A Unified Theory of Structural Alignment: Why Alignment Fails Under Scale, Abstraction, and Legibility Pressure

This article presents a unified diagnostic theory of structural alignment, explaining why systemic failures recur across artificial intelligence, institutional governance, and social justice despite high levels of technical sophistication and moral sincerity. It argues that alignment failure is not primarily the result of misaligned objectives or bad actors, but a predictable consequence of structural constraints introduced by scale, abstraction, and mediation. The theory distinguishes coherence (context-dependent alignment between perception, value, and action) from legibility, which relies on standardized representations and proxies. As systems scale, legibility necessarily displaces coherence, producing self-stabilizing failure dynamics in which correction is suppressed and silence is misread as success. The work concludes by rejecting design-based or procedural solutions, identifying hard structural boundaries beyond which alignment and moral agency become inoperable.