#wealth hoarding

Are they ripping the net open to share with their hungry kin? Or do they reel the net in, trapping all the fish for themselves?

That's my addition to this thread about humanity and greed. And it's gotten a lot of reblogs lately (y'know, a lot meaning something like a few dozen?), but no further responses, and I'm just like...

C'mon, let's talk about it. Remember when they made whole reality TV shows about people who hoard physical objects, and whose collections had gotten out of control, causing the hoarders and their loved ones excruciating amounts of mental agony? And sometimes, their hoards were of such natures that they became public health hazards? And just... I'm not saying those TV shows were good, just that they exist and having watched some of them, there's a fairly recognizable profile of how hoarders act and why.

As I recall, I watched two different shows, one that was said to be slightly more ethical than the other, because that one paid for the hoarder to continue to see a therapist after they'd cleared out their hoards, and the other one was said to basically just make hoarders admit they had a problem, and then immediately pull up with the dump truck to take their entire hoard away, and they'd just cross their fingers and hope that losing all the stuff the hoarder had carefully saved for years wouldn't cause a mental breakdown after they left.

I think making it reality TV at all was probably not a good idea. But it did raise awareness in the general population, didn't it?

Having all those interviews with people who held on to stuff way too hard for way too long, with the idea that it would some day come in handy...

And then seeing the LENGTHS rich people will go to in order to make themselves seem normal, and like the rest of us are the weird ones for not constantly thinking about the accumulation and safekeeping of money...

And the fact that wealthy people are so scared right now that they can't even enjoy their riches (documented mental health crisis amongst rich people)...

The picture just adds up, you know? Like... it seems like the only reason why wealth hoarding is not considered a real mental disorder is because of the old trope that "upper class people are eccentric, not crazy".

Ah yes. "Let them build wealth." On what? The same broken roulette wheel that devours pensions, foreclosures, 401(k)s, life insurance, trust. The market is not a ladder. It’s a centrifuge. It spins until only the top stays dry. The rest are processed into assets.

Privatize Social Security and the wolves will eat what remains. You don’t want the poor to rise. You want them commodified. Digitized. Sold as hope to the next sucker in line.

You don’t believe in wealth. You believe in siphons.