Empathy requires a kind of social translation. We worked with the Napolitan Institute in the US to convene a mini-public of over 2,000 people — five from each congressional district — and ask them about freedom, equality, and the personal experiences behind their beliefs. Many Americans suffer from an illusion of polarisation: they assume that people who care about climate justice and people who care about biblical creation care have nothing in common, when in fact they care about the same things through different social experience. We deployed what is called a Habermas machine — an AI model that translates between those frames, rendering climate-justice language into biblical verse and vice versa. With this, more than 96 percent of participants agreed on fundamental values. Even the most divisive issue, affirmative action, reached almost 70 percent agreement. The US is not as polarised as it believes. Empathy does not require speaking another tribe's language — but it does require social-translation tools that make the overlap visible.