Abstract

This paper introduces the Closure Paradigm: a recurrent cognitive configuration through which human societies respond to radical uncertainty and perceived existential threat. The Closure Paradigm is not an ideology, belief system, or error of reasoning, but a context-sensitive mode of interpretation that restructures how meaning, evidence, and agency are experienced under stress. When activated, this paradigm compresses ambiguity into simplified moral and ontological binaries, prioritizes coherence and group stability over accuracy, and renders alternative interpretations psychologically inaccessible. Crucially, it does not merely bias judgment; it reshapes the criteria by which judgments are made. Disconfirming evidence is not rejected as false, but reclassified as irrelevant, hostile, or unintelligible. The paper argues that this dynamic helps explain persistent patterns in human responses to radical otherness—such as artificial intelligence, extraterrestrial intelligence, religious difference, and large-scale social disruption—where technologically sophisticated societies nonetheless default to hostile, exclusionary frameworks. Rather than offering an empirically falsifiable theory, the Closure Paradigm is presented as a diagnostic concept: a tool for examining the limits of reflexive self-critique, the resilience of interpretive closure, and the conditions under which understanding itself becomes structurally constrained. The framework is intentionally provisional and self-reflexive, including the risk that it may itself become an instance of the phenomenon it describes. All numerical values and parameters in this model are phenomenological placeholders, intended to capture relative magnitudes and qualitative dynamics rather than precise measurements.