Though exaggeration and myth sometimes affect perceptions, the grievance underlying such causes was usually some very real experience - e.g. slavery, separate-but-equal (Jim Crow), ethnic and religious discrimination - with real effects on persons in the affected group. In response to the injustice, advocates for justice and reform arose, from among those have been wronged, as well as from among unaffected persons. Social change often takes time; people are born, people die. When an injustice is inflicted on multiple generations, it becomes a part of the consciousness of those affected: fear of acts of injustice; behaviors employed to avoid such acts of injustice; frustration and resentment. The fear, the avoidance behaviors, the frustration, the anger, and the resentment are all natural human responses to prolonged injustice, but, however understandable, nursing anger and resentment is injurious. Along with the various ill effects to personal health, anger and resentment color the resentful person’s perceptions, impairing their ability to recognize progress toward and accomplishments of reform - a self-defensive skepticism that protects from disappointment, but also hinders recognition of real improvements. Groups organized to advocate reform also tend to take on a life of their own, making them reluctant to acknowledge progress - if reform is complete and successful, the group loses its reason for continued existence. Grievance and advocacy have become such a way of life that cessation feels like the death of someone dear or a loss of purpose. This blinkered refusal to acknowledge progress and success, need for organizational survival, and passing of resentments to successive generations, even those who didn’t experience the injustices, creates a mindset of perpetual grievance.

When a group of people takes on such a mindset of perpetual grievance, several irrationalities may evidence themselves. Generations born after corrective reforms are enacted remain resentful over the original grievance - perpetual grievance. People who didn’t experience or see the injustices are suspicious of the actions of an entire class of people they blame for the injustices. They have widened blame for the injustices to include people who never perpetrated the injustices, and are unrelated to those who did - even people who worked for reform might receive blame for what they tried to reform from people who don’t care to learn about the reforms they won’t acknowledge. For the perpetually aggrieved, this resentment and suspicion has become a monochromatic lens through which their every experience is filtered and understood. Generations that didn’t experience the injustices, through their inherited resentment, often develop a sense of entitlement: they believe they are owed compensation for injustices they never experienced from people who weren’t perpetrators (or the descendants of perpetrators). This entitlement mindset can (on the part of those who feel entitled) both paralyze personal responsibility and blind people to the need therefor.

As in algebra, there is another side to this social equation. Most of those who are blamed for injustices in generations past were not perpetrators of the injustices, nor descendants of those who did. Thus, they, reasonably, refuse to assume responsibility and guilt for those injustices. This isn’t a denial of the seriousness of the injustices, however. With continual pressure to do so, a resentment arises toward those who urge them to assume the false guilt, to provide "compensation" for what they didn’t do. They grow so accustomed to being falsely accused, that they view all claims of new injustices as likely to be false. In self defense, they may avoid associations with persons they anticipate (sometimes incorrectly) will have a perpetual grievance attitude.

Perpetual grievance isolates and divides. The pseudo-aggrieved view the actions of those they blame with paranoid suspicion, perceiving insult and hostility where there is none. Those wrongly blamed tend to minimize association with the pseudo-aggrieved. Ill feelings easily escalate in such isolation. An attitude of perpetual grievance limits the accomplishments of those who nurse that attitude. They don’t perceive opportunities for self improvement and advancement. They believe they will be "held down" by prejudice, surrender to their own fatalism, and fail to try to advance themselves. They alienate people who would otherwise aid them. An entitlement attitude paralyzes personal initiative. Such persons will believe themselves trapped by society, when they have unknowingly entrapped themselves. Perpetual grievance is self-perpetuating, fed by injustices, insults, and hostility that are often mostly imaginary.

Ultimately, when entire sections of a society are motivated by grievance and resentment, society itself is harmed. When many in a society are skeptical of complaints of injustice, recognition and correction of real injustices are hindered and delayed. When groups within society are alienated from each other by suspicion and defensive avoidance, that society becomes vulnerable. Events can be misinterpreted. Demagogues can use lies and half-truths to stir up hatreds and hostile actions. When individuals lack initiative, a sense of personal responsibility, and are unable to see opportunities for education and self advancement, society loses, too, when that person doesn’t become what he or she could be.