We find the following in Wiener's Cybernetics (p. 185+):

"There is a belief, current in many countries, which has been elevated to the rank of an official article of faith in the United States, that free competition is itself a homeostatic process: that in a free market, the individual selfishness of the bargainers, each seeking to sell as high and buy as low as possible, will result in the end of a stable dynamics of prices, and with redound to the greatest common good. This is associated with the very comforting view that the individual entrepreneur, in seeking to forward his own interest, is in some manner a public benefactor, and has thus earned the great reward with which society has showered him. Unfortunately, the evidence, such as it is, is against this simple-minded theory. The market is a game, which (...) is thus strictly subject to the general theory of games, developed by Von Neumann and Morgenstern. (...) In many cases, however, where there are three players, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, when the number of players is large, the result is one of extreme indeterminacy and instability. The individual players are compelled by their own cupidity to form coalitions; but these coalitions (...) usually terminate in a welter of betrayal, turncoatism, and deception, which is only too true a picture of the higher business life, or the closely related lives of politics, diplomacy and war. In the long run, even the most brilliant and unprincipled huckster must expect ruin; but let the hucksters become tired of this, and agree to live in peace with one another, and the great rewards are reserved for the one who watches for an opportune time to break this agreement and betray his companions. There is no homeostasis whatever. We are involved in the business cycles of boom and failure, in the succession of dictatorship and revolution, in the wars which everyone loses, which are so real a feature of modern times.

Naturally, Von Neumann's picture of the player as a completely intelligent, completely ruthless person, is an abstraction and a perversion of the facts. It is rare to find a large number of thoroughly clever and unprincipled persons playing a game together. Where the knaves assemble, there will always be fools; and where the fools are present in sufficient numbers, they offer a more profitable object of exploitation for the knaves. The psychology of the fool has become a subject well worth the serious attention of the knaves. Instead of looking out for his own ultimate interest, after the fashion of von Neumann's gamesters, the fool operates in a manner which, by and large, is as predictable as the struggles of a rat in a maze. This policy of lies—or rather, of statements irrelevant to the truth—will make him buy a particular brand of cigarettes; that policy will, or so the party hopes, induce him to vote for a particular candidate—any candidate—or to join in a political witch hunt. A certain precise mixture of religion, pornography, and pseudo-science will sell an illustrated newspaper. A certain blend of wheedling, bribery and intimidation will induce a young scientist to work on guided missiles or the atomic bomb. To determine these, we have our machinery of radio fan-ratings, straw votes, opinion samplings, and other psychological investigations with the common man as their object; and there are always the statisticians, sociologists, and economists available to sell their services to these undertakings."

Wiener goes on to say that things are not all bad:

"Luckily for us, these merchants of lies, these exploiters of gullibility, have not yet arrived at such a pitch of perfection as to have things all their own way. This is because no man is either all fool or all knave. The average man is quite reasonably intelligent concerning subjects which come to his direct attention, and quite reasonably altruistic in matters of public benefit or private suffering which are brought before his own eyes."

But this leads to stable or ‘homeostatic’ social organization only in small, tightly knit communities.

"It is only in the large community, where the Lords of Things as They Are protect themselves from hunger by wealth, from public opinion by privacy and anonymity, from private criticism by the laws of libel and the possession of the means of communication, that ruthlessness can reach its most sublime levels. Of all of these anti-homeostatic factors in society, the control of the means of communication is the most effective and most important."