Not because we fear it, but because we desire it.

During every financial crisis, I always feel that maybe it's going to be a false alarm. There have been alarms going off for years. People are afraid that a major disaster will happen very suddenly, and they'll be out shivering and starving on the streets in less than a month. A lot of people have very low incomes and no savings. If they save any money at all, they do it by allocating some of their paychecks to a retirement account. If there were a major sudden disaster, such as a job layoff, they would immediately need to get financial help from somebody else, or use credit cards to buy their basic necessities, or take money out of their retirement accounts.

I don't know much about retirement accounts, because I've never had one. I don't know what they 'invest' in. I don't know whether those investments would still have any value if there was a massive deflation. Paper investments could lose a lot of value, while the cost of living could still remain high. It would be nice if the price of food and commodities collapsed at the same time that paper investments collapsed, and to the same degree. However, I think that paper investments had a much larger bubble, a much larger inflation, than things like food. I don't know though.

All of that thinking is based on fear: the fear that maybe something bad will happen to the retirement account if we don't pull our money out of it right away. It's true, though, that in some other countries, over the twentieth century, there have been financial disasters that resulted in a lot of people's life savings becoming worthless. It was the worst whenever inflation made it so that a wheelbarrow full of money wasn't enough for a loaf of bread. Will our situation be like that? It could be. Politicians and government employees were just as educated, just as intelligent, in those other countries as they are here. They were the same species (Homo sapiens) as ours here in the USA. (I know some people classify humans as more than one species - I still see them as one.)

But what if you turned this fear around, turned it into something else, if you looked at it another way - What if you WANTED the banking system to collapse? What if you thought that the banking system was a parasitic institution that profits insiders at everyone else's expense? I'm not as knowledgeable about the banking system as some people are, but I know enough to disapprove of it. I've done a lot of reading, I can quote people, but I still don't really know how to show it to the average person who doesn't read about economics or banking.

But if I disapproved of the banking system, and wanted to cast my vote against it, using whatever tiny powers I have as an individual, I might withdraw my money from my retirement account and (of course) buy coins. Since I personally don't have an account, I don't know how that would feel. It might seem self-destructive or crazy. The financial alarms have been going off for years, over and over again, and the destruction of the economy happens over a period of years, through a series of disasters that happen one after another. Taking any sudden actions, making any sudden changes, feels unnecessary, even embarrassing somehow, like all false alarms feel. What if you take some extreme action only to find that everything is still looking perfectly normal tomorrow? It's a foolish, humiliated feeling. People might get angry that they wasted their energy preparing for a disaster that didn't happen.

Disasters and apocalypses can be wishful thinking. If the apocalypse wipes out the existing system, then all the wrongs will be righted, all the justice will be done, all the evil will be cleansed. Power will be taken away from those people who rule over everyone else, and put back into the hands of the individual.

I read a news article where they quoted some government official in Iraq saying something like, 'I hope that this financial crisis does not trigger the immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq.' Those weren't his exact words, but it was almost that explicit. I'm sure he had his fingers crossed behind his back when he said it.

The Titanic lifeboat analogy is how many people see the banking system. It's sort of like that, and sort of not. You had to get on the lifeboats as soon as possible because there just weren't enough spaces for everybody on the ship. But in the banking system, money isn't as solid as a seat on a lifeboat. They change the value of money, they change where it comes from, they change what it's called, they make it appear and disappear at will. Yes, it's a fractional reserve system. Yes, it's true, the banks really don't HAVE all of the money that you deposited, if you and everybody decided to withdraw all of your money simultaneously. If people took all their deposits out, then yes, all the 'lifeboats' would be full.

A righteous anger in me says that this is what the banking system deserves. True, the banks NEVER had all of the deposited money, even during 'safe' time periods when most people didn't know there were any problems in the banking system. Nothing is any different today than it was yesterday: they could have simultaneously withdrawn all their money yesterday or last year just as much as they can now. I don't think they WILL. Individual banks will have problems, one after another, and people will wait and see if THEIR bank has any scary rumors. They won't move or do anything UNTIL they hear rumors. Until then, it's all just a scary thing that could only happen to somebody else's bank.

My bank actually changed its name recently, just in the last two years or year and a half. It was bought out by some other bank, before the banking problems were even in the newspapers. The signs outside still say the same name, but it has different internal ownership now. I didn't think much of it, but that was probably 'it.' That was probably my own personal bank failure, and I didn't even notice it. And there's another bank down the street that also changed its name - I just noticed it the other day. It isn't called what it used to be called. Maybe that is what we will experience firsthand. So the changes may happen a little at a time and not be very noticeable.

But what if you wanted to express your opinion ahead of time - to actually MAKE it happen? Cast your vote before it was required of you? Maybe it's a hopeless vote - maybe we couldn't collapse the banking system by simultaneously withdrawing all of our retirement accounts. Maybe that would be wishful thinking. Maybe you'd get stuck with a big pile of coins and nowhere to put them except a hole in the backyard.

Maybe only a little at a time, then. No big deal, no big panic. No sudden changes, no apocalypse. Small withdrawals from the retirement accounts every time you felt anxious or angry about the banking system, or every time you looked at your investments and saw how much value they had lost in the latest stock market plunge. Just little bits at a time. Find out what paperwork you have to do in order to withdraw the money. Find out how much the early-withdrawal penalties cost. Find out what red tape you have to get through. Find out whether you'd be able to do small withdrawals or whether one large withdrawal would be better. If you've only looked at it and asked 'what if?', that might be better than nothing at all.

A leap of faith, or a false alarm - it always feels kind of stupid and foolish to do those things. It means you're going against what everybody else says, what everybody else has told you to do, what everybody else trusts. It goes against the normal life that you've always seen. It means there's less of a cushion between you and reality, the world, nature, consequences, decisions. It means you can make mistakes. It means relying on yourself.