AIM Framework glossary
Grievance Gateway (the Gateway)
Canonical definition
Grievance Gateway (Locked) is the pre-screening filter applied before the Three-Test Battery, requiring that any Grievance Belief first satisfy three checks: (1) Origin Check: whose Appetitive or Intrinsic deficit is this, and did it reach me by a traceable route or only as circulating account? (2) A-Check: does my body need the thing being denied? (3) I-Check: would I still care about this if nobody knew? Only grievances passing the Origin Check (Step 1) and at least one of the A-Check or I-Check (Steps 2/3) proceed to the Three-Test Battery. Grievances failing Step 1 are copied grievances, requiring Epistemic Suspension rather than agent-targeting.
Explanation
Before you test whether your blame is accurate (Immediacy, Mechanism, Authorship), you first test whether the grievance reached you from a real deficit, your own or one suffered by someone you can identify and trace. Many grievances are absorbed from social groups, news, or online communities with no route back to any sufferer or any harm. The Grievance Gateway catches these copied grievances before they reach the heavier diagnostic machinery, saving cognitive resources and preventing participation in collective scapegoating narratives that were never grounded in a traced deficit. A grievance held on another's behalf passes where its route to the sufferer is traceable and fails where it is not.
Epistemic status
Construct (derived from Source Opacity and the Information Gap Principle; formalised from the Knowledge Patch children's adaptation) See Presumption Against Scapegoating, Three-Test Battery, Two-Question Diagnostic, Epistemic Suspension, Source Opacity.