Coda: In Plain Terms

Plainly: someone has to hold authority, and the role itself slowly distorts whoever holds it. Good design develops stewards and protects them from their own power. — The Cardinal Scale rotates its stewards and, just as important, watches over them — because it learned that the danger is not bad people seeking power, but good people being changed by it. Stewardship here is a practice, not a throne.

Toward the coherent substrate. Authority without stewardship reliably regrows the extractive reflex, even in good people. Developing stewards, and protecting them from their own power, is how coherence survives contact with leadership. The pivot is not only structural; it is the ongoing tending of the humans who hold it.