PhronesisCompulsive finger-pointing — the reflexive, habitual attribution of causality and moral responsibility to external agents as a primary response to problems, failure, or discomfort — is analyzed here as a dynamical systems wrong attractor W that pulls agents away from the ground state S^0 of calibrated honest attribution. We introduce the Blame-Displacement Architecture (BDA): the set of cognitive, affective, and social mechanisms by which systematic outward attribution is generated and maintained as a self-protective strategy.
We further characterize the Self-Responsibility Foreclosure Basin (SRFB) as the attractor basin surrounding W, within which honest assessment of one's own causal contribution to events becomes increasingly inaccessible. Nine propositions (P1–P9) formalize the structure of the wrong attractor: shame-anxiety as the primary driver; deflection as immediate emotional relief; problem-persistence through unaddressed agency; identity-lock-in to the victim-of-others narrative; relational deterioration as the pattern becomes legible to others; the distinction between accurate external attribution and compulsive deflection; the self-implicating statement as the minimal return move; gradual recalibration through causal-audit practice; and the stability of S^0 under conditions of honest mixed attribution.
The paper closes with a discussion of return paths, the phenomenology of opening the hand, and the conditions under which calibrated attribution becomes the stable equilibrium.