Connection nihilism – The Binding Chaos Lexicon

The idea that all connections are qualitatively the same and there is no added value to bonded people, objects, ritual or ideas. A denial of the existence of euphoric objects.

Expanded explanation

The position being named is a flattening one. It holds that one connection is interchangeable with another, that a bonded object is only an object, that a rite is only a behaviour and that nothing is added by the history invested in any of them. Marsh names it in order to reject it, because most of the rest of the framework depends on the opposite being true. Euphoric objects are real in her account, and the examples are ordinary ones: presents, heirlooms, rewards and earnings that carry personal esteem. Their value is not in the material but in the bond invested in them, which is why earnings given without gratitude and respect impart no primary anima. They were not offered through a balanced connection, so nothing was stored in them. The same premise runs through capacitors, anima banks, totems, icons and charms, all of which work by holding an excess of interactions in an object, a rite or an idea to be drawn on in another time and place. Connection nihilism denies that such storage happens at all. If it were correct there would be no difference between a gift and a payment, no reason a particular home should produce euphoria that an identical building does not and no account of why substituting one relationship for another does damage.

In Heather Marsh’s words

Marsh wrote the position she is rejecting positively elsewhere, in the value that gifts carry or fail to carry.

“Earnings given with a lack of gratitude and respect do not impart primary anima”
Abstracting Divinity

Examples

Gift against payment: If all connections were qualitatively the same these would be equivalent transfers, which is the consequence Marsh treats as a refutation.
The heirloom: An object carrying invested bond is not interchangeable with an identical object that carries none, which is what connection nihilism denies.
Substitution as damage: Replacing one relationship with another of the same type causes harm, which only makes sense if connections differ in kind.

How others use it

The position has no single name in philosophy but appears in several places at once. Reductive materialism treats sentimental value as a fact about a person rather than about an object. Behavioural economics files it under the endowment effect, a bias to be corrected. Fungibility is the working assumption of market exchange, that a unit is a unit regardless of history. Rational choice models of relationships treat partners as substitutable on their attributes. Marsh gathers these into one named position so that it can be argued against rather than assumed, and the argument she makes is not sentimental but mechanical, since her framework requires that interactions can be stored and later drawn upon.