Compulsive Fairness Monitoring as Equity-Compulsion Wrong Attractor: The Ledger That Cannot Close, the Justice Paradox, and the Return to Calibrated Fairness Engagement

Compulsive fairness monitoring — the chronic maintenance of a continuous running ledger of contributions, sacrifices, and benefits across all relational domains, activating automatically when any perceived imbalance occurs — is here reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_CFM in the landscape of relational functioning. The healthy ground state S0 is calibrated fairness engagement: episodic, proportionate attention to genuine inequity that motivates repair and then releases, allowing the relationship to continue in an atmosphere of generosity and good faith.

Three mechanisms maintain the basin: continuous equity accounting (the compulsive fairness monitor maintains a running ledger; any perceived imbalance generates displacement cost D(xi); the accounting system activates automatically, resisting suspension even when the person recognises its destructiveness); injustice sensitivity amplification (exposure to the monitoring system progressively lowers the threshold for perceived inequity, so that interactions that would be experienced as neutral by the healthy ground state generate injustice responses); and generosity foreclosure (the monitoring system makes genuine spontaneous generosity impossible, because any act of giving is immediately registered as a debit that creates an expectation of reciprocal credit).

The central formal result is the Justice Paradox: compulsive fairness monitoring reliably produces the injustice it is organised to prevent. Nine propositions formalise the attractor structure, developmental roots in genuinely unfair environments, and return paths through graduated ledger release, IFS work, and relational generosity practice.