re: #6 Targetpractice

What so many of these goobers fail to realize is that gold has no inherent value, that the same reason they sniff at paper/plastic notes as “fiat currency” is why gold coins are useless if we find ourselves reverting to a barter economy. Without a government to set and enforce their value, gold coins are only worth what the other guy is willing to exchange them for. So if he thinks that a bottle of clean water is worth a sack of gold coins, then that’s their value and arguing what the price of gold was when society collapsed isn’t going to change that.

Goldbuggery is magical thinking taxonomically adjacent to conspiracy theories: it’s not really an explanatory structure of how the world is, but how the world needs to be for the believer to imagine themselves as the elect, special.

Like conspiracies, there’s a kernel of reality: value is now not just abstract but basically occult, with new formulations of “how is a thing worth what it is worth” being constructed regularly in ways that reinforce the wealth of the already very wealthy, while the basic sources of wealth are less and less accessible to most people. Wishing for a store of value that you can literally horde, that is not mutable within the market structure, is pretty understandable…

…until you get to the part where the advocates talk about the power/control their stash will grant them in the future. The real fantasy is a return to an older system of hierarchy-through-wealth, where the gold-holder has, through cunning and savvy, prepared for the moment when there’s a very specific level of societal collapse that destroys other methods of storing value, but does not reduce gold merely to token-value because subsistence is all that matters.

One day, we’ll wear the boot that stamps on the face of society, envisions the goldbug, because we’ve discerned the secret of the One Substance That Has Objective Worth But Also Can Be Stored Indefinitely.

It’s basically the same magic thinking that rules NFTs—thing has value because thing has exclusivity—but with a backwards-looking mythology rather than a farrago of neologisms.