Pain into Suffering

Set Description
I think what you often see with governments dealing with an emerging hyperinflationary crisis in their country is a rejection of reality - the idea of 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 failing, they know things are not working and are not going well, and they are not convinced. And the confidence game fails.

Researching this set lead me to find an interesting handout 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.

Set Goals
The goal of this set is to build a collection of Venezuelan coins spanning from the 1980s to the present, showing and chronicling 1) the debasement of the coins from silver to lesser metals and then plated-steel and 2) the rapid rise in minted denominations and the redenominations of the Bolivar to the Bolivar Fuerte, Bolivar Soberano and Bolivar Digital as inflation and then hyperinflation destroyed the currency.

With what I want to show, this set is going to cover most of the coins issued under the 4th Republic of Venezuela (1953-1999) and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (1999-Present).