The Myth of Natural Order
Aug 27, 2025
Every age baptizes chaos with a different name. The Greeks called it cosmos, an ordered world bound by harmony. Medieval scholastics renamed it the Great Chain of Being, every beast, man, and angel locked into a rung. Economists now drape it in the language of equilibrium, claiming greed and fear self-correct, as though panic and hunger carried a hidden thermostat. Different masks, same deceit: the story that chaos bends toward balance. It is not a harmless story—it is a leash. Tell people there is an order to collapse, and they will sit quietly in the rubble. Tell them
they will sit quietly in the rubble. Tell them cycles purify, and they will confuse their own dispossession with moral hygiene. Even in ruin, they will imagine justice is being done.
Disorder was never neutral; it is a weapon. Kings enforced thrones with it, priests shored up altars with it, philosophers of empire reframed war as destiny. Today’s elites deploy the same script in market jargon. Crashes become “corrections.” Debt implosions are “cycles.” Layoffs, the cleansing fire of “market adjustments.” The language reframes cruelty as inevitability. Don’t resist, don’t rage, don’t question—because the pain you feel is not injustice but law, a sacred current, a divine algorithm designed to teach submission.
Empedocles imagined the cosmos swinging between love and strife, union and rupture. Poetry masquerading as physics. Markets co-opt the metaphor: liquidity and euphoria as “love,” liquidation and panic as “strife.” Label both “order” and catastrophe looks ordained; resistance appears childish. Augustine taught that wars, plagues, earthquakes were divine order. Modern economists repeat the same lesson: collapses cleanse, inflation purifies, fraud exposes weakness. Your suffering is framed as equilibrium; to rebel is heresy.
Strip away the mask. Disorder isn’t balance. It isn’t cleansing. Sometimes rot wins and compounds. Sometimes predators feast without consequence. Sometimes collapse destroys the weak and hands the strong new weapons. There is no cosmic referee, no invisible hand smoothing jagged edges. There is only raw struggle—chaotic, asymmetrical, merciless. Balance is the bedtime story. Strife is the fact.
The Machinery of Chaos
Economists’ charts pretend to be photographs of nature—X and Y axes compressing hunger, fear, and hoarding into neat crossing lines. Markets are theater, not physics. Priests in suits chant price targets; traders kneel not to math but to belief. The line works because enough people pretend it’s law, the way ritual sacrifice works because the crowd believes the gods are watching. What they call equilibrium is stagecraft. Keep the crowd convinced, and panic turns into compliance.
Collapse is often engineered. Rome debased coins to pay armies. 1929 wasn’t a natural swing—it was leverage stacked by insiders. 2008 wasn’t a market purging excess—it was predation: mortgages sliced into weapons, sold to the unsuspecting, while architects exited rich. Every “cycle” carries fingerprints of men, not gods. Yet commentators cloak it in inevitability. When the crash is called a “correction,” responsibility dissolves; no villain remains, only the invisible hand stealing your wallet.
Strife has no symmetry. Losses sometimes compound for generations. Wealth can accrue upward and stay. Mean reversion is a lullaby for investors unwilling to face the abyss. History shows systems that didn’t swing back—empires that fell and never rose, currencies hyperinflated into wallpaper, classes stripped of wealth forever. The pendulum doesn’t always swing. Sometimes it snaps. Permanence of rupture is the waking truth.
Predators never bare their teeth outright. They wear language like camouflage: “correction,” “rebalancing,” “mean reversion.” Behind soft syllables, hedge funds short into panic, insiders dump into optimism, private equity scavenges failing firms. Cycles don’t turn themselves. Each so-called accident is pushed. Inflation is “transitory” only because officials say so, even as liquidity firehoses roar. And when markets collapse, insiders are insured; the public is stripped. The myth of the invisible hand is the perfect lie—gravity didn’t pull you down, someone shoved.
