Structural Distance Theory: A Mechanism-Level Account of Epistemic Drift in Complex Systems

Modern institutions increasingly exhibit epistemic drift: delayed recognition of emerging risks, divergence between official representations and ground‑level conditions, and widening testimonial fractures across social strata. Existing frameworks—polarization, misinformation, administrative failure, complexity governance—identify important symptoms but do not specify the upstream structural conditions under which such failures become synchronized and self‑reinforcing. This paper develops Vertical Distance Theory (VDT), a structural account of how epistemic drift emerges when hierarchical separation jointly degrades reciprocal visibility, feedback fidelity, and consequence coupling. When these V–F–C impairments co‑occur, systems lose contact with the lived realities they are meant to register, producing stratified epistemic pathologies: abstraction and risk‑blindness among insulated elites, stability‑seeking proceduralism in middle strata, and high‑resolution experiential knowledge without institutional traction downstream. VDT identifies empirical signatures of vertical distance—including exposure gradients, institutional responsiveness lag, representational divergence, and cross‑stratum testimonial fracture—and argues that the mechanism generalizes to organizational, computational, and hybrid systems. A brief link to Truth Stabilization Theory (TST) clarifies why reducing vertical distance is necessary but insufficient for sustained truth‑tracking, highlighting the epistemic capacities required for drift resistance.