PhronesisAwe is the response that marks genuine encounter with the edges of what a person currently understands — the experience of smallness before vastness, of frameworks meeting their limits, of the world disclosing something that exceeds the categories currently available to process it. It is among the rarest and most epistemically significant responses a person can have, because it is structurally a signal that learning is genuinely possible: the person has been stopped by something real.
This paper formalizes the chronic foreclosure of that capacity as a wrong attractor W_ CAS (chronic awe-suppression) within the displacement framework. The person living in W_ CAS does not merely fail to encounter awe-inducing stimuli; the perceptual-interpretive apparatus that would produce the awe response has been systematically closed off. Three interlocking mechanisms sustain the wrong attractor.
The sophistication defense encodes susceptibility to awe as intellectual naivety, childishness, or epistemic weakness: experienced awe triggers shame rather than wonder, and the person preempts the exposure by deploying irony, premature categorization, or explicit self-monitoring against any recognizable moment of being stopped. The explanatory-completion compulsion is the automatic drive to immediately explain, categorize, and intellectually resolve anything extraordinary, collapsing the dwelling-in-wonder that constitutes the awe response before it can form.
The habituation-threshold elevation progressively raises the threshold for what counts as remarkable: each encounter with something extraordinary is rapidly processed and domesticated, requiring increasingly extraordinary stimuli for any response to register. Nine formal propositions characterize the attractor and its basin-maintenance dynamics. The paper introduces and proves the Awe-Suppression Paradox: the sophistication defense that protects against what feels like childish wonder systematically impoverishes the epistemic and affective life it was designed to protect, because awe is precisely the signal that marks genuine encounter with the limits of current understanding.
Persons in W_ CAS are epistemically worse off — not better off — than persons in the ground state S^0 of calibrated openness, because they have closed the very response that would have indicated real learning was available. Return paths include cultivated encounter, wonder-tolerance practice, and the defection from sophistication norms that have made the defense necessary.