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User Info	America Is DONE; entered at 2021-10-13 03:06:14
Dishwasher Posts: 19 Registered: 2021-08-05 Middle England	Made me think of this essay from 2014 by John Michael Greer 'Th hoard of the Nibelungs', here's a extract: "The habit of reducing every kind of value to bare price is profitable in a money economy, since it facilitates ignoring every variable that might get in the way of making money off transactions; unfortunately it misses a minor but crucial fact, which is that the laws of physics and ecology trump the laws of economics, and can neither be bribed nor bought. The contemporary fixation on abstract value isnt limited to economists and those who believe them, nor is its potential for catastrophic consequences. Im thinking here specifically of those people who have grasped the fact that industrial civilization is picking up speed on the downslope of its decline, but whose main response to it consists of trying to find some way to stash away as much abstract value as possible now, so that it will be available to them in some prospective postcollapse society. Far more often than not, gold plays a central role in that strategy, though there are a variety of less popular vehicles that play starring roles the same sort of plan. Now of course it was probably inevitable in a consumer society like ours that even the downfall of industrial civilization would be turned promptly into yet another reason to go shopping. Still, theres another difficulty here, and thats that the same strategy has been tried before, many times, in the last years of other civilizations. Theres an ample body of historical evidence that can be used to see just how well it works. The short form? Don't go there. It so happens, for example, that in there among the sagas and songs of early medieval Europe are a handful that deal with historical events in the years right after the fall of Rome: the Nibelungenlied, Beowulf, the oldest strata of Norse saga, and some others. Now of course all these started out as oral traditions, and finally found their way into written form centuries after the events they chronicle, when their compilers had no way to check their facts; they also include plenty of folktale and myth, as oral traditions generally do. Still, they describe events and social customs that have been confirmed by surviving records and archeological evidence, and offer one of the best glimpses weve got into the lived experience of descent into a dark age. Precious metals played an important part in the political economy of that ageno surprises there, as the Roman world had a precious-metal currency, and since banks had not been invented yet, portable objects of gold and silver were the most common way that the Roman worlds well-off classes stashed their personal wealth. As the western empire foundered in the fifth century CE and its market economy came apart, hoarding precious metals became standard practice, and rural villas, the doomsteads of the day, popped up all over. When archeologists excavate those villas, they routinely find evidence that they were looted and burnt when the empire fell, and tolerably often the archeologists or a hobbyist with a metal detector has located the buried stash of precious metals somewhere nearby, an expressive reminder of just how much benefit that store of abstract wealth actually provided to its owner. Thats the same story you get from all the old legends: when treasure turns up, a lot of people are about to die. The Volsunga saga and the Nibelungenlied, for example, are versions of the same story, based on dim memories of events in the Rhine valley in the century or so after Romes fall. The primary plot engine of those events is a hoard of the usual late Roman kind, which passes from hand to hand by way of murder, torture, treachery, vengeance, and the extermination of entire dynasties. For that matter, when Beowulf dies after slaying his dragon, and his people discover that the dragon was guarding a treasure, do they rejoice? Not at all; they take it for granted that the kings and warriors of every neighboring kingdom are going to come and slaughter them to get itand in fact thats what happens. Thats business as usual in a dark age society. The problem with stockpiling gold on the brink of a dark age is thus simply another dimension, if a more extreme one, of the broader problem with intermediation. It bears remembering that gold is not wealth; its simply a durable form of money, and thus, like every other form of money, an arbitrary token embodying a claim to real wealththat is, goods and servicesthat other people produce. If the goods and services arent available, a basement safe full of gold coins wont change that fact, and if the people who have the goods and services need them more than they want gold, the same is true. Even if the goods and services are to be had, if everyone with gold is bidding for the same diminished supply, that gold isnt going to buy anything close to what it does today. Whats more, tokens of abstract value have another disadvantage in a society where the rule of law has broken down: they attract violence the way a dead rat draws flies. The fetish for stockpiling gold has always struck me, in fact, as the best possible proof that most of the people who think they are preparing for total social collapse havent actually thought the matter through, and considered the conditions that will obtain after the rubble stops bouncing. Lets say industrial civilization comes apart, quickly or slowly, and you have gold. In that case, either you spend it to purchase goods and services after the collapse, or you dont. If you do, everyone in your vicinity will soon know that you have gold, the rule of law no longer discourages people from killing you and taking it in the best Nibelungenlied fashion, and sooner or later youll run out of ammo. If you dont, what good will the gold do you? The era when Nibelungenlied conditions applywhen, for example, armed gangs move from one doomstead to another, annihilating the people holed up there, living for a while on what they find, and then moving on to the next, or when local governments round up the families of those believed to have gold and torture them to death, starting with the children, until someone breaksis a common stage of dark ages. Its a self-terminating one, since sooner or later the available supply of precious metals or other carriers of abstract wealth are spread thin across the available supply of warlords. This can take anything up to a century or two before we reach the stage commemorated in the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer: Nearon n cyningas ne cseras, ne goldgiefan swylce i weron (No more are there kings or caesars or gold-givers as once there were)." https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-.... 2021-10-13 03:06:14