Today, we appear to be in an era beset by catastrophic events. Pandemics, anti-democratic insurrections, wars, climate change. If there is a unique feature, however, to this barrage of catastrophic events, it is their seeming banality and ubiquity. These ongoing events appear to evade historical demarcation as events either revolutionary or catastrophic. How did we come to reimagine systems from biology to brains to economies to political institutions as volatile, unstable, and constantly changing…This article examines the linked histories of neo-liberal economic thought, financialization, and ecology in the 1970’s and 1980’s.