That is the fundamental problem with ecosystems built on narratives rather than markets. The moment an economic system derives its survival not from genuine demand but from a story that must constantly be defended, promoted and financed, it ceases to possess the one characteristic that makes markets remarkably resilient: the ability to correct their own mistakes.
Markets are ruthless, but that ruthlessness serves a purpose.
Anything that exists because people genuinely want it possesses a natural degree of sustainability. Demand is voluntary. People buy products because they solve problems, improve lives or simply offer something better than the alternatives. That demand rises and falls as circumstances change, competitors emerge and technology advances. Some businesses flourish, others disappear, fortunes are made and lost.
That is not a flaw.
That is precisely how progress works.
Every market experiences shocks. Consumer preferences change. Raw material prices move. Interest rates rise. Competitors innovate. Entire industries are occasionally turned upside down. Yet those very disturbances perform an essential function. They expose bad ideas, inefficient companies and obsolete products. Capital is released. Resources become available again. Better ideas replace worse ones. The correction is often swift, occasionally brutal, but it limits the damage by preventing failure from accumulating decade after decade.
Markets heal themselves by allowing failure.
Narrative-based ecosystems possess no such immune system.
They do not emerge because consumers demanded them. They emerge despite the market. The demand has to be manufactured politically because it never arose naturally in the first place. Subsidies replace customers. Regulations replace competition. Mandates replace voluntary choice. Taxpayer money replaces profitability.
The larger the ecosystem becomes, the more artificial demand must be created simply to keep it standing.
Like every bubble, it becomes increasingly dependent upon its own expansion.
Unlike a normal market, however, there can be no meaningful correction. The political class cannot admit failure because too much political capital has already been invested. Activists cannot admit failure because their entire worldview depends upon the project succeeding. Bureaucracies cannot admit failure because failure threatens their budgets, their influence and often their very existence.
So the correction that should have happened years earlier is postponed.
Then postponed again.
And again.
The zombie continues to stagger forward, animated not by customers but by an endless stream of money extracted from taxpayers who, ironically, never had much of a say in financing the experiment in the first place.
Reality, however, is remarkably patient.
Gravity never disappears simply because politicians vote against it.
Eventually the narrative begins to lose its credibility. Investors become hesitant. Governments run out of fiscal room. Public support weakens. The economic foundation underneath the entire structure starts to erode.
That is when the real danger begins.
Because what should have remained a small correction years earlier has now grown into something enormous. Entire industries have become dependent upon subsidies. Tens or hundreds of thousands of jobs rely upon continuous political support. Vast supply chains exist only because governments keep writing cheques. Universities, consultants, lobbyists, NGOs, regulators and financial institutions have all organised themselves around the same artificial ecosystem.
The bubble has become too large to fail.
Except it still can.
And when it finally starts to tilt, it does not merely deflate. It crumbles under its own weight. Companies collapse. Industries disappear. Workers lose their livelihoods. Investors lose capital. Governments lose credibility. The institutions that fed on the narrative suddenly discover that the money sustaining them has vanished.
The tragedy is that everyone involved knew, somewhere in the back of their minds, that the system could never survive without constant financial life support.
It could not stop receiving money because the moment the flow ceased, it would reveal that it had never learned to stand on its own.
That is the paradox.
Or perhaps more accurately, the Catch-22 of every narrative economy.
It cannot survive without perpetual funding.
But the longer it receives that funding, the larger, more fragile and more destructive its eventual collapse becomes.
And when the dust finally settles, the people who were promised prosperity invariably discover who has been nominated to pay the bill.
The taxpayer.
As always.
https://tilakdoshi.substack.com/p/rage-rage-against-the-dying-of-the