The Invisible Heel
How we shape the world when things get out of hand
It’s an article of faith in the U.S. that society is shaped by the invisible hand of market forces, the sum of the countless choices people make in deliberate pursuit of their own self-interest1. But there is a kindred force, equally powerful and usually overlooked: the collective behavior of people who have been wrong-footed by events and have to improvise ways to steady themselves. People do not passively endure an unstable world. They stagger, pivot, or dig in. They reach out to others for support in unexpected or unfamiliar ways, and test out new avenues of thought and action. This too adds up to a real effect. Call it the invisible heel.
This is what I, with my colleague Denise Milstein, set out to understand in a study recently published in the journal Social Forces. Drawing on 115 in-depth interviews with New Yorkers conducted during the chaotic first months of the Covid pandemic, we looked for patterns in the ways people described the crisis they were living through and how they were coping with it. Our findings can help make sense of the strange social weather that prevails in periods of widespread instability and upheaval.
What made the pandemic so traumatic for many, aside from direct experiences of illness and grief, was something more diffuse and pernicious: a general loss of trust in the dependability of people, places, things, and self-conceptions that had been taken-for-granted pillars of everyday life. Pandemics aren’t the only events that can cause this. Today you can point to all kinds of events and transformations that scramble or sever, en masse, the connections, assumptions, and social roles people have relied on to buttress their self-identities.
When the scaffolding of everyday trust falls away, people can experience what we refer to in the paper as ontological insecurity2: a feeling of being adrift, unable to connect your present circumstances to life as you knew it, without a practical path into the future3. It’s a crisis of self-confidence, brought on by a suddenly bewildering world. Unable to depend on the connections that defined you, you become unsure of who you are.
People do not go quietly into ontological insecurity. It does not just happen to them. In our interviews people described their crisis as being triggered by failures they couldn’t overcome in one of two areas: their ability to know something about the world, or their ability to act in it. So as they worked to steady themselves and repair their trust in things, these are the domains they turned to. They gathered new knowledge, reframed what they already knew, or redrew their boundaries around what they thought could or should be known. We call this in the paper cognitive grounding: overcoming pervasive uncertainty by resetting your assumptions, anchoring your thinking in things you can rely on to be true.
At the same time, people took action to reshape their social and physical environments in ways that made them more predictable and trustworthy. They made new friendships or cut off troublesome ones, gathered supplies4 or joined mutual aid networks to help others in need, rearranged their living spaces, set up new routines and schedules to structure the formless days of lockdown and work/learn-from-home life. This we call agentic enactment: regaining confidence in your ability to act effectively by making changes to your immediate social and physical surroundings5.
The boundary between these two areas—thinking and acting—was permeable: people experimented through new ways of acting to test out their knowledge. Sometimes, severing a social tie could be a way of cutting off a flow of destabilizing information. Venturing out to a street protest could be a way of testing assumptions about the risk of catching the virus in crowded public places. Of course, people’s attempts to rebuild their trust in the world didn’t always succeed. That rarely stopped them from trying.
The most interesting thing about this work of repair, though, is that even as people faced a totally unprecedented situation, in a period of general social isolation, they didn’t invent strategies of repair totally on their own, from scratch. They adapted things they already knew from their professional training or personal histories, or picked up behaviors they saw from neighbors, on social media, or just generally from the culture around them. A classic example is the 7-o’clock cheer, where every evening during the early pandemic New Yorkers headed out to their fire escapes, balconies, or leaned out of their windows to make noise together to celebrate health care workers. The practice originated in Italy, spread through social media and then through word of mouth and ultimately through example. For New Yorkers, the cheer built a space of togetherness and shared emotional intensity, and a common temporal structure to the day.
In our paper we call these learned techniques and routines people use to rebuild their ruptured trust in the world repertoires of repair. These repertoires can be as simple as the expressions people use in conversation or say to themselves to move past a moment of discomfort6 or as complex as participation in a social movement that builds community ties and reshapes the institutional life of the country. In between are all kinds of habits and dispositions people pick up from each other to recover for themselves a feeling of continuity or control.
If the invisible hand works by coordinating behavior through markets, the invisible heel works by coordinating behavior through culture. The urge to find security may be individual, but the strategies we use to pursue it, like the languages we speak, are borrowed and adapted from the templates we learn through our encounters in the social world. Because repertoires travel, because they can, to use a vulgar term, go viral, they can produce widespread and consequential patterns of new behavior and thinking. When enough people reach for a similar strategy of action, what starts as an improvised solution can get reinforced, and over time can solidify into an institution. At the same time, because repertoires travel socially, and are adopted unevenly across society, the repair work of some can destabilize others. It can pit groups against each other. It can be pathological.
The pandemic provides examples of this too. The political backlash against public health officials and institutions — the harassment campaigns against pandemic restrictions that congealed into state legislative action to strip health departments of their powers, culminating in the effective destruction of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — can be read through the lens of ontological insecurity. A significant share of the public experienced the disorientation of the pandemic and the lockdowns as intolerable intrusions into their personal sovereignty, upending their conceptions of what it meant to be Americans. Anti-government and anti-science populist mobilization were readily available repertoires for repair. Before Covid, it would have been hard to imagine that the US would, as a result of experiencing a pandemic, dismantle its public health infrastructure. The idea of the invisible heel helps reveal a pathway to a possible future that had been there all along.
The pandemic has receded, but widespread experiences of uncertainty and insecurity have not. In a January 2026 Civic Pulse poll, 52% of Americans said they were worried that “something unexpected could significantly disrupt their life this year.” Among these, 42% were most worried about economic disruptions like job loss or rising prices, while 39% said their biggest fears were political in nature — war, government repression, civil unrest. Fully 53% of Americans in the survey said they felt threatened or unsafe in the current political climate.
It’s not hard to see the sources of this insecurity. Precarity has shot through the labor market so completely that even economists are broadly worried about their job prospects7. Inflation is making prices unreliable, with the cost of groceries rising faster than at any time since 2022, and the war in Iran is already spiking gas prices, setting off the most serious energy crisis since the 1970s.
Developments in AI have either, depending on who you ask, produced an asset bubble pushing the economy to the edge of another great recession, or led us to the edge of a fundamental transformation in the nature of power, labor, and the economy itself — Silicon Valley elites excitedly tell each other these days that now is their last chance to amass wealth before AI ends economic mobility forever and builds a new permanent aristocracy and a new permanent underclass.
As predictable returns to work and education evaporate, and chance seems increasingly the only way to get ahead, online sports gambling has exploded in popularity. Prediction markets — themselves a response to the uncertainty of the Covid pandemic according to Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan — have extended wagering to pretty much all other areas of social life. Complicating that already dizzying state of play, a series of scandals in sports betting and in prediction markets have left bettors wondering if these games too are rigged.
Meanwhile the federal mass deportation program has terrorized immigrants regardless of documentation status, and upended even citizens’ long-held assumptions of safety and security in the places where they live and work.
Amid all of this disruption and insecurity, people are searching for solid ground in new ways. Communities are finding new connections by organizing against the construction of data centers, both for environmental reasons and as an opportunity to hash out fundamental concerns about how Artificial Intelligence is being used to reorder society. Mutual aid networks that were founded during the pandemic have sprung back to life in places like Minneapolis to help cities under siege by out-of-control immigration enforcement agencies.
The coming weeks and months do not seem likely to bring certainty to many people. They will seek it out anyhow, testing out new ways of thinking and acting in attempts to rebuild their trust in an unsteady world. The work of repair can have unpredictable, unanticipated outcomes. The distributed responses of people to ontological insecurity can be as consequential as the actions of powerful decision-makers trying to make deliberate change. It’s critical to pay attention to these movements: to learn more about what conditions make repair productive rather than destructive, or what makes certain repertoires of repair more or less likely to spread and to succeed, and how the process differs across communities with different resources to draw on.
In other words we have to pay closer attention to how people stagger, pivot, or dig in when things get out of hand. Repair isn’t a matter of pure reaction, it’s another way people make the future.
The metaphor of the invisible hand is attributed to Adam Smith, but it has arguably taken on a different meaning than the one he intended when he used the phrase in The Wealth of Nations in 1776.
We’re drawing here on the work of Anthony Giddens, who developed the concept of ontological security in, among other places, his 1990 book The Consequences of Modernity.
The sociologist Karl Weick in a 1993 paper described what he called “cosmology episodes,” where organizational sensemaking collapses because of radically shifting circumstances. It’s a feeling, he wrote, of having no idea where you are, experiencing something you’ve never experienced, without any idea of how to return to familiar terrain. Ontological insecurity can stem from a cosmology episode, but is more protracted.
The Germans have a delightful word for this, “Hamsterkauf,” literally “hoard-buying,” evoking the image of a hamster scurrying around stuffing its cheeks with food for later. The word had a brief surge in usage during the pandemic in 2020, but apparently has its roots in the economic depression that followed the First World War.
Psychologists have a term, “situational agency,” that describes the limits of willpower: people who are able to exercise self control and act effectively tend to be those who are able to manipulate their circumstances to limit their choices, minimizing “the in-the-moment experience of intrapsychic struggle typically associated with exercising self-control.” Agentic enactment can be understood as the work of manipulating one’s social and material context to make effective action is possible by overcoming the “intrapsychic struggle” produced by ontological insecurity.
Nitsuh Abebe wrote a wonderful New York Times Magazine piece on the phrases and tricks of the mind we use to “cope” with a disorienting world, which we can see as a catalogue of repertoires for cognitive grounding.
As a sociologist I have to admit to more than a little schadenfreude here, as when the New York Times recently reported on how economists worried that, after decades of policy dominance, the discipline was increasingly ignored by leaders in government and business and in public life generally. Welcome to the wilderness, my brothers and sisters in social science!