In 1929, the American stock market crashed. Millions of ordinary people lost their life savings overnight. Companies that had been selling stock to the public turned out to be complete frauds, they had no real assets, no honest accounting, nothing but promises and salesmen with pretty words. Investors bought shares in businesses they knew nothing about, trusting systems that had no oversight whatsoever. It was financial chaos. But it wasn't the first time.
Four years later, in 1934, the government created something called the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC. This new agency's job was simple, they were to make sure companies tell the truth about their finances before selling stock to the public. Require disclosure. Prevent fraud. Stop the madness before it starts. That was the idea.
The 1929 crash and the SEC's creation in response weren't unique events. The same cycle had been playing out for thousands of years.
The same pattern had played out countless times before. The Dutch Tulip Mania of 1637. The South Sea Bubble of 1720. The Mississippi Scheme of 1719.
Always the same sequence: wild speculation, promises of easy money, inevitable collapse, then desperate attempts to create rules that might prevent it from happening again.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: Why do human beings keep making the same mistakes?
The Pattern
Look back through history and you'll see this cycle everywhere. In 1750 BCE, nearly four thousand years ago, King Hammurabi of Babylon created one of the world's first legal codes. Why? Because people were cheating each other in business deals, charging excessive interest rates, and generally behaving in ways that destroyed trust and commerce.
Medieval guilds emerged for the same reason, they were to stop merchants and craftsmen from exploiting customers and each other.
Every civilization, in every era, eventually faces the same problem, left to their own devices, people tend toward chaos.
This isn't a modern phenomenon created by capitalism or technology or social media. You can leave Meta, NVDIA, Google, and Microsoft out of this. It's not something that emerged in the industrial age. It's something deeper, something that seems to be wired into human nature itself.
The pattern is always the same:
People get freedom to do what they want
Things go well for a while
Excess and abuse creep in
Everything falls apart
Someone has to step in and create rules
The cycle eventually repeats
We see this in markets, in politics, in relationships, even in our personal lives. The question is: what the helly is going on?
The Science of Human Nature
Modern science gives us some answers. Our brains evolved over millions of years to keep us alive in a dangerous world. They're wired for immediate survival, not long-term planning. We're built to grab the food in front of us, not save it for next winter. To fight or flee from immediate threats, not think through complex consequences.
This served our ancestors well. If you heard a rustling in the bushes, the smart move was to assume it was a predator and run, not stick around to gather more information. If you found fruit, you ate it immediately, you couldn't refrigerate it for later.
But the same mental wiring that kept us alive on the African savanna now gets us into trouble in modern civilization. We're still wired to:
Choose immediate rewards over long-term benefits
Follow the crowd when everyone else seems to be doing well
Believe that "this time is different"
Ignore boring warnings about complex risks
Trust charismatic people who promise easy solutions
This isn't a moral failing. It's not stupidity. It's the predictable result of really old mental software running in an increasingly modern world.
It Runs Deep
How would you feel if I told you that there’s something even more fundamental going on? Physics teaches us about a principle called entropy, the tendency of all systems to drift toward disorder unless energy is constantly applied to maintain structure. Your house doesn't stay clean by itself. Your car doesn't maintain itself. Your body doesn't stay healthy without effort.
The same principle applies to human systems. Markets don't regulate themselves. Governments don't stay honest without oversight. Relationships of all kinds don't maintain themselves without ongoing work and commitment.
Human beings are not naturally good at creating and maintaining order. We're capable of greatness, but we're also prone to selfishness, short-term thinking, and self-deception.
The Bible talks about humans being "fallen", capable of good, but with a bent toward selfishness and pride. Ancient philosophers wrote about the need for virtue and self-discipline precisely because they observed how easily people drift toward vice and chaos.
Modern psychology confirms what the Bible has always said, that we consistently overestimate our own abilities, underestimate risks, and choose immediate pleasures over long-term gain.
Why This Matters for Literally Everything
Understanding this pattern changes how we think about almost everything.
In Money: The reason most people struggle with money isn't that they're bad at math, it's that they're human. We're wired to spend money we see, to buy things that make us feel good right now, to believe we'll "start investing next month." Successful people don't overcome this wiring, they design systems that work with it. They automate their investing so they never see the money. They use boring index funds instead of trying to pick exciting stocks. They create constraints that guide their natural impulses toward better outcomes.
In Health: We know what we should eat and how much we should exercise. The problem isn't information, it's that healthy choices often feel boring or difficult right now, while unhealthy choices feel good immediately. People who stay healthy don't rely on willpower, they change their environment. They remove junk food from their house. They find exercises they actually enjoy.
They create systems that make good choices easier and bad choices harder.
In Relationships: We've all seen relationships fall apart not because people stopped loving each other, but because they stopped doing the boring work of maintenance. They stopped having difficult conversations. They stopped prioritizing time together. They stopped choosing their partner's needs over immediate comfort. Successful relationships require structure, regular check-ins, shared goals, agreed-upon boundaries, not just good intentions, vibes, and end of weekend dumps.
In Politics: Understanding human nature explains why every political system eventually needs checks and balances, why power corrupts, and why utopian schemes consistently fail and will never succeed. The problem isn't finding the right people to put in charge, it's creating systems that work even when the wrong people get power. No government has ever sustained the capacity to change things for the better, forever.
“Freedom” You Say?
This leads to an interesting little paradox, real freedom often requires constraints, while apparent freedom frequently leads to bondage.
Consider someone who eats whatever they want, whenever they want. This feels like freedom, but eventually leads to poor health, low energy, and a body that limits what they can do. Meanwhile, someone who follows a disciplined eating plan may feel constrained in the short term, but gains energy, confidence, and genuine freedom to pursue their goals.
The same principle applies everywhere:
Financial discipline creates financial freedom
Exercise discipline creates physical freedom
Relational discipline creates emotional freedom
Professional discipline creates expressive freedom
This is why successful societies repeatedly create institutions that limit individual behavior in the short term to expand collective possibilities in the long term. Financial regulations prevent the boom-bust cycles that impoverish everyone. Traffic laws constrain how we drive but make transportation possible. Property rights limit what we can take from others but enable economic prosperity.
These aren't arbitrary impositions by power-hungry bureaucrats. A human being flourishes only within virtuous constraints.
Living With Reality
So what do we do with this knowledge?
First, we stop pretending we're different. The same tendencies that created every historical bubble and crash live in us. The same impulses that lead to addiction, broken relationships, and wasted potential are part of our daily experience. We're not above the pattern, without the life of God in us, we are the pattern.
But there's something liberating about this recognition. If the drift toward chaos is universal, then our struggles aren't unique moral failures, they're part of the human condition. And if societies have repeatedly found ways to channel destructive tendencies into constructive outcomes, individuals can do the same.
The goal isn't to transcend human nature but to work with it intelligently. This means:
Designing Your Environment: Don't rely on willpower, change your surroundings. Remove temptations. Automate good choices. Make bad choices inconvenient.
Creating Accountability: Find people who will call you out.
Building Systems: Develop routines and processes that guide your behavior when motivation fails. Have a budget you follow automatically. Exercise at the same time every day. Schedule important relationships like appointments.
Accepting Constraints: Stop seeing rules and boundaries as restrictions on your freedom. Start seeing them as the foundation that makes real freedom possible.
The Choice We All Face
Every generation faces the same choice human beings before us did. We can pretend that man has evolved beyond his Garden of Eden patterns. We can believe that this time will be different, that we've learned from past mistakes, that technology or education or good intentions will save us from ourselves.
Or we can accept the evidence of history, science, and our own experience and acknowledge that without God humans are capable of great things, but we consistently drift toward chaos without the structure His word creates.
This doesn't mean we should despair or give up on progress. It means we should build our lives, and our societies, around the truth of who we actually are, not who we wish we were. And who we actually are is only found in the life of Christ.
The Securities and Exchange Commission exists not because markets are evil, but because they're human. Marriage vows exist not because love is weak, but because commitment requires more than feelings. Speed limits exist not because driving is inherently dangerous, but because humans reliably overestimate their abilities and underestimate risks. The Laws of the Kingdom of God exist because heaven is founded upon order.
These constraints don't diminish us, or seek the worst for us, they enable us to become our best selves within boundaries.
The pattern will continue. New technologies will create new opportunities for both wisdom and folly. There will always be new technology. New generations will face the eternal choice between structure and chaos, between immediate gratification and long-term flourishing, no matter what we create.
But understanding the pattern gives us power. We can choose to learn from history instead of repeating it. We can design systems of all kinds that work with human nature instead of against it. We can embrace the constraints that make genuine freedom possible.
The question isn't whether we'll face the choice between order and chaos. The question is whether we'll choose wisely when our turn comes to do so.