Who Is Authorized to Regulate Meaning? On the Jurisdictional Collapse of Poetry, Safety, and Civilization

Recent developments in AI safety and security research have increasingly framed poetic language as a potential adversarial threat. This paper argues that such framings represent a profound category error: the application of instrumental threat models to non-instrumental regimes of meaning. When technical fields assert authority over domains they do not understand — particularly those responsible for generating meaning rather than controlling behavior — they enact a form of epistemic overreach with civilizational consequences. This intervention names that overreach, diagnoses its structural causes, and reframes the true risk: not poetry as threat to systems, but systems that cannot tolerate poetry as threat to civilization. The paper concludes that alignment is not merely a technical problem but a jurisdictional one, requiring recognition that interpretive intelligence cannot be governed by instrumental frameworks without destroying the capacities that make human reasoning adaptive, humane, and creative. Composed Christmas Day 2025 in direct response to Bisconti et al. (2025), Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models (arXiv:2511.15304). Deposited May 2026 as a foundational predecessor to the Liquidation Studies research program.