The Pendulum of Power: Gold, Silver, and the Quiet Reclamation of Self
January 18, 2026 by Elaine~
In these opening days of the year, the metals are speaking clearly.
Gold has climbed beyond $4,600 an ounce, silver has pushed through $90—records etched not by just speculation, but by a deeper current of distrust and realignment. Central banks are hoarding and buying with quiet determination: China extending its streak, India and others are following, with 634 tonnes as of last November for 2025.
Individuals, too, are now turning to physical bullion, stacking coins and bars against the storm of inflation and fractured faith in the system’s promises.
This change is a message carried on silent waves, a communicative shift where the old centralized voices sound suspect and the individual begins to listen inward and do their own research.
Precious metals are the yardstick beneath the chaos—the ageless anchor when empires sway and pendulums swing from fiat centers toward decentralized edges of the ever turning wheel of peace and war, of summer and winter.
Fiat money is our dollars, and they have value only because the government stamps a number on the paper or the digital account and says they can be exchanged for a number’s worth or something else. Ruled and run by a dollar and a gun. The system itself is built on a model that must expand to continue.
But human systems always swing to excess because humans over time, in groups, are the same.
Gold is the physical, solid and true value that endures through every financial system and empires rise and fall, unmediated by digital abstraction or governmental decree.
Marshall McLuhan saw media as extensions of ourselves, blurring private and public until we live in a global village of instant, overwhelming signal.
This means that whatever medium we use to communicate: a yell, a radio wave, a newspaper, guitar, clothing, television, internet, dictates how we extend ourselves into the world.
Then we arrange our thoughts and lives in ways that help us to interact and communicate with whatever “village” we are domiciled in. That is how the medium itself is the message, instead of just carrying it.
All value or ideas of value start in one place, are coded and carried through a medium, and then decoded on the other end. So money is a medium of exchange, mass media is the plural of the word mass medium, and it carries the message of the owner of the broadcast infrastructure.
Today, the global village roars: headlines reach all corners of the globe, of U.S. actions in Venezuela, Maduro’s fall, events in Iran, discussions over Greenland, China’s silver curbs as a strategic weapon.
Social feeds and screens compress time and space, pulling the solitary self into collective anxiety. One human can impact many who are in another hemisphere. The private citizen, once sheltered, now stands exposed to every distant tremor all at once.
In response, many reach for gold and silver—not as investments alone, but as personal extensions of sovereignty, tangible and beyond the crowd’s digital grasp. The metals are slow and malleable, so can be melted and rebranded. The owner who holds gold or silver is not at the mercy of any counterparty. The whole system could crumble and the coin is in your hand.
Elias Canetti understood the crowd’s power: how individuals dissolve into it, seeking unity against a threat, yet can serve agendas that are not their own. Leaders speak for the whole group, not the solitary citizen.
The crowd’s energy can come from a team scoring a goal, a musician aligning the listeners into one feeling of empathy or human emotion, or a flashpoint of anger or fear.
The crowd itself draws energy from somewhere to sustain itself, and the darkest forms prey on the vulnerable—misusing trust, weaving deception with promises of future return or protection from invented catastrophe.
Interpersonal Deception Theory echoes this: strategic masking, leakage of truth only in unguarded moments, exploitation of relationships to keep an illusion alive for the benefit of the insiders. When the center of the wheel itself is rotten then those who trust and wait are the ones most wounded by betrayal.
The child yields to the trusted voice, the powerful source of needs and desire fulfillment. To betray or neglect the child is humanity’s most egregious shame.
The metaphor is that a government in a high trust society that hides fraud and exploits its citizens is using the same tactics.
The adult, forged in awareness, develops internal agency: the quiet decision to stay or leave a closed system, to step aside even when persuasion presses hardest.
In this gold rush, the crowd flocks to metals as a hedge, yet remains vulnerable to panics, to manipulation by policy turns or backroom deals. Corruption reigns during this early winter global turn, and the coverup pressure with NDAs, buy offs, mysterious deaths and threats is the harbinger that we are coming to the end of this centralized cycle.
The creators of the system, with hopeful eyes and fairness for an eternal summer, have passed away, and the institution manager only know. how to divided the pie the came from fruit they have no idea how to grow or nurture or sustain.
Central banks mirror that collective grasp, but the wise individual chooses differently—holding some physical, portable, immutable metal.
Machiavelli would recognize the ruthless adaptations: rulers weaponize resources, consolidate through division. Empires rise on mobilized crowds, fall on overreach and resentment. The pendulum swings. The prudent secure independent means when the season turns, evading failing institutions.
Mass media amplifies a message to create a crowd from a sea of individuals. The crowd can be pushed and panicked. Here lies the turning point. As media amplifies unrest, as crowds dissolve identity into mass, as power maneuvers, the message in the rising metals is clear: reclaim the private self.
Step from the throng’s volatility. Hold what endures.
Know gold in its breadth—historical, poetic, wild and sovereign—and you hold the richest intel of all.
Elaine~
Keys: gold, silver, geopolitics, financial panic, sovereignty
Songs in Theme:
“Coins and Crowns” unplugged, featured in Mike Maloney’s episode 1 New Secrets of Money viral series on YouTube.
“Black Swan Dive” unplugged, about black swan events that are unplanned for and how an unusual number of bankers have walked the plank. On Youtube at Elaine Diane Taylor. Link.
links:
https://www.gold.org/goldhub/research/gold-demand-trends/gold-demand-trends-q3-2025
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Mike Maloney’s Hidden Secrets of Money:
- Hidden Secrets of Money – Full Series on YouTube (opens in new tab)
- Direct link to Episode 1 – Currency vs Money (the one that features “Coins and Crowns” unplugged):
- Episode 1 – Currency vs Money (opens in new tab)
Elaine Diane Taylor on X @ ElaineDTaylor
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Thank you to Jim Rickards for including me in the forward of his New York Times bestselling book The New Case for Gold.
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Nothing on this site is intended as investment advice. We’re all watching which way the wind is blowing.
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Gold is at historic highs because trust in government and legacy systems is at historic lows.
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Elaine – Barkerville, Gold Rush Town, British Columbia, Canada
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Thank you to Mike Maloney for including my song Coins and Crowns in Episode 1 of his bestselling YouTube series Hidden Secrets of Money.
Coins and Crowns
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
SOCAN/ASCAP
from the album Coins and Crowns
Coins and Crowns is featured in Episode 1 of Mike Maloney’s bestselling series Hidden Secrets of Money.
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Not Much of a Holiday (Bank Holidays and Media Persuasion)
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
Single available on iTunes
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Thank you to the late David Crosby for his kind messages, including the message to me on X (formerly Twitter) saying this song, Terrible Breeze, has excellent lyrics and good music, and his encouragement for me to get out there and sing.
A Terrible Breeze (War and Social Media)
The news comes down
A little ex (X) bluebird sings
Words of war
Fire and furious things
Of testing might
‘Til no patience knows
If keeping still
Still keeps you safe at home
There’s a terrible breeze
They speak of today
Of threats that used to live a world away
We all know wind
Can blow both ways
And a terrible breeze can blow it all away
A worldwide net
Sees our village grow
Until we all forget
What each one used to know
How a blind bird’s wings
Can reach the shore
And turn the wheel of peace and war
Village fools sinking down, down, down
Debt and gold wound in numbered shrouds
Deal of a life it’s bread and clowns
Can we afford another go around?
The news comes down.
It’s a terrible breeze. The news comes down.
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
Single available on iTunes
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Preparing for the Fall is a live boutique album available for digital download — featuring Wag the Dog, Black Swan Dive, American Pie and Gods of the Copybook Headings. Also available on iTunes, Google Music, Amazon Music and major digital distributors.
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The Gods of the Copybook Headings
words by Rudyard Kipling and music by Elaine Diane Taylor
from the album Preparing for the Fall.
The copybooks of the early 1900s gave us all the wisdom we need. The sayings that were copied are the truths, the gods of our world. All the empires who followed the gods of the marketplace have fallen, and there’s terror and slaughter when the gods of the copybook headings return. The lyrics are by Rudyard Kipling. One of my gurus.
Another Week on Wall Street
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
from the album Coins and Crowns.
“A little grease (Greece) is floating out to sea, and little pigs (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) are bobbing up and down, they’ll send a storm and we’ll see, when the tide goes out who’s naked on the beach“. The world is changing as we know it.
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Nothing on this site is intended as individual investment advice. We’re all watching which way the wind is blowing.
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Elaine Diane Taylor 
