The Logic of Utility

In a world increasingly shaped by metrics, commodification, and performance, human relationships have been increasingly reduced to transactions. Children earn love by obedience. Workers prove value through productivity. Romantic partners perform roles in exchange for security, sex, or emotional labor. This cultural infection, rooted in shareholder capitalism and reinforced by institutions, has become a sociological virus. It is a form of relational pathocracy: a system that corrupts our emotional immune systems and trains us to relate through extraction rather than connection.

Transactional frameworks evolve from childhood into adulthood, and how they uniquely impact neurodivergent individuals, and how secure attachment offers a path toward healing. By tracing these dynamics through family, romantic, and economic systems, we expose not just an ideology but a relational illness and propose a framework for regeneration.

Pathocratic Roots: Conditional Worth in Childhood

The first site of infection is the home. Children raised in environments where love, safety, or attention is contingent upon performance, grades, chores, politeness, or emotional suppression, learn to equate being with doing. The child becomes hyperaware of expectations and internalizes the belief: “I am only worthy if I am useful.”

When parents withdraw emotionally after disappointment or reward children only when they conform, they inadvertently teach that relationships are conditional. Over time, this erodes the foundation of secure attachment. Instead of safety, the child experiences vigilance, instead of connection, transaction.

This foundation lays the groundwork for a lifetime of relational cost-benefit analysis, where vulnerability is unsafe and authenticity becomes a liability.

Adulthood: Spouses, Workplaces, and the State

As adults, those conditioned in transactional homes often recreate the same dynamics in romantic and professional relationships. Spouses become service providers: sex exchanged for financial security, acts of service for emotional reassurance. Love becomes a currency, not a connection.

Workplaces further normalize this model. Under the regime of shareholder capitalism, employees are reduced to performance metrics. Emotional needs, personal growth, and autonomy are sidelined for output, efficiency, and compliance. The emotional cost is burnout. The relational cost is disposability.

Just as corporations lay off workers to protect profit, individuals in transactional relationships cut off emotional ties when reciprocity wanes. It’s the same logic: extract, maximize, replace.

Neurodivergent Fallout: The Cost of Constant Masking

Neurodivergent individuals, those with ADHD, autism, or other cognitive variations, experience this pathology even more acutely. From a young age, they are taught to mask: to hide their sensory needs, to suppress their impulse patterns, to perform neurotypical behavior for the comfort of others.

This, too, is transactional: “I will be accepted if I act normal.” The price is authenticity. The reward is provisional belonging.

The emotional labor of this masking leads to chronic exhaustion, relational trauma, and the internalization of shame. In romantic, professional, and social relationships, neurodivergent people often feel they must over-function to prove they are not a burden. Their requests for support are misread as weakness. Their boundaries are labeled as inflexible. Their honesty is mistaken for rudeness.

When a society only values people who are convenient, neurodivergent individuals are forced to trade themselves for acceptance.

 

The Immune Response: Secure Attachment as Antibody

Against this pathocracy stands secure attachment, a biological and relational design pattern rooted in safety, presence, and emotional attunement. Secure attachment teaches that people are worthy not because of what they do, but because of who they are.

In family systems, this means parenting that holds boundaries without punishment, and offers love without performance. In marriage, it means seeing the partner not as a role or function, but as a person with needs, wounds, and growing edges. In workplaces, it means leadership rooted in trust, flexibility, and psychological safety.

Stakeholder ethics, a counter-model to shareholder capitalism, mirrors secure attachment: every person in the system matters. Value is not extracted but nurtured. People are not disposable, they are invested in with time, empathy, and co-regulation.

Systems of Regeneration: From Extraction to Connection

To move beyond the tyranny of transaction, we must create systems of regeneration:

• In education, we must affirm diverse ways of learning and emotional processing.
• In the workplace, we must normalize accommodations and redefine productivity around sustainability, not speed.
• In families, we must raise children who know they are loved even when they fail, even when they struggle.

Regenerative relationships are not zero-sum. They are abundant, adaptive, and healing. They are built not on leverage, but on presence. They honor dignity not as a reward, but as a birthright.

The Cure is Connection

The sociological immune system breaks down when we treat people like products and relationships like contracts. But it heals when we return to the truth: that we are meant to co-regulate, to belong, to be seen.

Transaction isolates. Attachment integrates.

The cure for this relational pathocracy is not found in better algorithms, greater efficiency, or more polished performances. It is found in slowness, attunement, and the quiet, radical act of seeing another human being as worthy without condition.

Because what we heal in ourselves, we repair in the world.

And that is how the sociological immune system remembers who it was always meant to be.