Wonder Woman doubted the truth that it was revealing to her because she didn’t like it-, disrupted the underlying truth of reality itself; with the lasso broken, reality came to be dictated by whatever people believed to be the case,

… disrupted the underlying truth of reality itself; with the lasso broken, reality came to be dictated by whatever people believed to be the case, starting with older beliefs and extending to beliefs that were held by various individuals in the present, resulting in Earth becoming the center of the universe for two weeks, Earth becoming flat for several hours, the moon turning into cheese for a time….

This pop culture narrative almost fashions a naive parable about the virtues of:

a unit of account with real integrity (absolute truth) –

able to cure the insanity  (of a completely unmoored arbitrary order) –

easily containing superhuman strength (as gold provided financial stability to accommodate the dynamism of the Industrial Revolution) –

with the antithesis of reason and logic (such antithesis as that which Hayek, in his Nobel Prize lecture, called “the pretense of knowledge) –

disrupt the underlying truth of reality itself (replacing a defined unit with a capricious one in the world financial system) –

temporarily replacing the true heliocentric order — discovered by gold-standard savant Copernicus — with the superstition of geocentricity….
As the Psalmist wrote: Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.

(Appreciation noted to the astute Nicholas Arnold of the American Principles Project for having lassoed The Golden Lasso and brought it to the attention of TGSA blogging team.)

 This post originally appeared at thegoldstandardnow.org