The archetypal hoarder is really just the concentration of a tendency that is in everyone more or less: the tendency to grasp. At its extreme, the concentration is made into a media spectacle and as such, can be isolated as an aberration, usually for the sake of fascination and entertainment for those witnessing the spectacle. What starts as a private social problem is made public through this media spectacle, as it is the media that perpetually reproduces the public at the scale we are at today.
Through typical media transmission, the hoarder is a character who dependably hoards, and everyone looks on in agitation and pity. It is up to the individual to break the cycle of grasping and let go, with a little bit of help from family and friends. This is a character that has less social power, whose living conditions are perfectly acceptable terrain for shame and pity, and thus suitable for an intervention.
Reckoning with the structural social conditions that bring about this concentration - at a certain frequency and probability - is a little more difficult, and not as appealing a subject for a TV show. This becomes more apparent the further you get into the meat and bones of the structure, those parts of the structure that are a little more difficult to shift around and alter without affecting meaningful change. In other words, resistance grows as attention is shifted to those with higher social power.
For example, the phenomenon of the billionaire is not yet readily accepted as a horrifying and shameful state of affairs (at least in the carefully censored public realm), even though the associated hoards are far more extensive, and are far more destructive to far greater swathes of community than the garage filled with crap. Yes, negative talk against billionaires is more present than ever in certain regions of the political spectrum, and is even permitted to be aired in media venues, but this is a far cry from actually going to someone's house, pointing fingers and tut-tutting, and then with tears and heartfelt hugs, liquidating and setting free that whole unsightly mass of material and abstract wealth.
And for something like this to happen without the complete razing of the entire political economic structure, and the wiping out of the classes most committed to it, it would take a massive and widespread change in consciousness, of one's perception of the nature of the cosmos and one's own visceral feelings and relations to the universe. I know what you're thinking: not likely.
After all, the greater hoards bring about the conditions for desiring hoards in the first place, and those conditions brought about earlier hoards, and so on. I have my own little collection of stuff I'm quite attached to, and looking out over the world and its current state, I think: well I better hold onto this stuff a little longer. The billionaires can go first!
At least for the time being, some things can be let go, especially through one's own private spiritual and living practices.
