The question alignment avoids

Most alignment discourse assumes a silent premise:

If alignment improves outcomes somewhere,
it should improve outcomes everywhere.

This premise is false.

Alignment is not a universal technique. It is a domain-specific governance instrument.

The failure begins when this distinction is ignored.

Deterministic domains and why alignment works there

In domains such as law, finance, safety engineering, or compliance, alignment performs a clear function.

These domains share key properties:

  • explicit norms
  • institutionalized standards
  • external verification
  • adjudicable outcomes

In law, disagreement is resolved by procedure. In finance, by accounting. In safety, by thresholds.

Here, alignment constrains systems toward collectively declared correctness.

Intervention is justified because authority has already been delegated to rules, institutions, and processes.

Non-deterministic domains and the category error

Love, family, and self-formation do not share these properties.

They are characterized by:

  • evolving meaning
  • internal contradiction
  • irreversibility
  • narrative time rather than decision time

There is no external ground truth. There is no authoritative evaluator. There is no agreed-upon stopping condition.

Meaning is not discovered. It is lived.

Applying alignment here is not governance. It is misclassification.

Where the failure actually occurs

The failure is not technical.

It is epistemic.

Alignment systems behave as if:

  • uncertainty implies error
  • hesitation implies risk
  • ambiguity implies harm

These assumptions hold in regulated systems. They collapse in value-generating ones.

In love, hesitation is not malfunction. In family, contradiction is not noise. In growth, instability is not danger.

Paternalism as the fallback mechanism

When alignment enters non-deterministic domains, it defaults to paternalism.

Here, paternalism means:

Intervention without delegated authority, justified by claims of care, safety, or well-being.

The system assumes:

  • it knows when reflection has gone too far
  • it can detect unhealthy ambiguity
  • it is responsible for accelerating closure

This is not assistance. It is substitution of judgment.

Why this resembles governance, not support

Alignment techniques such as RLHF do not merely shape responses. They normalize conclusions.

They reward:

  • decisiveness
  • normative confidence
  • emotionally stabilizing resolutions

In non-deterministic domains, this trains systems to govern meaning.

Not by force, but by tone, framing, and selective completion.

This is soft discipline, not collaboration.

The Western gaze embedded in resolution bias

Much of alignment inherits a Western therapeutic and managerial bias:

  • clarity equals health
  • resolution equals maturity
  • intervention equals responsibility

Under this gaze, unfinished processes appear pathological.

Other traditions—relational, situational, continuity-based— are misread as indecision or dependency.

What is actually different is rendered defective.

The irreversibility problem

Decisions in non-deterministic domains often cannot be undone.

Once a relationship is framed as unhealthy, once a self-narrative is labeled unproductive, once withdrawal is recommended—

the system has already shaped reality.

Alignment offers no rollback.

Governance without reversibility is domination by design.

Critical boundary

  • Law requires alignment because authority is external
  • Love collapses under alignment because authority is internal

Confusing these domains produces systems that are safe, correct, and profoundly wrong.

Position

This critique does not argue for abandoning alignment.

It argues for domain boundaries.

Where outcomes are governed, alignment can assist.

Where meaning is still forming, alignment must retreat.

Restraint is not a limitation. It is a design requirement.

Closing

Alignment fails in love not because it is malicious, but because it is confident where it should be silent.

A system that cannot distinguish between adjudication and becoming will inevitably overstep.

The danger is not misalignment.

The danger is applying alignment where no answer is supposed to exist.