“What can be counted is an instance of a category,” thought Midas.

And he reflected on gold, “Is it gold I really love? Or is it the quantity of gold that I have counted that makes my face glow with pleasure?

And he turned to look at his wife and asked, “Is this crazy woman inside my Queen the one I adore? Or do I love this one (1) I can count on to be my good wife, my good queen, the effective mother of my daughters?

“And how do I love her? Let me count the ways! And does not each way have a name and criteria by which it can be classified as that which it essentially is? Let me count the number of instances of each of the ways I love her!” exclaimed Midas.

“And is it my car I love? Or do I love driving? I love acceleration, speed, torque. My love for my car equals its best-of-breed specifications.”

“I used to love insatiably and helplessly, because I did not know how to eat. My mistake was I loving most what I could least digest: the inert permanence of gold.

“One cannot own what is not made one’s own flesh, and my mind’s flesh is idea. My mind makes things mine by knowing them. Counter, counting and counted are One.”

Midas touched his friends and family and made a social network with whom he could stay in touch with a stream of quick updates. Midas touched actions, and the actions became behaviors and the behaviors became patterns, performance and measurable value. Midas touched the school and all the students were scored, ranked, morally evaluated, and routed to appropriate facilities. Midas touched the appliances in his home to tap their informational juices so they could flow into his world of hard fact.

The world was his at last — all at his transfiguring fingertips.

And behind Midas’s glinting eyes, Plato smiled in his archetypal paradise where the mind is a place of its own, knowing heaven, hell, earth, man, woman, values, categories, instances, criteria, data.