PhronesisAnger is adaptive — a signal that a boundary has been violated, motivating repair or protection. Chronic resentment is a wrong attractor W_resent in which the anger system is organized around a consolidated grievance that remains permanently activated: the injury is rehearsed rather than processed, the perpetrator remains on trial in perpetuity, and the return to equanimity is blocked by the grievance narrative itself.
We apply the Displacement Framework to formalize chronic resentment. The equanimity ground state S0_equanimity is defined as proportionate anger that resolves once the injustice is addressed: Aristotle's mean — anger at the right person, to the right degree, at the right time. W_resent is maintained through two interlocking mechanisms: the rumination engine (Nolen-Hoeksema 1991 — repetitive, passive grievance-rehearsal of the injury as an open goal that cannot be closed; Martin & Tesser 1989 goal-interruption) and the injustice narrative (Baumeister et al. 2001 — the coherent account of the perpetrator's wrongness that justifies continued anger and blocks perspective-taking).
Nine formal propositions cover: S0_equanimity (P1), W_resent as grievance-consolidation wrong attractor (P2), the rumination engine (P3), the injustice narrative (P4), Nietzsche's ressentiment as identity structure (P5), secondary gains of resentment — moral high ground, social capital, identity protection (P6), relational and somatic costs — Witvliet et al. cardiovascular reactivity, the drinking-poison formalization (P7), cumulative Phi_resent across emotional, relational, somatic, and identity domains (P8), and return paths including Enright's process model, Worthington's REACH, anger completion, ACT defusion, and self-compassion (P9).