437
As Gold Hits New Record, Some See Warning Signs of Civilizational Collapse
(www.newsweek.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
437 points (100.0% liked)
World News
50563 readers
1846 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
- Blogsites are treated in the same manner as social media sites. Medium, Blogger, Substack, etc. are not valid news links regardless of who is posting them. Yes, legitimate news sites use Blogging platforms, they also use Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube and we don't allow those links either.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF OCTOBER 19 2025
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The imaginary money you invested in gold is worthless if civilization collapsed, so it's in the rich person's interests to keep things going so they can pull that investment back.
It's more likely we are heading to another US recession, hopefully not as bad as the 1930s
I'm sorry, what? Gold has value regardless of if there's a government backing it or not. That's the entire point of investing in it, as a buffer for when fiat loses its value.
That's the general idea, yeah. But gold investments are just a kind of construct where you legally own a certain amount of gold. Wether anyone respects your right of ownership when civilization collapses... we'll see about that.
What value? Can't eat it, makes shitty tools. It's shiny, but I'm not going to trade ny potatoes for shiny in a survival situation.
You can starve sitting on a pile of gold.
For gold to be valuable you still need social stability.
Bottle caps are where it's at.
The value of gold lies in the fact that other men may be disposed to work their ass off in order to have some shiny things to gift to women in order to have sex. As you can imagine, the power of gold amongst married couples drastically decreases.
Besides this... History shows humans always gave value to gold. For some reason we got very used into associating gold with value. As such, it is probably something good to have if economy collapses. But it doesn't really matter if society collapsed.
Gold is supposed to represent something finite that's hard to dig out of the ground. It's like the antithesis of fiat currency that way. i think of it like a hedge against the dollar like with some cryptos. That said I only think US civilization would collapse while the rest of the world moves on or divvies up its corpse.
That is valid for many other resources: iron, silicon, carbon, carrots whatever. Gold has always been attributed some special value, throughout history. That is ok. I don't think US civilization is going to collapse, why would you think that?
Gold has always been valued because it has some important attributes that few, if any, other substances have.
It won't tarnish or oxidize, so it will look just as shiny and beautiful a thousand years from now.
It is extremely malleable, easily crafted into any shape. It can be hammered thin enough to be a foil, or drawn into a wire as thin as a human hair.
It has a relatively low melting point, making it easy to cast.
It is extremely conductive, and is the conductive material of choice when price is no object.
There are other unique properties, but the point is that much of Gold's value derives from being significantly, even uniquely, different from most other substances, giving it an intrinsic value beyond its monetary value.
The very article linked to this post talks about civilizational collapse of the US similar to the Roman republic.
No it doesn't. Not anymore.
Not beyond its industrial uses, at least.
That’s incorrect. Gold still has value because it has utility.
The fact that you are being downvoted for this is pretty shocking.
He means regular money would be worthless as well as stocks and such. And as rich people own gold, but own much more of the other, he argues they would like to avoid collapse.
However, I don't think they really can. Also, if it comes to recession very rich people tend to profit.
If only there was a digital version of gold, that had a permanent record of everyone's ownership right back to the first nugget of gold, that would be untouchable/secure in a collapse/near collapse scenario. Something that you could bring with you wherever you go in the world, yet no need to physically bring anything with you.
Man I would be investing in that so hard right now.
You mean Bitcoin, the imaginary thing that literally could be destroyed at any moment in time and the rich people use to manipulate their prices and game more money all the time? You mean that type of thing? Honestly gold is way better than investing in that.
Destroying Bitcoin would mean destroying the internet. Money will be the least of your problems when that happens. The price of Bitcoin being manipulated is not something that is inherent to Bitcoin. Anything that gets big enough will attract the big boys and they will try to manipulate anything for a little gain. Bitcoin being transparent, unmanipulatable and portable actually makes it better than gold though.
Major internet outages and blackouts, including across entire countries and continents, happen all the time. Your crypto is worthless numbers on a ledger when that happens.
What? we could easily keep the internet and have no crypto
Yes lol. But I'm way past the point that people's opinions of it have any bearing on my decisions.
I've had this conversation a million times. You don't understand Bitcoin, and that's ok, I don't mean it as an insult..... it's complicated. I can say that with 100% certainty based on your comments. This just means that there is more for me, at a cheaper price.
Yes there is manipulation going on, you're not wrong. But where you are veering off track is where you throw out the concept because of it.
Money is manupulated. Constantly. That's what happens with money. Bitcoin is no different.
Do you understand that Bitcoin has been around for 16 years, has never had an error or security breach (all cases of losing money are due to malicious actors or careless users), can send billions of dollars across the world for literal pennies, has over a TRILLUON dollars of market cap.
Please don't get stuck in the early days mindset. If Bitcoin was "destroyable" it would have happened long ago, as the threat it poses to fiat based sovereign currencies is huge.
I know I'm not changing any minds, but you can't say you didn't have the opportunity. You're standing in your own way.
Gold is good to invest in too now though! No shade on anyone who does that, just missing a better opportunity.
If this is really your perspective then tone down the condescension. BTC is only viable due to the poor policies of the Trump administration.
Gold has utility. BTC has no usability beyond being a cryptocurrency. I can make things with gold.
Not only that but Bitcoin is very limited as far as where you can spend it not a lot of places take it in order to actually utilize it for the most part you have to trade that in for whatever current value it may be whether it's $100 or $50,000 depending on how much the price has been manipulated at this point. And just like gold it's volatile it's going to all depend on what an arbitrary amount set is worth. And with more regulation Bitcoin becomes more and more useless as far as currency goes. I love Bitcoin I love crypto in general however I also realize how limited it is once you actually try to utilize it any sort of way. If somebody says hey I'm using it for my savings account and then next week that point is worthless because you can't catch then and nobody's willing to give you the actual money for it Cool you got a bunch of zeros and ones that are in your name and marked on a ledger someplace.
Yes, the thing that doesn't work in case of an internet or power outage. Yeah, that's a good idea to use in societal collapse.
That thing sounds like it needs a functioning internet and communications system. If society collapses I wouldn’t bet on the blockchain being usable.