Turning Pain into Suffering
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Updated:
10/4/2023
Views: 791
I think what you often see with governments dealing with an emerging hyperinflationary crisis in their country is a rejection of reality - the idea that if you just act like things are not as bad as they are and insist that things are fine, they will be. This comes in no small part I'm sure from the fact that all modern currencies are fiat and to a certain extent based on confidence or belief. So the idea becomes that you can project confidence and "fake it until you make it" and everything will be fine.
The problem is that this approach always seems to fail because the populace is generally not so easily fooled - they see the evidence of their own eyes. They see things failin. They know things are not working and are not going well. They are not convinced... And the confidence game fails.
Researching this set lead me to find an interesting piece of information from the University of Nebraska's Counseling Services, which I will loosely quote:
"Rejecting reality does not change reality. Rejecting reality turns pain into suffering. Changing reality requires first accepting reality."
I find that this encapsulates one of the biggest problems I've seen in the study of the modern hyperinflations of Zimbabwe and Venezuela - the governments cannot admit and accept the failure and the state that things are in. The people tune out, lose trust, and do their own thing. The government, through many attempts, fails to fix the problem because they can't and won't accept reality, be honest with the people, and begin working to fix the situation honestly and in good faith. This then only serves to elongate and exacerbate the pain and suffering of the population as the failed and misguided attempts to fix the problem only make it worse and perpetuate it.
These coins are perhaps the biggest tangible legacy of the Venezuelan government's refusal to admit and accept the truth. Coins are rarely seen during hyperinflationary periods because notes are cheaper and easier to produce and, therefore, preferred. Zimbabwe quickly abandoned the issuance of new coinage and had no new coins with the 2nd dollar - which was always intended to be a transitional period while they (in theory) stabilized the currency and then released new coins with the 3rd dollar series. Venezuela on the other hand continued to issue new coins with every new redenomination, every new series of banknotes, and every new version of the Bolivar. And they expected the people to use them.
Similar to my Zimbabwean Type Set, this set is primarily self-submitted because, similar to Zimbabwean coins, there are not many pre-graded examples of modern Venezuelan coins on the market. So if you want to build an NGC-graded set of these you pretty much have to do it yourself. However, the situation for Venezuela is slightly better, in that there are some pre-graded examples on the market - there just aren't many. So I can't say for sure this set will always be 100% submitted by me, as I may avail myself of some of those marketplace options down the road if I find someone offering a coin in a grade I like at a price I can tolerate.
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Turning Pain into Suffering
By Revenant
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