Why “Truth” Without Lived Experience Becomes a Closed System

Modern political systems often claim to possess “truth”:
the correct theory, the right direction, the inevitable path of history.

Yet a strange pattern appears across ideologies and regimes:
this truth is constantly asserted, but rarely defined.

It is seldom presented as a testable claim.
It rarely specifies failure conditions.
And it is almost never subjected to continuous verification through people’s real lives.

This avoidance is not accidental.

Perhaps what is being avoided is not a complex answer,
but a dangerously simple standard—one that existing power structures cannot afford to accept.

Across political traditions, disagreements are loud.
But at their origin, they quietly converge on one assumption:

People organize politically in order to make life better.

The left emphasizes equality and protection.
The right emphasizes order and security.
Democratic theory emphasizes accountability and consent.

Different paths—but the same implicit destination:
the sustained improvement of people’s lived experience.

This principle functions like a North Star.
It does not dictate routes, but it provides orientation.

And yet, in practice, it is often the first thing to be forgotten.

If political legitimacy is reduced to its most basic structure,
the ideal model is remarkably simple:

1. Starting point: concrete people, real needs, real suffering

2. Association: collective action to improve shared conditions

3. Authorization: power delegated to an executing group

4. Evaluation: decisions assessed by lived outcomes

5. Renewal: trust renewed—or withdrawn—based on feedback

At the center of this loop lies a non-negotiable chain:

Power → Responsibility → Outcomes → Lived Experience → Renewed Trust

Where this chain remains intact, legitimacy does not need to be endlessly proclaimed.
It is continuously earned.

Political drift usually begins quietly, under the banner of “rational governance.”

Gradually, a substitution occurs:

• Abstract goals replace concrete experience

• Metrics and indicators override lived reality

• Stability and obedience replace trust and authorization

Personal suffering is reclassified as:
“necessary sacrifice,”
“transitional cost,”
or “individual adaptation failure.”

At this point, people are no longer the purpose of governance—
they become variables to be managed.

Once this shift happens, legitimacy begins to close in on itself.

Many systems that claim to possess “correct theory” are not unaware of this standard.
They are structurally unable to tolerate it.

For three reasons:

1. Lived experience is distributed
   It cannot be centralized or fully controlled.

2. Lived experience is immediate
   It resists indefinite deferral into a promised future.

3. The rulers’ experience diverges from the ruled
   Over time, governance becomes self-referential.

Accepting lived experience as the ultimate test would mean surrendering monopoly over the definition of success.

For any bureaucratic or vanguardist system, this is an existential risk.

Lived experience has one decisive property:

It cannot be represented or substituted.

No organization can feel pain on behalf of others.
No theory can define happiness for someone else.

Therefore, any political system that asks individuals to suspend their own experience
in favor of abstract narratives has already crossed the boundary of legitimacy.

When truth exists only through institutional interpretation,
it ceases to be a reference point and becomes a command.

This also means the North Star does not need official recognition.

At the micro level, legitimacy can be rebuilt through practice:

• small scale

• voluntary participation

• exit options

• comparison and learning

• tolerance of failure

In such spaces—cooperatives, communities, experimental governance—
trust is not declared.
It is updated through lived outcomes.

This is not utopian politics.
It is politics stripped of self-referential immunity.

A North Star does not issue orders.
It prevents disorientation.

When politics once again takes lived experience as its coordinate,
legitimacy regains direction.

When that coordinate is removed,
even the most elegant theories collapse into closed systems.

Truth may never have disappeared.
It simply refuses to live inside structures that cannot survive it.

A common objection is:
“If legitimacy is based on lived experience, doesn’t politics dissolve into subjective chaos?”

This objection conflates two distinct things.

Lived experience is not momentary emotion or personal whim.
It refers to sustained, structurally patterned conditions, such as:

• long-term economic insecurity

• persistent exposure to risk or precarity

• chronic loss of dignity in work or care

• widespread inability to imagine a viable future

These experiences are:

• cumulative, not instantaneous

• comparable across groups and time

• collectively articulated and recognized

What is arbitrary is not lived experience—but abstract judgment detached from it.

Another institutional response is:
“Individual perception is unreliable. We must trust data.”

The issue is not data itself, but its structural limits:

1. Metrics average out distribution
   Severe suffering can coexist with “positive” aggregates.

2. Metrics are selectively constructed
   What is measured reflects institutional priorities, not lived reality.

3. Metrics lack experiential density
   Growth can coincide with burnout, anxiety, and social exhaustion.

Data should inform decisions—not invalidate lived testimony.

When people report suffocation and the system replies with charts,
the failure lies not in perception, but in representation.

This framework is not ideology-specific.

Some socialist systems initially improved material conditions,
but later replaced experiential feedback with doctrinal correctness and historical inevitability.

Once correction mechanisms disappeared, legitimacy hollowed out from within.

Systems prioritizing order or growth often treated dignity and safety as expendable variables.

Short-term efficiency was achieved; long-term trust was not.

Even formal democracies suffer legitimacy decay when procedural success
no longer corresponds to improvements in everyday life.

Institutions remain functional. Meaning does not.

These objections share a common impulse:
to locate legitimacy somewhere more controllable than human experience.

But lived experience is not a weakness of politics.
It is its final constraint.

Once even that constraint is removed,
what remains is power speaking only to itself.

To the extent possible under law, the author has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work:

Title: When Power Stops Serving Life: The Forgotten North Star of Political Legitimacy
Subtitle: Why “Truth” Without Lived Experience Becomes a Closed System

This work is published under CC0 1.0 Universal. You can:

• Copy, modify, distribute, and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, without asking permission.

• Use it in your own projects, DAOs, communities, or publications.

• Incorporate it into blockchain or decentralized archives (IPFS, Arweave, Nostr, etc.) freely.

Full legal text: CC0 1.0 Universal

Author Statement:
I dedicate this work to the public domain, enabling anyone to use, adapt, or preserve it for the expansion of knowledge and the shared understanding of political legitimacy.

Why “Truth” Without Lived Experience Becomes a Closed System

Modern political systems often claim to possess “truth”:
the correct theory, the right direction, the inevitable path of history.

Yet a strange pattern appears across ideologies and regimes:
this truth is constantly asserted, but rarely defined.

It is seldom presented as a testable claim.
It rarely specifies failure conditions.
And it is almost never subjected to continuous verification through people’s real lives.

This avoidance is not accidental.

Perhaps what is being avoided is not a complex answer,
but a dangerously simple standard—one that existing power structures cannot afford to accept.

Across political traditions, disagreements are loud.
But at their origin, they quietly converge on one assumption:

People organize politically in order to make life better.

The left emphasizes equality and protection.
The right emphasizes order and security.
Democratic theory emphasizes accountability and consent.

Different paths—but the same implicit destination:
the sustained improvement of people’s lived experience.

This principle functions like a North Star.
It does not dictate routes, but it provides orientation.

And yet, in practice, it is often the first thing to be forgotten.

If political legitimacy is reduced to its most basic structure,
the ideal model is remarkably simple:

1. Starting point: concrete people, real needs, real suffering

2. Association: collective action to improve shared conditions

3. Authorization: power delegated to an executing group

4. Evaluation: decisions assessed by lived outcomes

5. Renewal: trust renewed—or withdrawn—based on feedback

At the center of this loop lies a non-negotiable chain:

Power → Responsibility → Outcomes → Lived Experience → Renewed Trust

Where this chain remains intact, legitimacy does not need to be endlessly proclaimed.
It is continuously earned.

Political drift usually begins quietly, under the banner of “rational governance.”

Gradually, a substitution occurs:

• Abstract goals replace concrete experience

• Metrics and indicators override lived reality

• Stability and obedience replace trust and authorization

Personal suffering is reclassified as:
“necessary sacrifice,”
“transitional cost,”
or “individual adaptation failure.”

At this point, people are no longer the purpose of governance—
they become variables to be managed.

Once this shift happens, legitimacy begins to close in on itself.

Many systems that claim to possess “correct theory” are not unaware of this standard.
They are structurally unable to tolerate it.

For three reasons:

1. Lived experience is distributed
   It cannot be centralized or fully controlled.

2. Lived experience is immediate
   It resists indefinite deferral into a promised future.

3. The rulers’ experience diverges from the ruled
   Over time, governance becomes self-referential.

Accepting lived experience as the ultimate test would mean surrendering monopoly over the definition of success.

For any bureaucratic or vanguardist system, this is an existential risk.

Lived experience has one decisive property:

It cannot be represented or substituted.

No organization can feel pain on behalf of others.
No theory can define happiness for someone else.

Therefore, any political system that asks individuals to suspend their own experience
in favor of abstract narratives has already crossed the boundary of legitimacy.

When truth exists only through institutional interpretation,
it ceases to be a reference point and becomes a command.

This also means the North Star does not need official recognition.

At the micro level, legitimacy can be rebuilt through practice:

• small scale

• voluntary participation

• exit options

• comparison and learning

• tolerance of failure

In such spaces—cooperatives, communities, experimental governance—
trust is not declared.
It is updated through lived outcomes.

This is not utopian politics.
It is politics stripped of self-referential immunity.

A North Star does not issue orders.
It prevents disorientation.

When politics once again takes lived experience as its coordinate,
legitimacy regains direction.

When that coordinate is removed,
even the most elegant theories collapse into closed systems.

Truth may never have disappeared.
It simply refuses to live inside structures that cannot survive it.

A common objection is:
“If legitimacy is based on lived experience, doesn’t politics dissolve into subjective chaos?”

This objection conflates two distinct things.

Lived experience is not momentary emotion or personal whim.
It refers to sustained, structurally patterned conditions, such as:

• long-term economic insecurity

• persistent exposure to risk or precarity

• chronic loss of dignity in work or care

• widespread inability to imagine a viable future

These experiences are:

• cumulative, not instantaneous

• comparable across groups and time

• collectively articulated and recognized

What is arbitrary is not lived experience—but abstract judgment detached from it.

Another institutional response is:
“Individual perception is unreliable. We must trust data.”

The issue is not data itself, but its structural limits:

1. Metrics average out distribution
   Severe suffering can coexist with “positive” aggregates.

2. Metrics are selectively constructed
   What is measured reflects institutional priorities, not lived reality.

3. Metrics lack experiential density
   Growth can coincide with burnout, anxiety, and social exhaustion.

Data should inform decisions—not invalidate lived testimony.

When people report suffocation and the system replies with charts,
the failure lies not in perception, but in representation.

This framework is not ideology-specific.

Some socialist systems initially improved material conditions,
but later replaced experiential feedback with doctrinal correctness and historical inevitability.

Once correction mechanisms disappeared, legitimacy hollowed out from within.

Systems prioritizing order or growth often treated dignity and safety as expendable variables.

Short-term efficiency was achieved; long-term trust was not.

Even formal democracies suffer legitimacy decay when procedural success
no longer corresponds to improvements in everyday life.

Institutions remain functional. Meaning does not.

These objections share a common impulse:
to locate legitimacy somewhere more controllable than human experience.

But lived experience is not a weakness of politics.
It is its final constraint.

Once even that constraint is removed,
what remains is power speaking only to itself.

To the extent possible under law, the author has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work:

Title: When Power Stops Serving Life: The Forgotten North Star of Political Legitimacy
Subtitle: Why “Truth” Without Lived Experience Becomes a Closed System

This work is published under CC0 1.0 Universal. You can:

• Copy, modify, distribute, and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, without asking permission.

• Use it in your own projects, DAOs, communities, or publications.

• Incorporate it into blockchain or decentralized archives (IPFS, Arweave, Nostr, etc.) freely.

Full legal text: CC0 1.0 Universal

Author Statement:
I dedicate this work to the public domain, enabling anyone to use, adapt, or preserve it for the expansion of knowledge and the shared understanding of political legitimacy.