Tao Lesson 65 & a gestalt change

Tao Te Ching 65

In ancient times,
Those who followed the Way
Didn’t offer people knowledge thereof,
But kindly kept them from enlightenment,
To keep them in a state of simplicity,
with the humility to realise how very little they actually know.
Why is it so hard to rule?
Because people are so clever.
When they know that they do not know,
people can find their own way.
The reason it is difficult for the people to leave in peace
Is because of too much knowledge.
Those who seek to rule a country by knowledge
Are the nation’s curse.
Not using cunning to rule a country
is good fortune for that country.
The simplest pattern is the clearest.
Content with an ordinary life.
To know these principles is to possess
A rule and a measure.
To keep the rule and the measure
Constantly in your mind is Mystical Virtue,
Deep and mysterious, it leads all things to return
Back to Great Harmony.

Should hallucinogens, meditation, Yogic and Tantric exercises, sensory deprivation, extended periods of limited language utilization with no verbal communication, or perhaps total immersion in completely different cultures or even other avenues be able to unlock and open up otherwise only poorly (at best) accessed areas of the brain (opening doors of perception of the many mansions in our father’s house), then what was shut off must have been so resultant of some cause (evolutionary or otherwise). Maybe that reason has to do with a modern human proclivity for assholery.
Suppose 10,000 years ago life on Earth for humans became dangerously unstable, due to climate change, magnetic polarity change, large predator migrations, disease, meteors, earth-crust volatility and instability. Then for some the typically greater strength of community cooperation might have become evolutionarily eclipsed by need for smaller, more flexible groupings, greater diversity, more experimentation as it were, more individualism, spontaneity and self-reliance. Exit goodness.
Ants, bees, termites, rats, lions and surely others (Synalpheus regalis snapping shrimp, and maybe dwarf mongooses - but the list is small) live in groups that have (usually if not always) one or more members that do nothing towards procuring food. I once found a huge Norwegian rat living under a pile of OSB and ply-board, in a small pit to the center of the bottom board, surrounded by presents brought by smaller rodents, perhaps of more than a single species. The big rat clearly couldn’t have left his haven under the boards. It ran up a small tree; I went for my pistol, inside my house. Got back and it was still there in the tree! I shot and killed it, far less concerned with its mystical position than with Hinta virus, Bubonic plague, and an instinctual feeling of how ugly it was (looked like a small possum). Clearly it held great sway over its littler helpers, which surely derived some benefit from the association.
Anyway, we know the Tao Te Jing to antedate 500 BCE, at least in parts. Suppose section 65 harks back to memories of a difficult time, about 10,000 years BCE, when rooms in at least some human brains had, for whatever reason, to be closed off. People with the closed sections became uncooperative, mean-spirited, back-stabbing assholes with certain evolutionary advantages. Maybe the studied ‘The Art of War’ more than the Tao.
I find it fascinating that there is just that small spectrum of species with guiding sage-Gods that don’t have to do the work that others must do. Also that what we used to call schizophrenic multiple personality disorder, one’s female (or male) side, the child inside, one’s gay side, the lizard brain (medulla amygdala) and also our capacity to develop false memories, demonstrate a segmented brain, with parts closed off. Sometimes bits leak through, as warnings, perhaps, or to facilitate acceptance among others not of the temperament of one’s usual associates, or clue one as to another’s motives...

Anyway, the sage adviser, let’s say Dennis Rodman or Kanye West, self-chosen and self-advanced, assists the leader – and here we can similarly posit Donald Trump – for the benefit of society, the nation, the populace, the general good. OK, so maybe we don’t have real sages or leaders, even rulers, anymore, or at least visible ones. And maybe, just maybe, society and the Tao isn’t as egalitarian as it should be. Are male lions and rats really the role models we are looking for? Well, in any case, who governs best governs least.

The advent of humanity can be seen to have occurred millions of years ago; for the most part a peaceable creature, no more a scourge than hawks or lions or squids, mere survival tended to be of paramount importance. For about 10,000 years mankind has been pretty much as until quite recently (for the last 105 years our insanity has quite exploded), but for many times that amount of time, while being biologically the same, everything else about humanity was quite different.
Homo sapiens have existed upward of 500,000 years, but the term Middle Paleolithic is intended to cover the time between the first emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens(roughly 250,000 years ago) and the emergence of full behavioral modernity (roughly 50,000 years ago). Close precursors existed almost through the full of the millions of years of the last full Ice Age. Homo sapiens appear in Southwest Asia around 100,000 years ago and elsewhere in the Old World by 60,000-40,000 years ago. By 115,000 years ago, early modern humans had expanded their range to South Africa and into Southwest Asia (Israel) shortly after 100,000 years ago. There is no reliable evidence of modern humans elsewhere in the Old World until 60,000-40,000 years ago, during a short temperate period in the midst of the last ice age.
Before the advent of agriculture and village life, humans lived in a profoundly different ways. Human life was sustained by hunting and gathering rather than by animal husbandry and agriculture; towns and kingdoms were undreamed of; no one made a living as a potter or a basket maker or a metalworker. Trade was informal and only occasional; commerce unimaginable as a means of livelihood. For a dozen times the time separating us from the making of the Sphinx or Hanging Gardens of Babylon, human brains were physically as now but used quite differently than are those operating in modern society.
There weren’t weapons of war, only ones for hunting. There weren’t specialized classes for whom the dangers and difficulties of hunting were limited, restricted, controlled for the convenience and safety of those who rarely participated… Leaders, healers, crazies or other abnormal folk there surely were, but all had to participate in all that they could. Survival depended on it, although survival was likely hardly as difficult as it is usually imagined to have been. Hunting was a challenge, of course, but success in the hunt brought time for rest and relaxation. Human hunters of the Stone Age may well have hunted the mammoth to extinction, but they didn’t do this with awareness of doing so, unlike the way farmers currently hunt coyotes and wolves, simply to get rid of them. Mesolithic hunters may well have hunted the giant elk to extinction, but they didn’t do it from callous indifference, the way ivory hunters slaughter elephants. They couldn’t possibly have guessed how many animals remained far, far from where they hunted. If ancient foragers hunted any species to extinction, it certainly wasn’t because they wanted to wipe out their own food supply!
About 13,000 years ago, more than three-fourths of the large Ice Age animals, including woolly mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, the dire wolf, giant bears and beaver, American camels, horses and lions, died out. Scientists have debated for years over the cause of the extinction, with both of the major hypotheses — human over-hunting and climate change — insufficient to account for the mega die-off. Recent research suggests that an extraterrestrial object, possibly a comet, about 3 miles wide, may have exploded over southern Canada, nearly wiping out an ancient Stone Age culture as well as mega-fauna like mastodons and mammoths.

For the 30,000+ years that biologically modern man occupied the Eurasian continent before agriculture, one finds no evidence of jobs or private wealth, little social diversity, little if any evidence of torture or other injustices. The spiritual was hardly walled off, as it has since become. Spirituality included everything, and the mind, the brain, may well have been open to much that we have mostly closed off (ability to perceive tensions and blockages, auras, magnetic currents or whatever guides birds and fish on migrations, better awareness of our lesser senses, pheromones and how best to deal with ‘psychic wounds’… perception of transcendent patterns, connectivity and influence, awareness of and improved over brain and heart interactivity, anticipation and foresight…)
Noticing patterns in animal behavior was essential, as was anticipating weather changes and when and where what would be available. Language may have been more lyrical, musical, and as beyond definition as the tones of laughter. We think we need civilization, but they did, and still do, successfully make and raise babies. They carried little as they traveled, trusting to their successful socialization to help them find and make what they needed. Bitter animosities can’t have been other than rare. Some joke that prostitution was the first profession, but it requires pay, which requires ‘surplus’ and that assumes storage, the advent of which occurred with agriculture. If farming wasn’t the first profession, then surely lying was, but lying is only operative in competitive societies, not ones that depend entirely on co-operation. Farming requires seed storage, which could also lead to temptation to theft, but surely the first sown fields were but a part-time occupation, one which soon led to interest in protecting fields, so you can see how quickly ‘civilization’ (settled, agriculturally-based communities, somewhat competitive) involved rather ugly activity: the root of social differentiation.
In the totalitarian agriculture that followed the arrival of warmer weather, though, it’s generally been policy to wipe out undesired species as much as possible.
The central idea of the Agricultural Revolution is that about 10,000 years ago, people began to abandon foraging for agriculture. This isn’t quite right: first, it implies that agriculture is basically just one thing (the way that foraging is basically just one thing), and second, it implies that this one thing was embraced by people everywhere at more or less the same time. Many different styles of agriculture were in use all over the world 10,000 years ago, when our current style of agriculture emerged in the Near East. This style, mono-culture or totalitarian agriculture, subordinates all life-forms to the relentless, single-minded production of human food. Fueled by enormous food surpluses generated, a rapid population growth occurred, followed by an equally rapid geographical expansion that obliterated other lifestyles (including those based on other styles of agriculture).
But totalitarian agriculture is the foundation for the most laborious lifestyle known. This comes as a shock to many, but truly, no one works harder to stay alive than modern people do.
The important point is that a cultural continuity exists among co-operative hunter-gatherer peoples that extends back to the beginning of our kind. Homo habilis was born satisfied to share with any with whom he had a comprehensible relationship. He followed customs similar to those followed today by the Yanamamo of Brazil and the Bushmen of the Kalahari – and hundreds of other aboriginal peoples in undeveloped areas all over the world. But agriculturally-based society has taken the rule of the world into its own hands.

About 10,000 BCE the end of the most recent glaciations occurred; sea levels rose abruptly, with massive inland flooding due to glacier melt. The most recent glaciation period, often known simply as the “Ice Age,” began about 110,000 years ago, reached peak conditions some 18,000 years ago then gave way to our inter-glacial Holocene epoch 11,700 years ago. Ice Age climate was much colder and drier than it is today; since most of the water on Earth’s surface was ice, there was little precipitation - rainfall was about half of what it is today. During peak periods with most of the water frozen, global average temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees C (9 to 18 degrees F) below today’s temperature norms.
By 9500 evidence shows harvesting, though not necessarily cultivation, of wild grasses in Asia Minor. In Europe there was permanent ecological change. The savanna-dwelling reindeer, bison, and Paleolithic hunters withdrew to the sub-Arctic, leaving the rest to forest animals like deer, aurochs, and Mesolithic foragers. The climate in many areas (Asia, Middle East and Americas) improved and humans began leaving their nomadic life to settle down. They started domesticating animals and cultivating pulses and cereals, beginning to produce food in a systematic way rather than to find all their food in the wild. Having fire, spears, bow and arrows, flint knives, a few stone tools, but no wheel or metal work, they made primitive rope out of animal sinew, skins, hair, and vines, lived in small communities with populations of no more than a few dozen, and built shelters out of animal hide, sod, grass, and stone. Fireplaces were open pits. Much of their time would have been spent either searching for food or preparing it, but there was free time too.
The coming of agrarian societies was almost certainly connected to the waning of the Pleistocene, or Ice Age, the period beginning at about 15,000 years ago when glaciers shrank and both sea levels and global temperatures rose. In several parts of the Northern Hemisphere rainfall increased significantly. This period lasted 5,000 to 7,000 years. Rising seas drowned low-lying coastal areas (like the Sunda Shelf) and land bridges that had previously connected regions separated by water today. Land bridges now under water included spans between Siberia and Alaska, Australia and Papua New Guinea, and Britain and continental Europe.
One consequence of this ‘great thaw’ was the dividing of the world into three distinct zones, whose human populations, as well as other land-bound animals and plants, had very limited contact with one another. These zones were 1) Africa, Asia, and Europe combined; 2) the Americas; and 3) Australia.
A second consequence of the great thaw was that across much of the Northern Hemisphere, warmer, rainier, ice-free conditions permitted forests, meadow-lands, and small animal populations to flourish. With natural bounty so great, some folk began to settling, staying in one place all or part of the year. They became sedentary, rather than moving from camp to camp. For example, in the relatively well-watered part of Southwest Asia we call the Fertile Crescent, groups began sometime between 8,000 and 113,000 BCE to found tiny settlements from which they collected from the then plentiful wild grain and other edible plants and animals. They eventually began protecting wild grain from weeds, birds and even drought, then started broadcasting edible plant seeds onto new ground to increase yields. They began selecting and planting seed from individual plants that seemed more desirable due to size and taste, more and more learning more and more about how to control and manipulate the reproduction of plants, and about how better to harvest, store, and cook than they had with wild foods. Systematic domestication was under way, and the idea of control gained important favor!
Eventually, plant-growing and animal-raising communities became ‘co-dependent’ with their domesticates - humans came to rely on these genetically altered species to survive. In turn, domesticated plants and animals were so changed that they would thrive only if humans took care of them. For example, the maize, or corn, that we see in fields today can no longer reproduce without human help. And as humans controlled their domesticates, a small number of people began to control domesticated humans. The great advantage of co-dependency was that a community could rely fairly predictably on a given area of land to produce sufficient yields of hardy, tasty food, and even surplus. Populations of both humans and their domesticates grew accordingly. But co-dependency was a kind of trap: a farming community, which had to huddle together in a crowded village and labor long hours in the fields, couldn’t return to a foraging way of life - even when faced with calamity. And calamities did occur, from storms, flooding , new diseases from living in denser communities with buildup of waste and rubbish.
Also, there was no longer the wide variety of food that hunter-gatherers had enjoyed. Grain is notoriously bad for your teeth and deficient in some essential nutrients. Children were weaned early and fed on grain instead of mother’s milk, enabling mothers to have children once every 1.5 years. Child mortality soared but agrarian society still grew.
Underwater erosion from turbidity currents, earthquakes, mountain landslides, floods, eruptions and severe weather certainly continued to challenge communities, but perhaps not as much as threats from other human communities, especially after domestication of the horse, about 4000 BCE, in the steppe lands north of the Black Sea from Ukraine to Kazakhstan. Greed became ascendant, and doors to awareness closed.
When people became no longer happy to share, free to roam, confident in nature’s bounty and robust in and of health and confidence, some forms of mental activity closed off in compensation for the new forms of patience, concentration, discipline and toleration required, forms quite different from those of the hunt. Social differentiation, guarding of storage, and anxiety over pestilence and weather led to self-doubts, social tensions and conflicts, to focus anathema to full open-mindedness, and the petty emotions that dominate out political and economic reality even now.
Maybe should our differences become more valued than resented, our minds can begin to open again.

It may possibly have been with the changes from ancient to modern ways that the germs and viruses that killed so many Caribbean Islanders just after Spaniards first arrived there began to inhabit humans, but maybe that’s just my imagination. Could not closing down mental activity out of self-protective fear, to focus on roots of self-interested fears, have also opened the way to microbiotic parasitic infections?
Humans were, of course, well adapted to our previous mode of existence. But the inherent injustices of ‘civilization’ we remain poorly adapted to (as perhaps it should be.
Settled, village folk have longer memories about petty feelings than do ancient-style ones with their ‘wow be here now’ gestalt of immediacy and laissez-faire. For the former, saving face is very important; for the latter, you’re pretty much as good as your last haul. We think of hillbillies holding grudges, but it’s really more of a small-town thing that extends to communities within sprawling metropolises. For the nomad, old grudges tend to be counter-productive, counter-intuitive and just plain cumbersome. Remember, they can carry but little baggage. Until recently, for the more modern, stuff had a tendency to accumulate. Suddenly, for the last couple of decades, we find we can’t afford even the space for a bunch of junk, and now even worthless intellectual baggage is beginning to get discarded. I hope we’ll begin to notice, again, important things we’ve forgotten about, and no longer look for beauty and wonder only in museums. Or internet presentations!

The Tao Te Jing, composed while Europeans were still barbarians, has long been of great interest to me, and I've much appreciated wisdom I've found there. But with its anti-egalitarian bias, Tao Te Ching 65 seems to me a bit off - maybe a late addition lacking in some of the spiritual awareness of earlier lessons in the book.

These I admire:

Tao Te Ching - 76
A man is born gentle and weak.
At his death he is hard and stiff.
Green plants are tender and filled with sap.
At their death they are withered and dry.
Therefore the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death.
The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.
Thus an army without flexibility never wins a battle.
A tree that is unbending is easily broken.
The hard and strong will fall.
The soft and weak will overcome.

And 81
Sincere words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not sincere.
Good men are not argumentative, the argumentative are not good.
One who knows is not erudite; the erudite one does not know.
The sage does not take to hoarding.
The more he lives for others, the fuller is his life.
The more he gives, the more he abounds.
The Way of Heaven benefits and does not harm.
The Way of the sage works and does not compete with anyone.

Hoarding Compulsion: misery may love company, but misers don’t.

Compulsive or extreme hoarding was once classified as a symptom or sub-type of obsessive-compulsive disorder - not, contrary to what you might expect, of the anal-retentive one. Those categorizations have fallen into disrepute, with little residual professional usage anymore, but they still find utility in popular parlance. A mental illness entirely separate from other disorders, compulsive hoarding occurs in a variety of forms. Some pile up old newspapers, food cartons, cans, clothes, mail, notes or lists, garbage and other debris; some, collect knick-knacks, books, food or animals. Those with the condition may feel either or both sentimental attachments or desire to avoid wastefulness.
Although not officially recognized as a distinct psychological disorder, compulsive hoarding disorder is believed by many to be related to or interconnected with other disorders, including bipolar disorder, social anxiety, and depression. Some patients who have anorexia nervosa, dementia, or schizophrenia (another discredited term) may engage in some compulsive hoarding. Compulsive hoarding disorder is often seen to come in conjunction with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and, to a smaller extent, with attention-deficit-disorder (ADD). Compulsive hoarding disorder may run in families, have epigenetic roots, or be a response to trauma. Compulsive hoarders often lack the ability to socialize, or have difficulty with socializing, and may be embarrassed by the stigma of their disorder, and refuse to allow others to view their accumulated clutter. Or bank statements.
Compulsive hoarding, unlike OCD and ADD, responds but little to treatment with antidepressant drugs. Unlike OCD sufferers, hoarders actually enjoy being surrounded by all their stuff. Hoarding is more like compulsive gambling or compulsive shopping , in being pleasurable to the person.
The compulsion, scientists have theorized, is a natural adaptive instinct gone amok. Some animals hoard due to evolutionary advantages. One, the Arctic gray jay, caches some 100,000 mouthfuls of berries, insects, and spiders over a wide area, to ensure that it has enough for the long, dark winter. Hoarding may also function as a mating strategy: male black wheatears, which live in dry and rocky regions of Eurasia and Africa, spend considerable time and energy piling up heavy stones before mating season. Those with the largest piles are more likely to mate, having demonstrated exceptional fitness.
One hoarder may keep things that he believes he might need later on, while another may fear losing information she’ll want later on, in books, magazines, or even junk mail. For those with hoarding disorder, possessions remind them of the past or foreshadow a more secure future. They can remember wearing that outfit or playing with that toy when a child, and are certain that jug will be useful some day, despite having many other jugs they’ve never used. They’re extremely attached to their possessions – to the point of loving them more than they do people, any people at all.
I knew a guy who covered ten acres with junk that he expected might come in useful after the collapse of society. Bar-bell weights, ancient trucks, broken filing cabinets, bags of old shoes, ruined fire hoses, discarded beds… should he ever need a flux capacitor, surely the parts to put one together would be there, somewhere. Maybe the condition should be called compulsively accumulative and retentive weirdness! Many of its adherents are poor, perhaps due to the condition, but our richest seem to suffer from it also. I blame insufficient socialization, bonding and trust.
A need to explore and influence one’s environment, further realize self-identity and have a place within the milieu one finds oneself uncomfortable within may have parallels with emotional attachment to possessions exhibited by individuals with hoarding disorder. Many people hoarders experience other mental disorders, including depression, anxiety disorders, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder plus alcohol and/or drug abuse. Hoarding differs from collecting in that collectors look for specific items like cars or coins, then organize and protect them. People with hoarding disorder often save random items and store them haphazardly, thinking they may need them in the future, or fantasizing valuable sentimental value. Many feel safer surrounded by things they’ve saved. Hoarding behavior causes significant anxiety and distress in the hoarder that impairs functioning in daily life. It often begins slowly, building up over time. As the hoard increases, making passage through hallways, bedrooms, bathrooms, garages and other living areas more treacherous, the disorder progresses to a point of nearly no return. As Wikipedia points out, ‘A miser is a person who is reluctant to spend, sometimes to the point of forgoing even basic comforts and some necessities, in order to hoard money or other possessions.’
Food hoarding occurs after experience of painful hunger or starvation, at least among folk who’s society involves little or no expectation of periods of deprivation. As far as I know, among peoples where periods of great hunger are a norm, hoarding does not occur – perhaps because food scarcity doesn’t allow that? Or because the difficulties didn’t involve shock, or resultant change in world-view? Surely when spoiled rich kids discover they have no real friends and cannot make any, there is sense of shock, and deprivation, for which compensation will be demanded. This, in my opinion, goes far towards explaining the mean, vengeful behavior of Donald Trump and others of his ilk. The pains of loneliness and alienation are for lesser mortals, and the lack of fairness in finding oneself demeaned and tainted by somehow contacting it demands retribution on those from whom the cooties surely came! Far as I can figure anyway, and without meaning to in any way look to some kind of diminishment of the trauma of concentration camp internees or that of other victims of vicious cruelty or circumstance.
Hoarding – compulsive accumulation – is a sickness affecting perhaps over 6% of humanity (mostly, I suspect, among its more ‘Westernized’ and affluent – during my well over 25 years in Asia I haven’t encountered it). One or another variant of it affects up to 2 million people in the USA.
Hoarders excessively save things others see as worthless, things they’ll never use (like a 52nd billion $). Their persistent difficulty parting with possessions makes for disruptive clutter limiting living and work space, global economic advancement and social harmony. Hobby collectors and people who simply don't keep a neat living or work-space don’t necessarily fit diagnostic criteria for hoarding disorder, but there may be a psychological connection. Many have collections of favorite items and memorabilia; most folk collect at least some clutter. The healthy have little problem sorting through and discarding their clutter when time and situation allows, and often find other things to do than make or hoard money. In the mind of the compulsive hoarder, though, every single collected item has value, and every additional dollar further enriches life. Just the thought of discarding an item results in the kind of severe anxiety Scrooge McDuck or Silas Mariner might encounter in a candy or clothing store. You don’t part with something to get something else, just keep whatever you can.
Reports suggest anxiety disorder can trigger the need to hoard. One study found that those who hoard have difficulty coping with negative emotions like anxiety, which can operate in two ways when you hoard. The feeling of anxiety is sometimes eased by finding an item desirable to keep, but faced with need to discard items, the hoarder becomes extremely anxious and uncomfortable. Hoarders cannot, and will not, freely give up their possessions, however inconsequential they are, or how unsafe and unsanitary their environment has become. Without professional help, even if a cleanup crew comes in and removes the debris, clutter and detritus, the hoarder will just start to accumulate again until the problem reaches the same level of impending disaster. Children regularly use objects for comfort, especially during times of need, so shouldn’t everyone have at least a bit of a residual hoarding problem? Maybe the more alienated among us do, but some psychologists say maybe not, as only some people are excessively prone to anthropomorphism - perceiving objects and/or animals to have human-like qualities.
Individuals who hoard tend to experience interpersonal difficulties, feel insecure in relationships, and believe themselves to be a burden to others. Humans need to be connected physically, socially, and psychologically to other humans. This need is just as important as the need for air, water, food, and shelter. Loneliness negatively affects our health and is a risk factor for early death. Understandably, when we feel devalued or unloved, we seek out closeness. When our need isn’t met by humans, objects may serve as a substitute. To compensate for unmet social needs, objects and animals become personalized, given human characteristics and made to replace humans, in order for the hoarder to feel connected. But as anthropomorphism doesn’t fully meet anyone’s needs, they acquire more and more. Stronger anthropomorphic tendencies are associated with more compulsive buying and greater acquisition of free stuff. Individuals with hoarding disorder exhibit hyper-sentimentality, in which possessions are seen as part of the self. Ownership becomes seen as validization of the self, proof of position, importance, of being deserving of respect, love and attention.
So what we have is the needy having, because they need to have. They cannot count on their skills, their likability, their community, their resourcefulness. They fear that without that which they hoard, they would be nothing. And in many cases that is almost true. Usually though, total alienation is but a nightmare from which one can waken to a much more reassuring vision of reality. There are real rewards to generosity, whether material or just in friendliness.
Part of the problem is response to deprivation, usually irrational: when needs, physical or emotional, aren’t met, various forms of subsequent overcompensation result – the fear of recurrent deprivation is physical, not simply psychological, and it doesn’t dissipate with presentation of new fact, like ownership of a full pantry (which in any case could be lost to theft, fire, flood or many another possible event). Hoarders have difficulty discarding items because of strong perceived need to save items and/or distress associated with discarding, and this can lead to family conflicts, isolation, loneliness, unwillingness to have anyone else enter the home and an inability to perform daily tasks such as cooking and bathing in the home. Some individuals with hoarding disorder may recognize and acknowledge that they have a problem with accumulating possessions; others may not see a problem.

Hoarding disorder occurs in at least 2% of the population, but that figure fails to recognize more acceptable forms like hiding away money, art, clothing or jewelry. It's more common in males than females, and also more common among older adults - The consequences of hoarding escalate as people get older. Three times as many adults 55 to 94 years are affected by hoarding disorder compared to adults 34 to 44 years old. It leads to substantial distress and problems functioning, can cause problems in relationships, social and work activities and even create health issues. Consequences include fire hazards, health code infractions, loss of value in what actually had it, and decision-making impairment (things that need to be done may well be neglected due to fear of losing cherished junk or even unhealthy animals). As they age and their memories fade, they may no longer even remember what they’ve been hoarding.
In addition to difficulty discarding, excessive saving and clutter, many people with hoarding disorder have associated problems such as indecisiveness, perfectionism, procrastination, disorganization and distractibility. These associated features can contribute greatly to their problems functioning and overall severity. If you entered a hoarder's home, you would likely notice an overwhelming smell. The smell could come from mildew, rotten food, or even dead animals lurking behind and under the stacks of stuff that no one could reach to clean out. Hoarders who rent their homes risk eviction because of the mess and unsafe conditions. The filthy environment can lead to frequent or chronic illness. Certainly, social interactions and family relationships would become difficult for a hoarder. Even keeping a job can prove challenging because of frequent sickness and lack of hygiene. Early anxious attachments can lead to the avoidance of human interaction and the replacement of human relationships with objects. Individuals with hoarding disorder often have excessive emotional reactivity, and negative emotions can be slow to decline in response to interpersonal stressful events. This brings to the forefront a lack of emotional regulation skills and the need to manage these emotions by acquiring more objects. As the number of traumatic or stressful events increases, so does the severity of hoarding.
As children, we use possessions to comfort ourselves when our parents are unavailable. By the time we reach adulthood, most of us have abandoned security blankets and teddy bears. We might occasionally buy something unnecessary or hang on to a few items we no longer need. In most cases, these few extra possessions don’t pose a problem. We store them in a closet or display them proudly on a shelf. We have a few treasured objects, but we don’t rely on them to make us feel good – at least not on a regular basis, and not in the manner of someone who ‘collects’ art to store in a huge safe.

Animal hoarding involves an individual acquiring large numbers (dozens or even hundreds) of animals. The animals may be kept in an inappropriate space, potentially creating unhealthy, unsafe conditions for the animals. Animal hoarders are more likely than other hoarders to have had traumatic life experiences, like deaths of loved ones, disrupted family relationships, divorce, being placed in a foster home and sexual assault. A hoarder might collect and house dozens to hundreds of animals. Often they are actually, ironically, gifted with animals, and the animals love them, but equally often the ‘pets’ aren’t properly fed or kept healthy, due to lack of funds.
People who hoard animals may collect dozens or even hundreds of pets. Animals may be confined inside or outside. Because of the large numbers, these animals often aren't cared for properly. The health and safety of the person and the animals are at risk because of unsanitary conditions.

Most hoarders feel no need to seek treatment; treatment ambivalence is the norm, despite that about 85% of individuals with hoarding difficulties acknowledge a need for treatment. Nearly half of individuals with hoarding disorder refuse treatment from the outset, drop out of treatment once it is initiated, or have difficulty fully complying with treatment. A deeper understanding of the psychology behind hoarding is needed if treatment ambivalence and non-adherence are to be overcome.
Current treatment approaches include teaching individuals how to challenge their beliefs about possessions, how to resist acquiring urges and how to sort, organize, and discard things. This approach helps about a quarter of people who receive it. Psychological ownership theory highlights the extreme ownership experience of a person who hoards, both in terms of the intensity of their feelings and the quantity of items they acquire. Individuals with hoarding disorder also tend to take extreme responsibility for the object — as a part of ownership — and often make statements that express their concern for the well-being of the object. This is a sign of adult anthropomorphism, which research has shown to be a good predictor of hoarding behavior.

Stockpiled possessions addressed various psychological needs; they’re not seen as useless items, but rather as a bulwark to build safety in the face of an uncertain, dangerous future. Hoarders are often proud to value items others don’t appreciate, and sometimes refer to themselves as only “temporary custodians” of the items.

Part of the dragon myth involves their massive hoards of treasure. If the dragon steals all of the treasure, the economic consequences of money disappearing from circulation lead to negative supply shock, as the quantity of money available decreases. This leads to an increase in the 'price' of money, effectively causing deflation and reducing the purchasing power in the area where that wealth held currency. of the nation as a whole, which will be a major problem if the nation is largely an import economy. When treasure remains in the hands of the wealthy, this leads to increased economic disparity and a reduction in the buying power of the lower class. If the treasure is not in circulation, perhaps being stored in a bank to back a paper currency, the same thing happens. Money supply can be increased, but then foreign markets become less willing to accept that currency, and welcome opportunity to trade for a currency with more stable value.

Eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity, according to a 16 January 2017 report published by Oxfam. By 2 January 2018, Oxfam claimed that had changed: the gulf between the world's richest and poorest people is widening, it said in a report showing that 42 people hold the same amount of wealth as the 3.7 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world’s population. Elsewhere Oxfam says 85, 62 and 67... Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett combined own a US$248.5 billion fortune – as much as the bottom half of the US population, or 160 million people. The wealthiest 400 combined have more than the bottom 64% of the US population, an estimated 80 million households or 204 million people - more than the population of Canada and Mexico combined. A ‘Common Dreams’ analysis from 2016 data found that the poorest five deciles of the world population own about $410 billion in total wealth, while as of 06/08/17, the world’s richest five men owned over $400 billion in wealth. Thus, on average, each man owns nearly as much as 750 million people.

Adapted from an article by Joe Brewer:
At least 24 trillion dollars is squirreled away in tax havens around the world, hidden in a clandestine network of shell companies, computer accounting systems, law firms, and legal structures that comprise a global architecture for wealth hoarding. It is systemic corruption that was put in place on purpose.
When famine and starvation hit a community, the richest close off their food stores to keep as much as a ten year supply for themselves - so they can retain their lives and power until well after the famine comes to an end. Today’s wealthiest 0.1% behave like spoiled children —  grabbing more and more while billions of other people are malnourished and starving.
Imagine if we took the global crisis seriously and recognized those financial parasites for what they are. The wealth hoarders are symptomatic of an economic paradigm that behaves like cancer, spreading and growing exponentially because that is what its core logic dictates it to do. We must replace the logic of extraction with principles that are compatible with life. It will not be possible to make our cities sustainable (or even affordable to live in) if our economic paradigm fails to take into account the logic of homeostasis and its support capacities based in the patterns of emergence.
Our bodies, like all living things, are able to regulate themselves as nested systems of emergent order. They do this in a combination of centralized and distributed systems of control that function in parallel at multiple levels. Our bodies survive courtesy of a vast web of interconnected systems,  for circulation of nutrients, digestion, feeling pain, monitoring changes, and so forth. These keep it in a “safe zone” for several key biological parameters. Too hot? Open up skin follicles and start sweating. Too acidic? Release hormones for appetite to seek food that will restore balance. Too much pressure on the brain? Feel the discomfort and alter your behavior accordingly — maybe by sitting down and taking a few breaths.
Forget the mythical battle between large centralized economies and “free” markets. Real economic systems work through multi-tiered feedbacks in government and management across households, municipalities, professional associations, regional and national agencies, trade consortiums, and more.
No single level dominates, yet all work in harmony through the coordination of multi-level patterns for selecting desired outcomes. The field of evolutionary studies explains how all of this works. Biologist David Sloan Wilson describes it bluntly when he says the economy is an organism.
My reason for pointing this out is that our financial system has “gone rogue” and made the central goal for civilization to maximize profits for the few at the expense of the many. This is what cancer does and its end state is well known. We will not have a living civilization much longer if this pattern of growth without constraint continues.
Let’s seek instead to behave like the living systems that we actually are, in our communities and nations. In order to do this, we need to release financial nutrients that have been squirreled away. Currently, with wealth hoarding the way it is, the economy is functioning like your body would if half of your blood supply got siphoned off to the big toe on your left foot, or a particularly male organ.
This is the antithesis of sustainability, but it’s the direction we’re heading now — and we’ll only change course by updating the rules-of-play for our global economy. Praising wealth hoarders is what we’ve done for decades; instead we must end wealth hoarding and invest in the future of our species. Do this and we have a chance at making the transition to sustainability. Fail to do this, and we over-exploit the natural foundations of our livelihoods and go into rapid decline. Then our civilization collapses.