“We only responded.”
We didn't start
this.
Every side of every fight can tell you exactly what started it, and no two accounts begin in the same place.
Here is that one disagreement about where the story starts, growing from a single person all the way to the whole planet.
Underneath, it's always the same four moves.
Something happens between two sides.
Each remembers their move as the response.
So both are defending themselves.
And the next move is a response too.
The same shape every time. Now watch the stage get bigger. →
You replay the argument starting from what they said.
Your own tone is remembered as a reaction, because from inside it was one — you felt the provocation and then you spoke.
Their tone is remembered as a choice, because you did not feel what came before it. Same event, two different first frames.
Both of you can prove the other one escalated first.
Both proofs are real. Each of you is holding a sequence that is accurate from where you were standing, and the sequences overlap everywhere except the beginning.
So the argument stops being about the thing and becomes about the tape — which cannot be settled, because neither of you has the other's copy.
Two children, two accounts, both completely sincere.
This is the clearest version of the mechanism, because nobody is sophisticated enough to be strategic about it yet — they simply remember it differently.
The adult who arrives has to pick a story with no tape, and whichever they pick teaches one child that the truth is decided by who tells it better.
Two teams each have a thread proving the other one went around them.
Written records make it worse rather than better: each side keeps the messages that show what was done to them, and those archives are genuinely accurate and completely different.
So the dispute becomes a contest of documentation, and the side with the better filing wins an argument about who was provoked.
Each party's account begins one move after the other's.
Where the story starts is the whole argument, so choosing the starting point is choosing the verdict — and both sides choose sincerely, from what they remember costing them.
Because escalation is always framed as a response, there is no move available that anyone will read as beginning something.
Two histories of the same border, each one starting later than the other.
At this scale the disagreement is not about facts but about the first frame, and the first frame is chosen by which grievance is still being felt.
That is why nothing settles it. Every retaliation is genuinely a retaliation, and a sequence where every step is a response has no author anywhere in it.
The next argument you are in will have two honest accounts of who began it.
Not one honest and one false — two honest. Memory does not store the sequence neutrally; it stores what was done to you in detail and what you did in summary. So both people are telling the truth as they have it, and both of them are starting the tape a step after the other side did.
“We only responded.”
— and both of you are sure.