Systems in equilibrium are remarkable. – We know of none, for the concept is purely theoretical and without empirical support. Indeed, it can only be generated by taking a view of an observed system that is arbitrarily truncated fore and aft. All known systems are open and dynamic; energy was transferred to them, and is leaking from them. As Heraclitus says, everything flows, everything changes. At the most general level, this is the distinction between the theological worldview and that of the naturalist. The believer maintains the hope that there is, somewhere, an equilibrium to which we can ultimately return. The naturalist sees no evidence of such a thing.
It is this hope for stable equilibrium that marks out the green world view as fundamentally religious. From stabilising the climate to the steady state economy we see ghosts of a longing for equilibrium. The socialist world view is the same. And of course there are many other instances across the political spectrum; nostalgia for the past, seen as a stable system, arbitrarily truncated fore and aft, a longing for an authority capable of maintaining a stable hierarchy, a fear of the astonishing and indeed terrifying dynamics of competitive commercial societies.
Perhaps it is simpler to see many religious and political views as driven in large part by the pursuit of an equilibrium state 'suggesting', as Lewis observed of the arts, 'perfect conditions for one organism' ("Inferior Religions", 1917), and this is curiously true of both individualist and collectivist approaches alike, since both are driven by individual preferences, for all that collectivists say to the contrary.
In other words, these systems offer the subject a suspension of hostilities, man and world, man and man, and this is so agreeable a prospect that we are willing to contemplate the most extreme difficulties in the achievement.