Why Some Truth Systems Cannot Be Aligned
Some disagreements resist resolution—not because we lack empathy or effort, but because their base structure makes resolution impossible.
This isn’t about failure to empathize, poor communication, or lack of education. It’s about a deeper fracture in how different people (or systems) decide what counts as truth.
We often assume that if people could just agree on facts or values, disputes could be reconciled. But in some cases, the disagreement happens before facts or values are even allowed into the discussion. It happens at the level of admissibility: what a system will even recognize as a legitimate claim in the first place.
In legal terms, irreconcilable differences refer to a breakdown so deep that no amount of effort can repair it. In epistemic terms, the same can happen when two systems are structured to filter truth differently—and cannot even acknowledge the same inputs as valid.
Admissibility as Truth Filter
Every truth system has a built-in filter. It determines which kinds of statements are treated as meaningful, admissible, or worthy of evaluation.
In courtrooms, admissibility is literal: evidence either enters the courtroom or is excluded altogether, governed by structured rules. Hearsay, speculation, and irrelevant information may be barred—not because they’re false, but because they fall outside the frame of legally acceptable reasoning.
Epistemic systems function similarly. Some prioritize logical consistency and long-range coherence. Others admit symbolic, emotional, or narrative-based claims. Some require falsifiability. Others treat social resonance or divine authority as sufficient.
This is not a matter of preference. It’s a structural mechanism. And when two systems apply different admissibility filters, statements that are central in one system may not even enter the evaluative space of another.
Imagine one system only admits statements that can be logically justified over time. Another system prioritizes truth as it appears in the moment—through experience, story, or cultural meaning.
A claim made within the second system may seem rich, powerful, and true. But the first system sees it as incoherent, contradictory, or emotionally biased. It doesn’t even recognize the claim as processable.
This isn’t a failure of charity. It’s a result of incompatible structure. The claim simply never enters the logic of the other system.
These are not differences in judgment. They’re differences in what counts as a possible object of judgment.
Like radio waves tuned to different frequencies, each system hears only signals within its bandwidth—everything else is static.
Limits of Translation
When something cannot even be seen as “valid input,” it becomes illegible. It may carry deep meaning inside one truth system, but outside of it, it’s invisible, confusing, or even dangerous.
People often try to bridge this gap with translation. But translation assumes overlap in structure—that meaning can survive the journey from one filter into another.
When admissibility criteria diverge, translation becomes lossy. The receiver might hear the words but miss the architecture. The result is distortion: not miscommunication, but reformation of meaning into something unrecognizable.
This challenge of illegibility is perhaps best illustrated through an allegory:
The Cave of Shadows
In a cave, two prisoners sit facing opposite walls. Aria sees sharp geometric shadows—lines, angles, and cycles—and builds a logical system to predict their behavior. Belen sees fluid, evocative shadows—birds, faces, and storms—and weaves stories to explain their meaning.
Each worldview is coherent on its own terms. But Aria finds Belen’s stories incoherent and unstructured. Belen finds Aria’s logic cold and meaningless. Neither can process the other’s shadows through their filter.
One day, Aria turns slightly and glimpses Belen’s wall. She begins to map his symbols to her own, recognizing that both sets of shadows come from the same light source behind them. She begins predicting the appearance of Belen’s birds by mapping them onto her geometric sequences. In doing so, she approximates a broader view—one that models both systems without collapsing either.
But Belen doesn’t turn. His filter rejects Aria’s insights as alien. He continues to interpret his shadows through narrative, unable to see the shared source. Aria can now translate his meanings, but only partially. The emotional resonance he experiences doesn’t survive translation. A residue of meaning remains untranslatable.
This is structural illegibility. Not a failure of empathy, but a limit of the system. Even with goodwill, some meaning never crosses the boundary intact.
Some partial translations do succeed—such as Cold War treaties or AI models that adopt multicultural datasets. These moments don’t eliminate the underlying mismatch, but they offer brief zones of coherence. They’re useful—but fragile.
Filtering Isn’t Just for Structured Systems
Some truth systems deliberately embrace ambiguity. They allow contradictions, fluid categories, or symbolic truths. They avoid strict coherence in favor of expressive fidelity.
Yet even these flexible systems still filter. They typically exclude claims that depend too heavily on abstraction, closure, or deductive rigor. In other words, flexibility itself becomes the filter.
That’s important. Because it shows that all systems—whether rigid or fluid—exclude something. Even openness can become a gate.
This prevents the common mistake of romanticizing some systems as “inclusive” and others as “exclusive.” All truth systems draw boundaries.
The real question is: where, and with what effect?
Where These Differences Matter
Irreconcilable truth filters show up in history, governance, and cultural evolution—places where incompatible structures meet and the fractures cannot be negotiated away.
Here are three domains where structural illegibility reshaped the world:
A. Cold War Ideological Conflict
The Cold War was a collision of truth systems.
The Western liberal-capitalist model filtered truth through empirical verification, individual sovereignty, and adaptive institutional design.
The Soviet Marxist-Leninist model filtered truth through ideological coherence, historical determinism, and collective struggle.
Each side encountered the other’s assertions as fundamentally unintelligible.
Negotiations routinely failed not simply because of political distrust, but because each system’s claims failed to even enter the admissibility space of the other.
Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning captures this deeper fracture: Western systems sought meaning through the exploration of the unknown—through continual adaptation and empirical adjustment—whereas Soviet ideology demanded the imposition of a known ideal, enforced through narrative loyalty and the suppression of ambiguity.
The two systems didn’t just disagree.
They filtered reality differently—one through falsifiability and emergent meaning, the other through narrative consistency and teleological necessity.
Proxy wars, propaganda campaigns, and nuclear brinkmanship were material expressions of structural illegibility, not merely failures of diplomacy.
The Cold War’s end did not reconcile these systems.
The Soviet model imploded from within, hollowed by decades of economic exhaustion, systemic distortion, and the catastrophic moral toll of suppressing dissent.
As Alexander Solzhenitsyn chronicled in The Gulag Archipelago, the Soviet state did not merely mismanage policy—it devoured its own citizens through mass imprisonment, ideological purges, and an institutionalized machinery of terror that demanded the annihilation of truth to sustain itself.
Collapse came not through negotiation or gradual adaptation, but through the unsustainable weight of internal contradictions—economic, epistemic, and ethical—that shattered its legitimacy from the inside.
After the fall, hybrid models emerged: markets with statist controls, governance with mixed procedural and ideological logics.
These hybrids were not genuine integrations; they were strategic containments, enabling coexistence without resolving the underlying fracture.
B. Religious and Secular Legal Systems
The friction between religious law and secular law has exposed deep truth filter incompatibilities that cannot be reconciled without distortion.
Religious systems typically admit truth based on divine authority, sacred texts, and the coherence of symbolic tradition.
Secular systems filter truth through empirical repeatability, procedural equality, and evidentiary materialism.
In societies transitioning from religious to secular governance—or trying to accommodate both—this clash becomes visible in debates over education, civil rights, public morality, and legal authority.
For example, a religious court may admit prophetic revelation as legitimate evidence for adjudicating a dispute.
A secular court demands material evidence, testimony, and procedural neutrality.
The two systems are not simply in tension over outcomes.
They differ at the level of admissibility—what counts as a fact, what counts as harm, what counts as proof.
Attempts to merge these frameworks often fail.
Either secular systems carve out narrow exemptions for religious communities—without integrating their epistemology—or religious systems retreat into parallel structures, shielding their internal truth criteria from secular intervention.
Even where peaceful coexistence is achieved, it usually takes the form of carefully negotiated boundaries, not full integration.
Whenever an issue arises—such as debates over religious schooling, conscientious objections in medicine, or the scope of blasphemy laws—the irreconcilable fracture between sacred and empirical filters reemerges.
It isn’t merely a disagreement over policy.
It is a structural non-convergence in what each system believes can even be debated at all.
Structural Non-Resolution, Boundaries or War
What happens when two systems cannot reconcile their filters?
Sometimes, they attempt to proceed anyway—not by forcing agreement, but by managing the boundary.
They stop pretending that reconciliation is structurally possible.
Instead, they build interfaces—rules of engagement that preserve each system’s internal logic while preventing collapse.
This boundary management can take different forms:
- In diplomacy, it may mean treaties that regulate behavior without reconciling ideology.
- In governance, it might involve parallel legal structures under pluralistic frameworks.
- In relationships, it may mean agreeing to disagree—not rhetorically, but structurally.
But boundary management is not inevitable.
When recognition fails—or when systems demand illegitimate convergence—rupture becomes the outcome.
Sometimes, the conflict remains cold, frozen in procedural hostility.
Other times, it erupts into proxy wars, cultural revolutions, institutional collapses, or interpersonal breakdowns.
When the filters are non-compatible and the boundary is not respected, the clash is not a misunderstanding.
It is a structural inevitability—a collision between systems that do not admit each other’s existence on legitimate terms.
Sometimes this is survivable through fragmentation.
Sometimes, it is not.
What Cannot Be Merged
Some disagreements do not persist because we have failed to try hard enough.
They persist because we are attempting to reconcile what cannot be reconciled without structural collapse.
These are irreconcilable differences:
Truth systems with non-compatible admissibility filters.
They do not merely disagree.
They cannot even see each other’s claims as admissible.
When this fracture is not recognized:
- States fall into ideological purges or civil war.
- Institutions fragment into procedural deadlocks.
- Relationships rupture into unbridgeable alienation.
We must learn to notice:
- When a claim fails not because it is weak, but because it never entered the evaluative space at all.
- When translation bends meaning beyond recovery.
- When dialogue collapses not necessarily because of bad faith, but because of structural non-convergence.
From there, precision becomes survival…maybe.
Recognition of irreconcilable filters does not guarantee stability.
Design precision reduces the probability of systemic collapse, but does not eliminate it.
Where structure is preserved, limited coexistence might become possible.
Where structure is ignored, failure becomes certain.
In systems with non-compatible admissibility functions, consensus is structurally unstable.
Precision does not create convergence.
Precision constrains failure.
