Borge's Zahir and Free Will

The Borges story “The Zahir” is, like so much of Borges’s work, mysterious. Central to the story is the Zahir—a coin—that falls into the hands of the narrator on the same night as the wake of the woman he loved. Convinced of the importance of the coin, his mind wanders:

“Possessed, without a trace of sleepiness, almost happy, I reflected that there is nothing less material than money, since any coin (a twenty-centavo piece, for instance) is, in all truth, a panoply of possible futures. Money is abstract, I said over and over, money is future time. It can be an evening just outside the city, or a Brahms melody, or maps, or chess, or coffee, or the words of Epictetus, which teach contempt of gold; it is a Proteus more changeable than the Proteus of the isle of Pharos. It is unforeseeable time, Bergsonian time, not the hard, solid time of Islam and the Porch. Adherents of determinism deny that there is any event in the world that is possible, i.e., that might occur; a coin symbolizes our free will.”

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Taking Borges out of context, the passage stands as a fascinating argument for capitalism being inherently tied to free will in a society. Money does, after all, connote an ultimate purposefulness lost on other materials, even immatterial things.

But, as Borges’s story points out, this treatment of money is one that leads to idolatry and worship. Viewing money as independently godlike, however, overlooks the powerful fact that people exist as mediators in this relationship. While money may ostensibly the key to free will, money will never choose for itself. We’re the only ones doing that.