On Capital Materiality; The Phenomenon of Hording in Scale

Popular political philosophy since the cold war ended has taken something of a beating and devolved through the media zeitgeist into an economic existentialism advocating an absolute pursuit of self-interest to the exclusion of belief in social reality except as self-interest. It is something of a juvenile way of abnegating social, political responsibility. Society does exist in a concatenated state even as the individuals of it pursue their own self-interest. Like a football team the populous must have a fundamental game plan to win prosperity and security a viable ecospheric habitat. Unlike a football team the populous can and should pursue its individual interests with liberty and non-militarized uniformity.

Aristotle might have been more concerned with real politik and the prevention of the polity decaying into pure democracy and mob rule, or the more evil prospect of Aristocracy trickling upward into being oligarchy than today's economic existentialists of conservative bent, yet Americans today have exacerbated their historical trend against intelligent philosophical thought and just moved into a popular philosophy of super-sizing material things and capital in general.

From a pragmatist's point of view one needs material things to serve particular functions. Housing must be adequate to provide secure shelter and serve personal and social economic efficiency. Lifetime is limited so one doesn't want to tangentialize material possessions and become encumbered with maintaining a mansion or even a bureaucracy as the primary life experience. There are many experiences possible in life that are of equal or greater worth than just a few super-sized material items.

So one looks for other reasons why one must super-size possessions such as homes or SUVs and might discover than social equality or keep a defense parity against the advantage and opinions of other citizens is one of the basic causes for escalating personal investments in standard and predictable ways. Socially the opportunity cost for seeming to be living counter to a prevailing popular opinion may be financially significant. Social economic inertia drives the masses under the influence of concentrated power and wealth superiors along unsustainable social ends.

Value theory is a philosophical activity cognizant of the real value of goods or things, situations or circumstances, relationships and so forth for an individual and a society. Value seems to cohere within utility even if when utility is satisfied values for inessential items may arise to dominate a society. When societies compel individuals by circumstance and opportunity cost to buy very much oversized housing at high cost it has over valued non-utility and may create social dysfunction that spreads like waves outwards through the economic value exchanges into social regions unable to afford the luxury of investing in non-utility. If Americans were to build concrete dome homes with secure interiors, exteriors and adequate privacy and ecospheric integrity in the yard for a fraction of today's cost of quarter million dollar middle class homes perhaps Americans could save more for surfing, biking, sailing, skydiving or composing a poem. Some Americans could become inventors at home or learn a new field of science. The trouble generally is in developing more efficient and better quality housing at a lower cost as a fundamental effort and value of society.

If one could afford a decade's worth of food supply for one's home it still might be unreasonable to get more than a month supply. If a home is far larger than is useful within the context of one's life shelter and living needs it is as much a wasteful hording venture consuming one's time as if one buys far too large a boat to get to the other side of the river and spends years paying for it.