PhronesisChronic blame-deflecting is typically read as dishonesty or moral weakness: the person who will not own their actions, who reroutes fault to circumstance, context, or the other party. This paper argues for a different and more precise characterisation. Chronic blame-deflecting is here formalised within the Displacement Framework as a wrong attractor W_CBD — a locally stable configuration of the self-regulatory and interpersonal system organised not primarily by deception but by an architecture of attribution-redirection that systematically prevents the operation of accountable agency.
The healthy ground state S^0 is calibrated honest ownership: the capacity to accurately locate one's causal contribution to outcomes, assign it proportionate weight, act on that assignment through acknowledgment and repair, and move forward without either self-flagellation or self-exoneration. The wrong attractor W_CBD is maintained by three interlocking mechanisms: the attribution-redirection reflex, the causal-minimisation loop, and the agency-erasure narrative.
The accumulated displacement = D()\,dt grows as honest ownership is foreclosed and relational credibility erodes. A central formal result, the Ownership Paradox, establishes that chronic blame-deflecting reliably produces the moral diminishment it is deployed to prevent. Developmental roots lie in environments where honest ownership was punished, shamed, or exploited. Nine formal propositions develop the complete architecture.
Return paths include attribution recalibration, graduated ownership practice, Internal Family Systems work on the deflection-protector, and schema therapy for the defectiveness/condemnation schema cluster.