Silver and gold when the feces hit the fan
According to a tweet that I saw on the last day of 2022, the coming year is going to be one that will require large personal stocks of 1) silver and gold bullion, 2) non-perishable food, and 3) ammunition and firearms. Now while I have no objection to Mason jars of preserves and a large home armory, I do have to wonder what value will be found in blocks of those two kinds of metal in a situation in which government and the economy it protects has collapsed, law enforcement of the type that the middle class is used to has ceased to exist, and humanity has regressed into a war of all against all.
As we are in the midst of the winter holiday season, I am reminded of Yukon Cornelius roaming the Arctic wastes in search for precious metals, and the Snowman’s song about how the best use for such treasures is to decorate a tree. Jewelers and metalsmiths who specialize in making objet d’art have their own purposes here, and certainly, it is true that these metals have a particular luster and ductility that give them an aesthetic appeal to many humans. The latter property, along with conductivity and heat transfer, make them useful in many electronic and industrial applications, along with other metallic elements such as palladium and platinum.
But I seriously doubt that anyone will be engaged in the making of necklaces or cell phones if social organization collapses, even were we to assume that these were widely held skills. What the forecasters of doom appear to have in mind is the rarity of silver and gold, a scarcity that has made them useful as markers of exchange value, i.e., money.
It is the combination of being rare and thus hard to find and density that makes a small quantity feel impressive that makes silver and gold valuable. The residents of the Pacific island of Yap are famous for their use of large stone rings as currency, and I will someday write a scene with mobsters talking about how the crime rate is so low on the island because unlike stealing a Honda Civic, rolling hundreds of pounds of rock across sand ain’t easy—it turns out that while crime is infrequent on the island, it is still possible to get murdered by gunshot there, despite, be it noted, a total ban on the possession of firearms. But for most peoples, portability has been a useful characteristic of money along with rarity, requiring in the case of the Golgafrinchans a policy of deforestation to fight inflation when they made leaves their legal tender.
Note that all of this depends on a working—more or less—social structure with a division of labor. In such a system, money is efficient in that it retains—again, more or less—its value. Someone with a box of eggs may not want shoes right now, but those eggs will only last so long, and thus a marker of their value can in the future be exchanged for the desired product, rather than having to pelt the shoemaker with rotten ova until being shod.
But if social order has collapsed, we will all drop down to the base level of Maslow’s hierarchy, at which point, silver and gold, along with a whole lot of other things, will have no value—value here being defined in the economic sense of how much of something I want that people will give me in exchange for what I have.
Unless, of course, part of the collapse involves vampires or werewolves who may be dispatched with silver bullets. But melting silver requires a temperature of 961.8 degrees Celsius (1763.24 Fahrenheit), while lead becomes liquid at 327.5 degrees Celsius (621.5 Fahrenheit), well within the temperature possible in a decent campfire. If preppers anticipate hordes of unholy beings swarming their civilizations, they can justify for themselves the possession of silver, anyway, but they should fashion it into bullets, crosses, and blades before the apocalypse arrives.
For the rest of us, there is good sense in evaluating what scenarios may potentially occur where we live and to take some steps to prepare. Total social collapse in the United States as a whole is unlikely. We have survived multiple depressions and a civil war while mostly maintaining needed services and the flow of goods, though the Toilet Paper Famine of 2020 was unsettling, at least for those who do not shop at big box stores. When a tornado passed through my town in March of 2022, I was obliged to distribute freezer packs in some drawers of my refrigerator until the power was restored, but that was a short emergency. Riots have seized the attention of the right wing of late, but they are not all that common and rarely—alas—reach into the neighborhoods of the actual oppressors. And ammunition supplies are only now coming back to something like their former ready availability.
The fact is that yes, having some supplies can be necessary, but is more often simply convenient. What makes a whole lot more sense when it comes to stocking up is to keep a cache of things that one might actually use in an emergency and to recognize that precious metals only hang on to that adjective when times are stable.
Would it not then make sense to work for stability—which is to say, to build, maintain, and improve the kind of society that does not teeter on the edge of collapse?