written 22 May 2022
published 29 May 2022
We sometimes watch the "Hoarders" show on TV. Most of these folks have professional interventions resulting from family concerns, or public health legal actions due to unsafe conditions threatening the owner or the neighborhood.
Garbage hoarding is the most extreme, with homes sometime filled to the ceiling with garbage, trash, body waste, and decaying food. The house is not functional and the owner crawls over the piles to live in a nest is one portion of the building. Animal hoarding is another variation, with dozens, even hundreds, of animals living in unhealthy and unsafe conditions.
Not all hoarders are this disconnected from nominal health and safety. Some are shopping hoarders, constantly ordering online, filling their house with unopened boxes, racks of new clothes, or multiples of every kind of appliance, toy, or gadget. One man, with a good job, couldn't pass a yard sale without buying tools. By the time his family intervened, he owned several houses completely filled with storage shelves holding his tools, which he never used, but couldn't pass up.
Hoarding is not about being too lazy to clean, or having too much stuff, it is a mental health condition that affects your quality of life. Dysfunctional hoarding behavior is often triggered by some past trauma that never got resolved, and "things just got out of hand".
Physician Gabor Maté, trauma specialist, says it is not just what happened to us, but also, not getting something we need, that can traumatize. Consequently, most everyone is dealing with trauma, which disconnects us from our authentic self. Importantly, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are as a result of the traumatic event, is what maintains our current dysfunction. The past can't be changed, but our story can be, allowing for real healing.
Extreme hoarding makes for television entertainment, and it is easy to wonder how someone could drift so far. But hoarding might be a spectrum, with milder forms that aren't so cringe inducing. We might not even recognize them as a dysfunctional response to trauma. Consider extreme wealth as a form of hoarding.
Narcissism, is a form of selfishness, a psychological response to trauma. Selfishness is viewed as a mental health issue in many indigenous cultures, which honor compassion and empathy as social values, stemming directly from experiencing the unity of the tribe and the natural environment. In the Northwest Pacific coast native culture, the concept of potlach is a tradition of sharing, making sure no one has too much and everyone has enough.
The dominant American culture, deluded by the illusion of separation, has no such perspective. Instead, our social stories are "greed is good"; "socialism is evil"; and a corporation's only goal is "maximum short-term profit for the shareholders". This economic national religion, distorting even our self-proclaimed Christian values, has shaped our civilization. We are the richest country on Earth, consuming 6 times our share of energy and natural resources, with extreme economic inequity. The top 0.1 percent, 160 thousand households, own as much as the bottom 90 percent, 144 million households. Jeff Bezos spent over $5B for his 10 minute suborbital joy ride, but fights against paying living wages to his employees. Hoarding is a mental health issue which prevents a person from recognizing what is "enough".
While wealth hoarding isn't as viscerally disgusting as living in a house full of rotting garbage, it is clearly a hazard to the neighborhood. The climate deniers are heavily funded by wealth hoarders, who own and disproportionately benefit from the extremely profitable fossil fuel monopolies. However, the economic destruction is increasing every year, threatening not just this country, but the entire planet. Health care in America is more expensive, and less accessible, than in the rest of the developed world. This maximizes profits for the hoarders, but makes life more difficult for everyone else. Rather than sharing, wealth hoarders stoke divisive political polarization to distract from the real issues.
But demographics are shifting against the hoarders, not because of imaginary Democratic "replacement theory", but because people are awakening; realizing the system impoverishes the many for the profit of the few.
The sad truth is that even the hoarders suffer from their dysfunction, as their lives are filled with constant anxiety that they will "lose it all". Ironically, climate collapse makes that a self-fulfilling prophecy. Public health demands we change the story.
