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elfsThe DSM-5, Section 300.3, subpart F-42, is about [Hoarding Disorder](https://www.theravive.com/therapedia/hoarding-disorder-dsm--5-300.3-(f42)) as a subtype of Obsessive-Compulsive disorder. It’s a real problem, and I suffer a bit from it, mostly digital, in that I know I have waaaay too much literature, music, art, and video than I myself will ever actually consume in my lifetime in any significant way. My life has always been cluttered, but never dysfunctional, at least not yet.
The funny thing is, when we talk about “hoarding” we think about people who have stacks of newspaper everywhere in their home, or never throw out their junk mail because “there might be something valuable in there,” until over the decades their homes start to have [goat paths](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DNrZyht520) that you have to climb over to get from one room to the next. The real symptom of hoarding disorder is an inability to function normally as your stuff begins to crowd in around you.
And yet, there is one thing you’re allowed to hoard without question. You are celebrated for hoarding it. You are lionized in the press and feted by the powerful if you’re very good at hoarding *money*.
And yet hoarding money is still hoarding, and it’s become clearer than ever that the impulse to be a billionaire is just than: an impulse, separated from any notions of utility or community. It’s a hoarding syndrome in every way you can imagine, and it’s one that comes at the expense of not just the hoarder’s family, but in our case entire nations. Every billionaire is definitionally a psychopath; their need to hoard money, to have more than anyone else, to excel at the one thing which, more than any other, may stave off the indignities of the world, comes at the cost of everything and everyone else around them.
A lot of us want to resist this impulse, to *not* turn every conversation between two human beings into an exercise in accounting, books balanced and managed, overseen by an impassive transaction system built strictly to feed a few men’s unhealthy obsession with green slips of paper.
And yet… living in America forces us to develop the hoarding impulse. We’re encouraged, literally from the day we get our first job, to “start saving for retirement,” to put some money aside,to *hoard money* for the day when a healthcare disaster strikes and we’re on our own. Because we are on our own: the insurance company has to hoard money to survive so it has an antagonistic relationship with both you and with the healthcare providers; the healthcare providers have to hoard money to stay alive so they have an equally antagonistic relationship with the insurance companies. And you have to hoard money in case either one of those institutions decides you’re not worth saving. The US Government, meanwhile, has one party eager to tear down what little support there is for the aged and disabled, encouraging more hoarding.
The lack of a social safety net means that those who are good at hoarding money will pass down that trait to their children, and those who aren’t good at hoarding money will die with fewer offspring to pass those traits down to.
The 19th century invention of “medicine that works,” of an evidence-based approach to healthcare interventions that actually produces healthy people, could have created a better world, and in many ways it did. It’s just that the American implementation of it has bred a successively more psychopathic population.
The funny thing is, when we talk about “hoarding” we think about people who have stacks of newspaper everywhere in their home, or never throw out their junk mail because “there might be something valuable in there,” until over the decades their homes start to have [goat paths](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DNrZyht520) that you have to climb over to get from one room to the next. The real symptom of hoarding disorder is an inability to function normally as your stuff begins to crowd in around you.
And yet, there is one thing you’re allowed to hoard without question. You are celebrated for hoarding it. You are lionized in the press and feted by the powerful if you’re very good at hoarding *money*.
And yet hoarding money is still hoarding, and it’s become clearer than ever that the impulse to be a billionaire is just than: an impulse, separated from any notions of utility or community. It’s a hoarding syndrome in every way you can imagine, and it’s one that comes at the expense of not just the hoarder’s family, but in our case entire nations. Every billionaire is definitionally a psychopath; their need to hoard money, to have more than anyone else, to excel at the one thing which, more than any other, may stave off the indignities of the world, comes at the cost of everything and everyone else around them.
A lot of us want to resist this impulse, to *not* turn every conversation between two human beings into an exercise in accounting, books balanced and managed, overseen by an impassive transaction system built strictly to feed a few men’s unhealthy obsession with green slips of paper.
And yet… living in America forces us to develop the hoarding impulse. We’re encouraged, literally from the day we get our first job, to “start saving for retirement,” to put some money aside,to *hoard money* for the day when a healthcare disaster strikes and we’re on our own. Because we are on our own: the insurance company has to hoard money to survive so it has an antagonistic relationship with both you and with the healthcare providers; the healthcare providers have to hoard money to stay alive so they have an equally antagonistic relationship with the insurance companies. And you have to hoard money in case either one of those institutions decides you’re not worth saving. The US Government, meanwhile, has one party eager to tear down what little support there is for the aged and disabled, encouraging more hoarding.
The lack of a social safety net means that those who are good at hoarding money will pass down that trait to their children, and those who aren’t good at hoarding money will die with fewer offspring to pass those traits down to.
The 19th century invention of “medicine that works,” of an evidence-based approach to healthcare interventions that actually produces healthy people, could have created a better world, and in many ways it did. It’s just that the American implementation of it has bred a successively more psychopathic population.
