PhronesisAttraction is a navigational signal. In its original form --- before fear installs wrong attractors --- attraction is the felt sense of movement toward relational ground state (): the configuration in which the organism functions at minimum cost. We distinguish original attraction (ground state navigation) from fear-based attraction (displacement masquerading as desire). Fear-based attraction --- the pull toward unavailability, danger, status, or confirming self-narratives of unworthiness --- is not genuine attraction but rather the nervous system seeking relief from a familiar wrong attractor.
It feels like desire; it functions like entrapment. We formalize the distinction: original attraction reduces; fear-based attraction reduces without addressing the underlying displacement. We develop the ``BAE phenomenon'' --- the colloquial designation ``Before Anyone Else'' as an inadvertent precise description of the primary attachment figure who constitutes the relational ground state.
We offer operational definitions of attraction on a fear basis and show that the test of original attraction is simple: in their presence, does the cost of being decrease? If yes, that is ground. If no, that is a wrong attractor wearing the face of desire.