PhronesisCompulsive loyalty is the tendency to remain committed to relationships, institutions, or groups past the point at which continued commitment serves either party — driven not by genuine valuation but by fear of abandonment, sunk-cost amplification, and identity capture. This paper applies the displacement framework to model compulsive loyalty as a wrong attractor W_CL in psychological state space, organized around the prevention of abandonment rather than the rational assessment of relational worth.
We identify a three-component fidelity architecture: abandonment fear as motive force, sunk-cost amplification as the mechanism that escalates commitment with time rather than recalibrating it, and identity capture as the process by which the self is restructured around the role of loyal member so thoroughly that exit becomes self-dissolution. We introduce the concept of the discernment-foreclosure basin, in which the wrong attractor maintains itself precisely by disabling the discriminative cognition that would permit calibrated exit decisions.
Nine formal propositions are derived covering basin structure, the loyalty-abuse interface, cult dynamics, traumatic bonding, the sunk-cost fallacy, and return paths toward the ground state of calibrated earned commitment S^0_CL. The paper locates compulsive loyalty in relation to traumatic bonding, cult psychology, organizational psychology, and abusive relationship dynamics, and derives implications for therapeutic intervention. 0.5em: compulsive loyalty, wrong attractor, displacement framework, fidelity architecture, discernment-foreclosure, sunk-cost fallacy, traumatic bonding, identity capture, calibrated earned commitment, abusive relationships, cult dynamics