PhronesisShared events produce multiple valid perspectives. Memory is constructive, not archival; two people who lived through the same afternoon will encode, consolidate, and reconstruct that afternoon differently, and both reconstructions can be authentic, coherent, and accurate to each person's experience while diverging substantially in emphasis, interpretation, and felt meaning. This is not a failure of memory but its nature.
The healthy ground state S^0 — calibrated historical sharing — involves recognition of this basic epistemological fact: shared events belong, narratively, to everyone who shared them, and the coexistence of differing accounts does not threaten the reality or validity of one's own. This paper formalizes the systematic failure of that recognition as the compulsive narrative ownership wrong attractor W_ CNO.
The person living in W_ CNO treats their account of shared events as the authoritative, objective version. Others' differing memories are experienced not as perspectival variation but as error, distortion, or assault. The person actively works to have their version recognized as the official story: correcting, dismissing, arguing against, or simply overwriting alternative accounts.
The work is compulsive in character — it is not strategically managed self-advocacy but a driven need to close the gap between what happened and what they remember happening. Three interlocking mechanisms sustain W_ CNO: memory-as-fact encoding, in which one's own memories are implicitly treated as objective records rather than reconstructions; narrative-threat perception, in which others' different accounts are experienced as attacks on self-continuity or character rather than as normal perspectival variation; and the authoritative-account compulsion, the driven behavior of asserting, defending, and working to institutionalize one's own version of events.
Nine formal propositions characterize the attractor's structure and basin-maintenance dynamics. The paper introduces and proves the Narrative Paradox: the more forcefully one asserts narrative ownership, the more others' counter-narratives are activated and defended, producing exactly the proliferation of competing versions the compulsion was designed to prevent. Return paths include narrative epistemology education, identity decoupling from account-accuracy, and the cultivation of historiographical tolerance.