The Illusion of Equilibrium
Aug 28, 2025
Balance is the word the system loves most. Economists, pundits, and central bankers chant it like a prayer: “markets seek equilibrium.” It is a theatre. Equilibrium is staged. Whiplash—rate cuts after hikes, stimulus after austerity—is not a natural swing but brutality: broken bones reset by the surgeon who caused them. When authorities pivot, it is to protect leverage, not restore fairness. The river Heraclitus warned about is no longer flowing naturally—it is dammed, diverted, and flooded on command. The current drags and spits, pretending rhythm was destiny.
The Veil of Balance
The deeper violence: traders internalize the illusion. They blame themselves for losses, await equal rebounds, and volunteer for games rigged against them. Equilibrium is not balance—it is the mask of control. The cruelest trick: once you believe it, you police yourself, applauding the forces tightening your noose. Hedge funds ride engineered oscillations; politicians sanctify cycles as necessity. Volatility becomes sacrament. Pain is natural, virtuous, ordained—not the calculated byproduct of power’s machinery.
Pattern comforts. People prefer imagining the market as a self-correcting clock to seeing a stage managed by predators. Symmetry sedates: what falls must rise, what breaks must mend. When empires collapse or families fracture, the myth soothes, like the medieval peasant who believed plagues punished before redemption, or the 18th-century citizen convinced that Robespierre’s terror would give way to virtue. Faith in balance is anaesthesia.
History shows the mirror shatters. Rome fell; the “natural hierarchy” myth gave way to apocalyptic cults. Black Death annihilated medieval confidence, birthing Renaissance brilliance and scapegoat hunts. The French Revolution shattered the divine mandate, spiralling into guillotines. Ibn Khaldun understood cycles: tribes rise, harden, dominate, decay. Machiavelli: leaders manufacture balance to reassert control, not restore fairness. Heraclitus: the river flows without symmetry. Illusion of order persists; what endures is theatre.
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 its 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.
