The Chain of Ownership: A Conditional Account of Suffering, Selfhood, Responsibility, Agency, Desire, Anger, and Narrative Self-Construction

Abstract

This paper argues that six recurring problems of lived experience—suffering, selfhood, ethical responsibility, agency, desire and anger, and narrative self-construction—are not isolated puzzles. They are interlinked phases of a single causal process. Experience becomes suffering when sensation or contact is interpreted through appropriation, resistance, and self-centered narration. The self appears as an ownership pattern constructed through memory, bodily continuity, perception, intention, and social recognition. Ethical responsibility remains possible because responsibility does not require a permanent inner substance; it requires intention, action, consequence, and continuity of practice and character. Agency is not absolute independence from causality, but the capacity to intervene within causal processes through attention, interpretation, restraint, and response. Desire and anger are not fixed personal essences; they are conditioned patterns involving sensation, valuation, bodily activation, memory, and repetition. Narrative self-construction turns small events into expanded stories of “I,” “me,” and “mine,” thereby intensifying suffering and reinforcing identity. The paper does not claim to settle every metaphysical question about consciousness or reality. Its claim is narrower: these six lived problems can be clarified and made more practically tractable when they are understood as linked processes rather than separate mysteries.