A pattern, described honestly so its subject can recognize it: take margin by friction, wait, and when aggregate pressure spikes, concede the minimum — then retain the rest and reset. This map names each phase and exposes the one quantity the loop depends on staying hidden: the concession is always smaller than the extraction, and the gap is the profit. Oriented for the climber — see the loop, name your phase, document, aggregate, find the node.
The loop only works if the give-back is smaller than the take. A concession that actually made people whole would zero the profit — so the concession is calibrated to the minimum that quiets the pressure, not the amount that repairs the harm. The difference is retained every cycle. Naming this is the whole point: the give-back feels like resolution and is partial by construction.
Phase 1 works because the friction is tuned: the cost to contest a single loss is set above the size of that single loss. So for any one person, fighting it isn't worth it — rational individuals walk away, and the extraction stays mostly uncontested. This is the attenuating staircase: the climb is engineered to cost more than the prize, so the prize is abandoned. The loss is real; the contest is just made not-worth-it, one person at a time.
The loop's one weakness is the same asymmetry that powers it. It survives by keeping each loss individual (where contest-cost wins). It breaks when losses are made collective (where the pattern becomes visible and the math flips).
The same mechanism described from the operator's chair is an extraction playbook; described from the subject's chair it is a defense manual. This map is the second one — deliberately. It names the loop so the people it runs on can see which phase they're in, refuse the framing that the concession is resolution, and convert their individual loss into the aggregate the loop has no defense against. The friction is tuned to beat you alone. It was never tuned to beat the pattern.