Why do people fail to understand one another-even when they use the same words?

This book begins with a deceptively simple question, then takes the reader on a journey across linguistics, cognitive science, anthropology, and the history of civilization. Drawing on the author's original research into the structural limits of language, it reexamines what was once called "magic" not as superstition, but as a coherent system of cognitive operation-one that has never truly disappeared.

From the Tower of Babel to artificial intelligence, from ancient ritual to the institutions that govern us today, the same structure keeps returning: language does not merely describe the world. It constitutes it.

For anyone navigating the fractures of our current age, this book offers not comfort, but clarity-and perhaps, a way of seeing that cannot be unseen.