In some ways even weirder than the strength of their belief in gold as the platonic ideal of abstract value stores is the (often more implied than spelled out, perhaps because it’s not desperately coherent) is the thinking around how societies actually relate to abstract value stores; and how brittle various institutions are or aren’t.
Even if you concede for argument that gold is god’s own abstract value store; it’s a bit tricky to come up with a societal collapse hypothesis that manages to be mild enough that everyone’s totally up for a slightly rustic but fairly liquid market economy where the limits of barter and various nonmarket distribution mechanisms have already forced people into using currency; but extreme enough that it isn’t just a relatively brief scramble for emergency relief supplies followed by a somewhat more squalid resumption of the status quo.
That’s not a literally inconceivable scenario; but it’s far from an easy one to put together; and (while in some people it’s a more straightforwardly pitiable fear response) there’s also a really offputting element of petty financial power fantasy about it: The Collapse will, conveniently, make the big, complex, Capital that you neither understand nor possess disappear in a nice purifying poof; but your wise investments in what someone too poor for finance and too temporarily-dispossessed-millionaire to fully appreciate nonmarket social relationships thinks wealth looks like will set you above the common rabble of the post-apocalypse as survivor gentry.
