Keeping any complex system stable requires continuous adaptation to its environment. Even our bodies, whose phase space of stability, which we describe as homeostasis, is a series of complex feedback mechanisms to cope with environmental changes in temperatures, threats, injury, infectious pathogens, changes in availability of energy inputs (food availability, etc), and if all of these feedback mechanisms were not constantly changing to adjust for all these stresses, we could die very quickly.

This all adds up to your own metabolic processes being “metastable”. They are stable given a certain set of parameters. But there is not set of parameters that is universally stable. There is no arrangement of these systems that could so be devised as to make us immortal in the face of an unbounded set of temperature ranges (because the behavior of chemical processes that keep us alive are temperature-dependent, which is why our body must maintain a constant temperature internally), nor could our body isolate itself from the entropy, or be able to survive below a certain minimum energy input.

Society and economic systems are exactly like this. Believing that we can formulate a perfectly stable economic system and set of norms and values that tracks close to some normative ideal, and this solution can be distilled down to a set of specific rules and abstractions (represented by some monetary theory, conception fo property rights, or some natural law concept of how to achieve optimal cooperation) is really, in my opinion, a fool’s errand. And I recognize I’m indicting a lot of people’s closely held political and economic beliefs when I say that. But I just happen to believe it’s true.

I also believe this kind of thinking can be outright dangerous, because it enhances people confidence that “burning it all down” is a safe and/or desirable thing to do, because they are so certain of their solutions, and they are so certain they know what the problems are, that they’re not even open to the possibility that they could be wrong. So they’d be willing to take these giant risks for millions, if not billions of people — believing they’re emancipating them — without considering for a brief moment, that maybe their capacity to understand the equities of human interest, in aggregate, are not cognizable by any one political or economic theory.

This is why I never jump on any “maximalist” bandwagons in really anything in my life, to the great frustration of many in these conversations.