Attachment to the Abyss: Why We Keep Seeking Security in the Systems That Are Destroying Democracy and the Planet

What if the systems promising to keep you safe are the very ones destroying your future—and you've been trained to cling to them anyway?

That's the unsettling question at the heart of Attachment to the Abyss, a bracing work of public sociology by Mark Durieux, Ph.D. Drawing on an ancient warning from the I Ching's Hexagram 29 - "Danger sometimes must be sought and pursued in order to find security" - this article exposes a disturbing truth about 2026: across the democratic world, people are being compelled to seek refuge inside the very forces dismantling their lives.

Durieux names them without flinching: market fundamentalism, billionaire rule, CEO monarchy, and the quiet normalization of kleptocracy. With razor-sharp clarity, he reframes our collective predicament through attachment theory, revealing why societies bond with harmful institutions the way people bond with dangerous caregivers. It isn't weakness. It's design.

You'll move from the spectacle of crypto billionaires dining at the president's golf club to the $7.4 billion Sackler settlement, watching a single pattern emerge: catastrophic harm, priced and absorbed rather than prevented.

But this is not a counsel of despair. Durieux maps a way through the ravine—toward democratic institutions, public infrastructure, and forms of collective security we hold in common rather than rent from our captors.

Essential reading for students, educators, activists, and anyone who senses that "realism" has become a cage. If you've ever wondered why nothing changes no matter who fails us, this article hands you the framework to finally see clearly.

Download now and learn to tell counterfeit security from the real thing.