fool's gold mine

(or, marriage & money)
(or, monogamy & materialism)
(or, m&m&m&ms)
(or, green m&ms)
(or, fools mine gold)
(or, fools mine "MINE")
(or, i can do this all day)

How we treat others doesn't just matter. It's the only thing that does.
-fuzzy houndstooth

What's the single greatest measure of a person's intelligence? It comes in two parts - their relationship to the institution of marriage, and their attitude toward money.
Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that that's the measure of a person's acuteness (what one does with one's intelligence). This society is such a swirl of dysfunction, that many highly intelligent people are so damaged or indoctrinated in one way or another that their smarts never translate into any kind of grasp of the big picture. For that matter, some intelligences probably just aren't of the "big picture" variety.
But if human existence in the 21st century can be viewed from the perspective of rats in a maze, the single most obvious (dual) measure of smarts is in how any human rodent reacts to marriage and money. Take someone who has never said a contrary word about monogamy or materialism, and you are looking at a person who would be denied a license to procreate, in any kind of sane world.
And truth be told, those two measures can be distilled one level deeper and simpler - how a person reacts to the concept "mine".
For what is money, if not the most baldfacedly obvious manifestation of MINE? Possession implies virtually undisputed ownership. Whenever we come across unclaimed money in an empty common area, we all ask the same question - "WHOSE is this?" And while it's far less overt, muddied as it is by sentimental notions of devotion, marriage at its most basic level is the most sacrosanct bastion of MINE-ness our society offers. MY man. MY woman. We've all taken liberties with money not our own, and society is pretty forgiving about small (or even large) infractions; the romanticizing of robbery started lonnnnng before Sherwood Forest. But "small infraction" is a phrase that almost can't be applied to marriage - both within and without the institution, we are ever vigilant for the tiniest of transgressions, ready to rush to judgment.
What is it about MINE-awareness that stamps a person's smarts so singularly? The realization that selfishness is the most sweeping, dominant facet of current human existence...and that virtually every social ill is a direct result. The brightest humans perceive that nearly every problem can be addressed and overcome, as soon as we figure out how to be WE-based instead of ME-based.
None of this qualifies as news - as far back as recorded history goes, individuals have condemned selfishness. Loudly, quietly, tragically, comically...selfish-bemoanment has a brimming history. Every so often, these expressions even scale the heights of popular culture: buddhism, "The Giving Tree", "I Me Mine"...
Of course, marriage/monogamy and money/materialism are far from discrete. Marriage, minus the surface sentiment, is nothing more than an economic contract that legitimizes and defines parameters of hoarding. Monogamy itself only arose as a way for greedy males to thumb their noses at death by passing on their possessions to male offspring, the people most likely to perpetuate their values (and protect their lives when they could no longer do so themselves). Before we invented monogamy, nobody much cared whose child was whose. Our children belonged to us all, so we all had a stake in loving and caring for them. Men dreamed up monogamy ten thousand years ago, and sixteen thousand children died of starvation yesterday. The causality between those two realities couldn't be more direct.
Curiously, an alternate and nearly as effective test of intelligence is gauging a person's reaction to Monty Python (but there's no particular relevance there, other than the appearance of yet another "m" in these equations). It's also tempting to think that a person's reaction to religion might be an excellent measure of intelligence, but no - there is something so shabbily obvious about believing in an invisible friend who can do ANYTHING (including give you a "get out of death free" card), that there is no shortage of atheists who aren't especially bright.
How omnipresent is selfishness in this day and age? Let's give a linguistic answer to that question. Just in case you're inclined to believe that selfishness ISN'T the guiding principle of the world you were born into, a look at the incidence of selfish (and non-selfish) words should provide a scientific starting point. Let's compare i, me, and my, with we, us, and our. The first one to clock in is "i" (or "I", as you know it, but i refuse to go along with the notion that i is more important than we...the same type of reasoning that makes me refuse capitals for people's names). "I" is the 10th most commonly-used word in the English language. "We" arrives at #27...a weighty placing indeed (unless you're invoking a relative comparison). Next up is "my" at #34, then "me" at #50. "Our" arrives at #86, and "us" at #100. Of the top fifty words you'll ever hear spoken, three are self-centered.
Yet i'm frankly encouraged that three group-based words even made the top 100.
Marriage is covertly about money, but overtly about child-rearing. You might suppose then that monogamous marriage would be an efficient way to raise children?
And it is...if you're trying to raise children with trust issues and parent-child complexes (to say nothing of how brutal monogamous parenting is on the parents). If you were trying to design the most inefficient paradigm in which to raise children, you couldn't do much worse than an isolated, two-parent family (the only thing that comes to mind is a single-parent family...which is precisely where monogamous marriage has left almost a third of all households). If you wanted a paradigm in which to raise non-neurotic children, a great place to start would be something with plenty of helping hands, and healthy models of human sexuality. Never mind the majority of marriages that fail...what percentage of "successful" marriages would you suppose are "healthy models of human sexuality"? How about after five years? Ten? Twenty?
Since no credible scientist any longer claims that humans are monogamous, why are we still trying to pretend we are? Money, of course. You've got to know which kid gets your stuff...and while you're doing it, you've got to live in a mortgaged, single-family home with 2.28 cars (the foundation on which the american economy runs...and rolls).
There's a profoundly unfortunate linguistic accident in the English language - the conjunction of words in the noun phrase "gold mine". We pair up the word for our most precious metal, with a noun describing where to find such treasure. But that noun, "mine", is a homograph, sharing spelling and pronunciation with a self-oriented personal pronoun. As a result, every time we speak or write "gold mine", we unwittingly toss another lustrous sheen onto our plague of selfishness. We subconsciously make selfish sexy. The word association is so strong that no FAMILY FEUD team ever missed the word "mine" on "gold (blank)". We've got diamond mines and silver mines too, but sadly not one single "trash mine" or "shit mine".
If only the word for "hole where we dig for minerals" were something other than "mine". Greedy me, i dream of it being more than a mere neutral word, too. We can do it! A little language tweak would do more for humanity's health than a million marches. How beautiful would it be if the word for that hole in the ground were a "we", or an "our"?
"Everybody thought her gold our was tapped out, but ol' rusty mcnoodles, she never gave up. Now look at her...easy street for the rest of her life!"
"Who ever thought the invention of a forty-foot penis toilet tube (with flush remote) would turn out to be such a gold we??"
"I still sometimes can't believe i'm a gigolo. But i always knew i had a gold we between my legs."
However, as you've no doubt already figured out, "gold we" (and even "gold our") are rather unfortunately excrementitious.
Sigh. Another brilliant idea down the crapper.