Beneficiary-Deficiency Asymmetry

Canonical definition

The structural regularity, identified by the Appetitive-Deficiency Test and the Reversal Counterfactual, that the party sustaining a Belief against a decohered Referent is, in every observed case of Referent Abandonment, the materially secure or better-resourced party, and the disadvantage imposed by the Belief falls on a different and weaker group. The Asymmetry is not incidental to the cases of Referent Abandonment; it is their signature. A Belief that transfers positional advantage to its beneficiaries while imposing cost on others is precisely what an A-driven Belief held by a party in genuine appetitive deficiency would not do: a genuine appetitive deficit generates a Belief whose content relieves the deficiency of the believer, not a Belief whose content burdens another group while leaving the believer's own deficits unaffected. The Asymmetry's constancy across unrelated domains (including trickle-down tax policy, race as a biological category, immigration and crime, vaccines and autism, and human-caused climate change) is what makes the eliminative proof of Referent Abandonment converge on Mimetic Desire as the maintenance mechanism in each case. The constancy of who pays is the constancy of the source seen from the side of the disadvantaged.