Hoarding is Socially Destructive, Especially Hoarding Wealth

By Hollis Phelps

We’ve probably all heard reports and seen video footage of people hoarding numerous so-called essential items, in preparation of the potential fallout from the Coronavirus pandemic. We may have experienced this ourselves, maybe even as hoarders. The shelves at my local, well-known chain supermarket have been consistently empty of toilet paper, paper towels, cleaning and sanitizing products, bread, and meat, to name a few.

The pandemic and the threats it poses to health, economic security, and daily life, among other things, has turned shopping into a more acute competition, a clearer reflection of the myth of scarcity that drives capitalist economies: there’s only so much to go around, so getting mine appears as the only viable option. Like other myths, the myth of scarcity is not so much descriptive but prescriptive of reality: it provides ideological cover for certain practices, in this case not sharing basic goods. The myth of scarcity drives hoarding, justifying it as perfectly rational.

Hoarding, however, is mostly irrational, grounded in a warped understanding of the self and its needs. Such irrationality can be seen in what is currently being hoarded. To use an example, toilet paper is all well and good, but it’s not essential, as there are other options available. A washcloth and water would do the trick, for instance. Fair enough if that doesn’t appeal to you, but that doesn’t need to translate into buying a hundred roles at a time. The perception that one needs such amounts, give or take, is the actual problem here. The perception of scarcity that the myth provides actually drives real scarcity, which is why the toilet paper aisles have been perpetually empty as of late.

I’m not suggesting that we behave naively, that we should not prepare. We should prepare, be ready for the various fallouts that will likely result from this pandemic. The problem is that much of our preparation is based on the flawed notion that we are atomized, self-interested beings first and foremost, and so we act in that manner, out of fear for our own well-being at the expense of others. It’s one more aspect of the myth of scarcity prescribing certain actions over others.

Jesus, however, teaches something different. He consistently criticizes this sort of fear-driven attachment to objects and, by implication, hoarding. To give just a few examples, he tells us that we should not accumulate treasures for ourselves (Matt. 6:19), that we can’t serve God and wealth simultaneously (Matt. 6:24), and that we should model ourselves after the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, neither of which toil to accumulate possessions but receive just what they need via God’s care. Jesus, in these examples, isn’t offering hollow platitudes with little value in the “real world,” but suggesting a different way to understand our relationship to our needs and desires. Jesus doesn’t assume a myth of scarcity but, rather, one of abundance, of more than enough to go around.

Nevertheless, examples of such hoarding have rightly been the subject of ridicule and consternation; we see the two combined, to continue with the example mentioned above, in the witty yet condemnatory memes regarding toilet paper, which are now ubiquitous across social media platforms. I’m not sure how effective such memes are, considering that they not only mainly “preach to the choir” but also express a collective sense of impotency, to use Bifo Berardi’s term, in the face of any overwhelmingly surreal situation.

Hoarding, then, is a heightened manifestation of capitalist individualism. The hoarder understands the world narcissistically, in the sense that the world is only the world if it is for them. The hoarder plays out a fantasy rooted in an understanding of the self that is egocentric, that values one’s desires as all important. The hoarder constructs an imaginary world in which one’s well-being and bare survival can be had it total isolation from society at large, which also means over-against others.

So it’s good that we criticize hoarding, criticize the practice as damaging to social well-being. But for me this pandemic and our various responses to it raise a related question: Why don’t we understand money in a similar fashion? We rightly criticize hoarding when it comes to basic goods, but why don’t we consider the hoarding of money, which we euphemize in terms of “success” and “wealth,” as equally pathological.

Money is, certainly, a different sort of object than, say, toilet paper, but the underlying ideology is the same: hoarding money assumes the already-mentioned myth of scarcity and the same atomized understanding of the self. Hoarding money, however, is also a more serious, more insidious form of hoarding, because it seeks to preserve not just an excess of value but an excess of the value of values. Hoarding toilet paper may express social inequity but the hoarding of money creates the socio-economic inequity that makes hoarding possible in the first place. Hoarding money, then, can be understood as the archetype of hoarding, meaning that differentiating wealth, as Jose Porfiro Miranda calls top-down economic disparity, is the epitome of this pathology.

To give just on example, in the midst of this pandemic, the Walton family moved $48 billion in Walmart Inc. stock into a different holding company, Walton Family Holdings Trust. The justification for such a move uses the guise of funding charitable work to shift attention away from the reality: the trust is one mechanism Walmart uses to park wealth, where it’s safe from estate and gift taxes. It’s a way to preserve dynastic wealth, exploiting a legal loophole that enables the Waltons to avoid paying their fair share.

The Waltons, of course, aren’t the only ones to engage in such behavior, as the hoarding of wealth is all-too-common among the wealthy. Put otherwise, hoarding is wealth and wealth is hoarding. We even find examples of it in the Bible, along with the judgement that comes with it. To cite just one example, at the end of Chapter 4, vv. 32 – 37, in the Book of Acts, we’re told that the fledgling community that would come to be known as Christians held “all things in common.” “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold.”

In the next chapter, we’re introduced to Ananias and Sapphira, the wealthy husband and wife duo who “sold a piece of land” but “kept back some of the proceeds, and brought only a part and laid it at the apostles’ feet” (vv. 1 – 2). The fact that they were able to do this at all assumes an accumulation of an excess of wealth, here concentrated in land, but also an attempt to have it both ways: it’s a ploy to be part of the community while also preserving an excess that benefits the husband and wife only, at the expense of other’s needs. It’s charity without solidarity, and Peter will have none of it. He tells the pair, separately, that holding back on their wealth is an affront to God, who then strikes them dead in turn, Ananias first and, a few hours later, Sapphira. Woe, then, to the Waltons and their ilk.

If we’re up to criticize the hoarding of toilet paper, perhaps we can also use this moment to reevaluate the problems with differentiating wealth. A start may be to simply name it what it is: the epitome of hoarding and, therefore, socially destructive. Perhaps we can also remember that, at its best, Christianity teaches this as well, framing the hoarding of wealth as a sin against others, including God.

Hollis Phelps is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Mercer University. His most recent book is Jesus and the Politics of Mammon published by Cascade Books.

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