Chapter 12 — Anomics Remedy: Rebinding Emotional Settlement

If emotional accounting has become unavoidable, the question is not how to abolish it.

The question is whether accounts can be made to clear.

This chapter does not offer advice. It does not propose kindness, better communication, or improved emotional literacy. Those prescriptions assume conditions that no longer hold. The problem diagnosed throughout this book is not a deficit of care or effort. It is the erosion of settlement.

Rebinding emotional settlement requires structural change.

Structure, here, does not mean policy alone. It means the rules—explicit or implicit—that determine what counts as payment, how value converts, and when an account is closed. Without such rules, even well-intentioned actors are forced into perpetual accounting. With them, effort can once again change state.

The remedy is therefore not emotional. It is grammatical.

Several requirements follow.

First: currencies must be bounded by domain.

Not all currencies can or should operate everywhere. Words, time, action, money, status, risk, and constraint each have contexts in which they are meaningful and others in which they are not. When domains blur, conversion disputes multiply.

Rebinding requires specifying which currencies count in which domains.

This specification need not be moral. It need only be clear. In some contexts, words suffice. In others, only action matters. In others still, constraint or restitution is required. When everything counts everywhere, nothing settles anywhere.

Boundaries reduce argument.

Second: exchange rates must be legible.

Conversion cannot be improvised endlessly. Participants must know, at least approximately, how payment in one currency translates into recognition in another. This does not require precision. It requires shared expectation.

Legibility allows planning. It allows participants to decide whether they can afford to pay. Without legibility, payment becomes guesswork. Guesswork produces resentment.

Exchange rates are cultural artifacts. They can be explicit or implicit. What matters is that they are shared and stable enough to support closure.

Third: returns must change state.

Payment that does not alter conditions is not settlement. Signals can coordinate intention, but they cannot substitute for effect. For an account to clear, something must be different afterward.

Change of state is the test.

This requirement is frequently resisted because it introduces cost. Cost is unavoidable. Settlement without cost is the scam this book has described. Rebinding requires accepting that some obligations are expensive and that expense is part of their function.

Fourth: closure must be restored.

Accounts must be able to end.

Ending does not require forgetting. It requires finality. A point at which obligations cease and memory is no longer active as debt. Without closure, every interaction remains provisional. Fatigue becomes permanent.

Closure can be temporal, procedural, or role-based. What matters is that it is recognized as binding. Once invoked, it must not be endlessly reopened without new cause.

Rebinding requires making closure legitimate again.

Fifth: moral arbitrage must be constrained.

Moral language cannot be allowed to function as currency by default. Its role must be limited to naming violations, not settling them. When moral claims substitute for repair, inflation accelerates and trust erodes.

Constraining moral arbitrage does not mean silencing harm. It means refusing to treat articulation as payment. Moral clarity without structural response produces exhaustion.

Sixth: risk must be shared or refused, not quietly transferred.

Emotional derivatives emerged because exposure became dangerous. Rebinding requires addressing that danger directly. Either risk is accepted mutually, or interaction is declined openly. Quiet hedging prolongs uncertainty and shifts burden asymmetrically.

Shared risk creates possibility of trust. Refusal creates clarity. Derivatives create neither.

Seventh: institutions must acknowledge their limits.

Institutions can intermediate claims. They cannot create settlement alone. Rebinding requires recognizing where institutional procedure ends and relational authority begins. Overextension breeds resentment. Underextension breeds volatility.

Institutions that pretend to settle what they can only process contribute to drift. Honesty about scope restores credibility.

These requirements are demanding.

They imply loss of flexibility. They imply cost. They imply constraint. They also imply relief.

Relief emerges when effort changes state, when obligations end, and when memory can rest. Relief is the felt experience of settlement. It is increasingly rare not because people are unkind, but because systems no longer permit it.

Rebinding does not guarantee harmony. It guarantees legibility.

Legibility allows people to decide what they are willing to pay and when to stop. It allows disagreement to conclude without victory. It allows relationships, roles, and disputes to finish.

Finish is the missing verb of modern emotional life.

This book has not argued for a return to earlier norms or a universal framework. It has argued for the necessity of settlement as a structural feature of coordination. Without it, emotional accounting expands indefinitely. With it, accounting recedes into background function.

Freedom without settlement is not empathy.

It is drift—priced in feelings.