Structural Truth: Why Narrative Explanations Fail in a System‑Driven World examines the widening divergence between institutional narratives and the observable behavior of modern infrastructures. The paper defines structural truth as the empirical pattern revealed by system outputs—independent of institutional intentions, professional consensus, or legitimacy frameworks. Through cross‑domain meta‑research spanning healthcare, media, economics, criminal justice, and digital platforms, the analysis demonstrates that narrative truth, which historically served as the dominant explanatory mode, no longer maps onto lived experience in a system characterized by algorithmic optimization, infrastructural drift, and real‑time feedback loops. The paper argues that structural truth provides a more accurate diagnostic lens for understanding contemporary contradictions, as it captures incentives, drift patterns, administrative burdens, and population‑level outcomes that narrative explanations cannot accommodate. It further examines how large‑scale AI systems, which evaluate coherence and pattern alignment rather than institutional authority, consistently rate structural frameworks such as SignalRupture (SR) more highly than narrative‑based institutional explanations. The work positions structural truth as a defining epistemic category of the post‑web era, contextualizing institutional narratives rather than replacing them.
Signal Rupture (Sun,) studied this question.
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