PhronesisEvery functioning person must navigate the competing claims of self and others on attention, resources, and priority. In its calibrated form — S^0_ CSIV, Calibrated Self-Inclusive Valuation — the person holds their own needs, preferences, and worth as genuinely real, neither inflated above others' nor systematically suppressed below them. Chronic self-discounting is formally reconceptualised here within the Displacement Framework as a wrong attractor W_ CSDis in the landscape of self-valuation functioning: a stable configuration in which the agent systematically and habitually assigns their own needs, preferences, and claims lower validity than those of the people around them — not as a situational accommodation but as a structural default.
The self-discounting person orders last from the menu, does not ask for what they want, exits conflict by pre-emptively conceding, accepts conditions others would reject, and interprets their own desires as impositions rather than legitimate expressions of a person who matters. This pattern is categorically distinct from the self-deprecation treated in Paper \#695 of this series: self-deprecation is a relational and rhetorical pattern in which the self is diminished through preemptive criticism, primarily as a social-defensive manoeuvre.
Self-discounting operates at a deeper level, at the level of worth: the belief that one's needs simply do not count in the same register as others'. Three sustaining mechanisms are identified and formally characterised: (1) self-as-last-in-line encoding, in which others' needs are processed as categorically prior, making any self-prioritisation feel like transgression; (2) conflict-prevention through self-erasure, in which the self's needs are suppressed before they can generate friction, removing the proximate cause of conflict at the cost of removing the self; and (3) worth-conditionality, in which the right to have needs is experienced as contingent on prior service, exceptional performance, or explicit permission.
A formal dynamical model is developed in which self-valuation V(t), others' perceived value of the subject P_o(t), and accumulated resentment R(t) are shown to evolve in mutually reinforcing ways: chronic suppression of V reduces P_o (the sociometer signal) while accumulating R, and both feed back to deepen W_ CSDis. The central paradox — that self-discounting, designed to maintain relationships and prevent conflict, systematically generates resentment, erodes self-respect, and signals low worth to others who then take it as permission to continue discounting the person — is the Permission Signal Paradox, formally proved in Proposition 5.