"Transactional"

"Most people weren’t even aware of how transactional things were. It was like the air that they breathed. That’s the way I would put it. They had grown up in that world, they ... didn’t see it as manipulative, that was just sort of the way it worked to them. And in some ways, I kind of pity them for thinking about it like that."

- J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, on the atmosphere in his years at Yale Law School