Orientational Residue: How Unrepaired Injuries Become Portable Political Grievance

This article asks how a specific social injury becomes portable political grievance. The central claim is that some unrepaired injuries leave behind a low-information, target-specific negative orientation — orientational residue — that can persist after detailed memory of the originating event has thinned. The framework distinguishes three objects often conflated: event-memory (what is remembered), orientational residue (the stance transmitted), and activated narrative (the story later generated under stress). Its load-bearing claim is asymmetric decay: factual content of an injury narrative is costly to maintain and tends to erode, while a target-specific interpretive prior is cheaper to transmit and may persist. Persistence depends on social carriers — language, family transmission, institutions, place, and reinforcing contact — and on carrier density rather than geographic concentration. The framework's strong portability claim is intergenerational: orientation can travel across people who did not directly experience the original injury and attach to later grievances against the same kind of authority. Cross-domain travel across structurally different target types is presented as a related hypothesis, not as demonstrated. Two origination paths are distinguished: injury-derived residue, which skeletonizes through erosion, and mythic or constructed injury narratives, which are assembled for transmission. The article distinguishes acute political entrepreneurship, which converts fresh grievance into rapid political consequence, from latent entrepreneurship, which operates on residue decades later. The framework specifies scope conditions, observable indicators, evidentiary tiers, and falsifiers. Empirical anchors illustrate components of the mechanism with differing evidentiary status, ranging from full-mechanism cases to exploratory applications. The contribution is to specify how political contagion can occur without uniform exposure: a transmissible orientation that makes later stresses feel newly predictive of old expectations.