This paper introduces and systematizes a new analytical concept—Perceptual Sovereignty of Reality (PSR)—to explain how modern institutions maintain stability by shaping how social members perceive, interpret, and internalize their own conditions, costs, and institutional relationships. Rather than relying primarily on coercion or material redistribution, contemporary governance increasingly operates through the management of perception.

The paper further develops three derivative concepts: Reality Perception Bias, Stratified Information Asymmetry and Perceptual Segmentation, and Narrative Labyrinths with the Production of “New Common Sense.” Together, these form an integrated analytical toolkit for identifying, comparing, and evaluating low-visibility mechanisms of cognitive power.

The core claim of this paper is that institutional justice cannot be assessed solely through resource distribution or formal accountability; it must also include systematic constraints on how reality itself is made perceptible.

Debates over taxation, social security, and public expenditure traditionally focus on questions of contribution, fairness, and sustainability. However, these debates often overlook a more fundamental dimension: how individuals are conditioned to understand these arrangements in the first place.

In many contemporary societies, institutional stability does not arise from broad agreement on distributive outcomes, but from limited public perception of cost origins, responsibility allocation, and alternative institutional possibilities. This paper conceptualizes this phenomenon as a distinct dimension of power—perceptual sovereignty—and proposes a framework for its systematic analysis.

Perceptual Sovereignty of Reality refers to the capacity of a power structure to systematically shape and constrain how social members perceive, interpret, and explain their own material conditions, institutional costs, and social relations.

This form of power does not primarily determine what is factually real. Instead, it determines:

• which aspects of reality become perceptible,

• how they are interpreted,

• and which structural discrepancies are normalized as inevitable or invisible.

Perceptual sovereignty operates not at the level of facts, but at the level of cognitive access.

The concept of perceptual sovereignty does not replace existing theories of political economy or power; rather, it repositions their analytical focus.

Where traditional analyses ask who controls resources or whether domination is legitimate, perceptual sovereignty asks:

Who determines whether domination itself becomes perceptible as a problem?

This shifts analysis upstream—from outcomes and legitimacy to the preconditions of social understanding.

Reality Perception Bias denotes a systematic divergence between individuals’ perceived social position and their actual structural position, produced under institutionalized informational and narrative conditions.

This bias does not stem from ignorance or misinformation. Instead, it emerges from rational interpretation within constrained explanatory frameworks.

Reality perception bias is likely present when:

• individuals accurately describe institutional surfaces but fail to integrate systemic structures;

• costs are perceived as natural conditions rather than institutional choices;

• injustice is interpreted as episodic failure rather than structural outcome.

The primary function of reality perception bias is de-problematization. Structural contradictions cease to appear as questions requiring resolution.

Stratified Information Asymmetry refers to systematic inequalities in access to institutional knowledge, cost structures, and decision rationales across social groups.

Perceptual Segmentation describes the stabilization of these inequalities into mutually incommensurable interpretive frameworks.

In such contexts, social actors do not merely disagree—they inhabit cognitively segmented realities.

• Competing social groups cannot translate each other’s institutional interpretations;

• public debate collapses into positional conflict rather than factual clarification;

• expert discourse and lived experience remain structurally disconnected.

Together, information stratification and perceptual segmentation form a cognitive firewall, preventing convergence on structural critiques without suppressing speech.

A Narrative Labyrinth consists of layered, internally coherent yet structurally misaligned explanations that continuously respond to critique while preventing systemic closure.

“New Common Sense” refers to the low-friction interpretive equilibrium that emerges after prolonged navigation of such labyrinths.

• every critique receives a response, yet no issue reaches resolution;

• increasing explanatory density reduces structural visibility;

• discourse is persistently redirected toward technical optimization rather than institutional choice.

Narrative labyrinths do not produce falsehoods. They produce cognitive fatigue, after which the least effortful interpretation stabilizes as social common sense.

A society exhibiting high perceptual sovereignty typically demonstrates:

1. fragmented perception of institutional costs;

2. centralized legitimacy of interpretation;

3. elevated social cost of structural questioning;

4. systematic temporal displacement of risk and responsibility.

The framework of perceptual sovereignty can be applied to:

• social security and taxation systems;

• labor relations and platform economies;

• public finance and debt governance;

• algorithmic decision-making and AI governance;

• expert-mediated policy communication.

This paper advances the following normative claim:

Any form of perceptual sovereignty that cannot be continuously contested will eventually translate into structural inequality.

Accordingly, institutional justice must include:

• transparency constraints on interpretive authority;

• reversibility of major institutional commitments;

• permanent mechanisms for public narrative audit.

As coercive governance recedes in visibility, the management of perception becomes a primary vector of institutional stability. By introducing the concept of perceptual sovereignty of reality, this paper provides an analytical instrument for identifying and comparing these low-friction mechanisms of power.

Future research may operationalize this framework for comparative institutional analysis, policy evaluation, and the governance of emerging socio-technical systems.

This framework builds upon, but departs from, existing theories of knowledge distribution.

Epistemic dispersion refers to the empirical condition that knowledge is decentralized, context-dependent, and unevenly distributed across individuals and institutions. This insight, most prominently articulated in economic and organizational theory, frames coordination as an information problem.

Perceptual governance, by contrast, concerns the institutional structuring of what counts as relevant knowledge, which interpretations are legitimized, and which cognitive pathways are normalized or marginalized. It is not an information problem, but a power problem.

The distinction can be summarized as follows:

• Epistemic dispersion asks: Who knows what?

• Perceptual governance asks: Who determines what is allowed to be perceived as meaningful?

The core transformation in modern societies may thus be described as a shift from controlling information to managing perception. Institutions increasingly tolerate informational plurality while maintaining stability through perceptual constraint.

Despite extensive literature on ideology, discourse, and knowledge-power relations, the concept of perceptual sovereignty remains under-theorized for three reasons.

First, dominant theories often treat perception as a derivative outcome rather than an independent analytical variable. They examine beliefs, ideologies, or discourses without isolating the prior structuring of perceptibility itself.

Second, much of political economy focuses on allocation and incentives, assuming that actors possess sufficient awareness of their structural position to form preferences. The question of how such awareness is institutionally conditioned is typically bracketed.

Third, contemporary governance increasingly operates through technocratic, expert-mediated, and algorithmic systems that do not rely on overt persuasion or ideological coherence. Existing concepts struggle to capture how such systems stabilize cognition without producing explicit doctrine.

Perceptual sovereignty addresses this gap by treating perceptibility as a governed domain.

Response: Perceptual sovereignty differs from ideology or discourse power in analytical focus. Ideology concerns belief content; discourse power concerns language and representation. Perceptual sovereignty targets the pre-discursive structuring of what becomes perceptible as an object of interpretation in the first place. It explains why certain questions never crystallize as questions.

Response: The framework does not claim direct measurability but proposes diagnostic indicators (cost perception gaps, interpretive centralization, questioning thresholds, temporal displacement) that can be operationalized comparati.

This paper introduces and systematizes a new analytical concept—Perceptual Sovereignty of Reality (PSR)—to explain how modern institutions maintain stability by shaping how social members perceive, interpret, and internalize their own conditions, costs, and institutional relationships. Rather than relying primarily on coercion or material redistribution, contemporary governance increasingly operates through the management of perception.

The paper further develops three derivative concepts: Reality Perception Bias, Stratified Information Asymmetry and Perceptual Segmentation, and Narrative Labyrinths with the Production of “New Common Sense.” Together, these form an integrated analytical toolkit for identifying, comparing, and evaluating low-visibility mechanisms of cognitive power.

The core claim of this paper is that institutional justice cannot be assessed solely through resource distribution or formal accountability; it must also include systematic constraints on how reality itself is made perceptible.

Debates over taxation, social security, and public expenditure traditionally focus on questions of contribution, fairness, and sustainability. However, these debates often overlook a more fundamental dimension: how individuals are conditioned to understand these arrangements in the first place.

In many contemporary societies, institutional stability does not arise from broad agreement on distributive outcomes, but from limited public perception of cost origins, responsibility allocation, and alternative institutional possibilities. This paper conceptualizes this phenomenon as a distinct dimension of power—perceptual sovereignty—and proposes a framework for its systematic analysis.

Perceptual Sovereignty of Reality refers to the capacity of a power structure to systematically shape and constrain how social members perceive, interpret, and explain their own material conditions, institutional costs, and social relations.

This form of power does not primarily determine what is factually real. Instead, it determines:

• which aspects of reality become perceptible,

• how they are interpreted,

• and which structural discrepancies are normalized as inevitable or invisible.

Perceptual sovereignty operates not at the level of facts, but at the level of cognitive access.

The concept of perceptual sovereignty does not replace existing theories of political economy or power; rather, it repositions their analytical focus.

Where traditional analyses ask who controls resources or whether domination is legitimate, perceptual sovereignty asks:

Who determines whether domination itself becomes perceptible as a problem?

This shifts analysis upstream—from outcomes and legitimacy to the preconditions of social understanding.

Reality Perception Bias denotes a systematic divergence between individuals’ perceived social position and their actual structural position, produced under institutionalized informational and narrative conditions.

This bias does not stem from ignorance or misinformation. Instead, it emerges from rational interpretation within constrained explanatory frameworks.

Reality perception bias is likely present when:

• individuals accurately describe institutional surfaces but fail to integrate systemic structures;

• costs are perceived as natural conditions rather than institutional choices;

• injustice is interpreted as episodic failure rather than structural outcome.

The primary function of reality perception bias is de-problematization. Structural contradictions cease to appear as questions requiring resolution.

Stratified Information Asymmetry refers to systematic inequalities in access to institutional knowledge, cost structures, and decision rationales across social groups.

Perceptual Segmentation describes the stabilization of these inequalities into mutually incommensurable interpretive frameworks.

In such contexts, social actors do not merely disagree—they inhabit cognitively segmented realities.

• Competing social groups cannot translate each other’s institutional interpretations;

• public debate collapses into positional conflict rather than factual clarification;

• expert discourse and lived experience remain structurally disconnected.

Together, information stratification and perceptual segmentation form a cognitive firewall, preventing convergence on structural critiques without suppressing speech.

A Narrative Labyrinth consists of layered, internally coherent yet structurally misaligned explanations that continuously respond to critique while preventing systemic closure.

“New Common Sense” refers to the low-friction interpretive equilibrium that emerges after prolonged navigation of such labyrinths.

• every critique receives a response, yet no issue reaches resolution;

• increasing explanatory density reduces structural visibility;

• discourse is persistently redirected toward technical optimization rather than institutional choice.

Narrative labyrinths do not produce falsehoods. They produce cognitive fatigue, after which the least effortful interpretation stabilizes as social common sense.

A society exhibiting high perceptual sovereignty typically demonstrates:

1. fragmented perception of institutional costs;

2. centralized legitimacy of interpretation;

3. elevated social cost of structural questioning;

4. systematic temporal displacement of risk and responsibility.

The framework of perceptual sovereignty can be applied to:

• social security and taxation systems;

• labor relations and platform economies;

• public finance and debt governance;

• algorithmic decision-making and AI governance;

• expert-mediated policy communication.

This paper advances the following normative claim:

Any form of perceptual sovereignty that cannot be continuously contested will eventually translate into structural inequality.

Accordingly, institutional justice must include:

• transparency constraints on interpretive authority;

• reversibility of major institutional commitments;

• permanent mechanisms for public narrative audit.

As coercive governance recedes in visibility, the management of perception becomes a primary vector of institutional stability. By introducing the concept of perceptual sovereignty of reality, this paper provides an analytical instrument for identifying and comparing these low-friction mechanisms of power.

Future research may operationalize this framework for comparative institutional analysis, policy evaluation, and the governance of emerging socio-technical systems.

This framework builds upon, but departs from, existing theories of knowledge distribution.

Epistemic dispersion refers to the empirical condition that knowledge is decentralized, context-dependent, and unevenly distributed across individuals and institutions. This insight, most prominently articulated in economic and organizational theory, frames coordination as an information problem.

Perceptual governance, by contrast, concerns the institutional structuring of what counts as relevant knowledge, which interpretations are legitimized, and which cognitive pathways are normalized or marginalized. It is not an information problem, but a power problem.

The distinction can be summarized as follows:

• Epistemic dispersion asks: Who knows what?

• Perceptual governance asks: Who determines what is allowed to be perceived as meaningful?

The core transformation in modern societies may thus be described as a shift from controlling information to managing perception. Institutions increasingly tolerate informational plurality while maintaining stability through perceptual constraint.

Despite extensive literature on ideology, discourse, and knowledge-power relations, the concept of perceptual sovereignty remains under-theorized for three reasons.

First, dominant theories often treat perception as a derivative outcome rather than an independent analytical variable. They examine beliefs, ideologies, or discourses without isolating the prior structuring of perceptibility itself.

Second, much of political economy focuses on allocation and incentives, assuming that actors possess sufficient awareness of their structural position to form preferences. The question of how such awareness is institutionally conditioned is typically bracketed.

Third, contemporary governance increasingly operates through technocratic, expert-mediated, and algorithmic systems that do not rely on overt persuasion or ideological coherence. Existing concepts struggle to capture how such systems stabilize cognition without producing explicit doctrine.

Perceptual sovereignty addresses this gap by treating perceptibility as a governed domain.

Response: Perceptual sovereignty differs from ideology or discourse power in analytical focus. Ideology concerns belief content; discourse power concerns language and representation. Perceptual sovereignty targets the pre-discursive structuring of what becomes perceptible as an object of interpretation in the first place. It explains why certain questions never crystallize as questions.

Response: The framework does not claim direct measurability but proposes diagnostic indicators (cost perception gaps, interpretive centralization, questioning thresholds, temporal displacement) that can be operationalized comparati.