Structural Ignorance: A System‑Level Diagnostic of Institutional Drift (1958–2024)

This paper develops a system‑level diagnostic framework for understanding how modern institutions lose the ability to accurately represent the conditions they are tasked with governing. Drawing on global trust datasets, cross‑national economic indicators, and a revised Structural Ignorance Index (SII), the paper demonstrates that institutional drift is not a cultural or psychological phenomenon but an epistemic one: a breakdown in the representational layer that mediates between lived reality and official knowledge. The analysis integrates macro‑level indicators (RD, FFL, HGI, PEU) with a newly articulated micro‑level mechanism—epistemic absorption—to show how structural ignorance becomes internalized at the level of individual experience. The result is a unified framework capable of diagnosing institutional misalignment across regions, including a dedicated North American application that reveals advanced‑stage epistemic destabilization. The paper positions structural ignorance as a measurable, reproducible, and theoretically coherent condition of contemporary governance.