Abstract

Contemporary democracies appeal to human dignity, rights, and the common good when they justify coercive laws, yet their dominant models of public reason are designed to hold explicit reference to Sabda, understood as Revelatory Word, the authoritative source of norm and telos, at a distance from the structure of public justification. Building on earlier work that developed The Cohesive Tetrad and a set of minimal dignity axioms, this article reconstructs Rawlsian, Habermasian, and liberal neutrality approaches to public reason and argues that, once those axioms are taken seriously, they tend to drift either toward “empty secularism,” where procedures remain while the horizon of norm and telos becomes thin, or toward “fearful theocracy,” where one interpretation of Sabda is insulated from correction. The article then presents The Cohesive Tetrad, with its six registers of Sabda, Logic, Qualia, Mistika, Akhlak, and Intention-Trace Alignment, as an architecture for democratic truth governance and as a way of understanding public reason as a multi-register practice shaped by conditions such as universality of address, non-coercion of conscience, accountable interpretation, and protection of dissent. Finally, it applies this architecture to stylised cases in bioethics, social policy, and artificial intelligence governance, and suggests that it offers a more stable grounding for strong claims about human dignity and telos in plural societies than either empty secularism or fearful theocracy.