I keep noticing a tension: how can anyone ever agree with reality when reality itself is so often misunderstood, misrepresented, filtered, or missed entirely?
What we call “reality” is never encountered directly. It arrives mediated — through perception, language, memory, culture, incentives, fear. Even before power enters the picture, misunderstanding is already baked in. Two people can be acting in good faith, observing the same world, and still walk away with incompatible truths. Not because one is lying, but because each is modeling something different.
So when societies talk about “agreeing on reality,” what they really mean is agreeing on a model of reality. A simplified, stabilized version that allows coordination. These agreements take many forms — hierarchies, institutions, markets, narratives, technologies — but they all serve the same function: reducing ambiguity enough to act. None of them guarantee accuracy. They only guarantee consistency.
Hierarchy, in particular, doesn’t resolve disagreement so much as override it. When consensus fails, authority steps in. Reality becomes whatever is legible to the system, whatever can be enforced, measured, repeated. Stability is mistaken for truth. Compliance is mistaken for understanding.
Language plays its own quiet role here. Reality is fluid and continuous; language is discrete. The moment we name something, we freeze it. Agreement often forms around labels rather than processes, nouns rather than motion. We argue over words while the underlying dynamics keep shifting beneath us.
This makes “agreement” a strangely dangerous goal. High agreement can coexist with deep misalignment from what is actually happening. History is full of moments where near-total consensus formed around ideas that were later revealed to be catastrophically wrong. Meanwhile, early truth often looks like dissent, confusion, or incoherence.
Maybe the problem isn’t that we fail to agree on reality. Maybe it’s that we expect agreement to be final.
A more honest approach might be provisional alignment — shared models that are explicitly incomplete, revisable, and open to friction. Multiple perspectives constrained by evidence and feedback, not flattened into a single authoritative story. Reality approached as a process, not a verdict.
In that framing, disagreement isn’t a breakdown. Disagreement is a signal. It’s information about where our models stop matching the world. The danger isn’t disagreement — it’s forgetting that our agreements were ever provisional at all.