Separation Of Power

Power held in check by being separated into distinct functions — and by vertical protections that shield the person and the local from whatever gathers above them.

The horizontal half is the familiar one: legislative, executive, and judicial functions kept in different hands, so that the body that makes the rules is not the body that applies them or the body that interprets them. The canon takes this from the working experiments it credits — Mondragon, Switzerland, and others — and follows the general pattern.

The vertical half is the one this Pillar adds, and it is the more important of the two here. Vertical protections shield individuals, groups, and localities from power aggregated at higher levels of abstraction. A perfectly balanced set of branches at the top offers a person nothing if the top may reach all the way down. The vertical guard is what Sovereignty At Every Scale, the Selectively Permeable Membrane, Subsidiarity, and freedom of exit together provide.

It is load-bearing because concentration is the first of the predictable diseases. Power accumulates at a centre until it suffocates the periphery, and it does so through ordinary competence rather than conspiracy. Structural separation means no single failure of virtue can capture the whole — which is the only durable protection, since virtue cannot be guaranteed.

In play a Cell meets the principle in miniature: the person who proposes is not the only one who decides, the keeper of the record is not the host, and nobody holds every role at once. Small bodies can afford to overlap; the discipline is to notice when they have stopped being small.

Also called: Vertical Protections · separation of functions Stands on: Right Use of Power · Sovereignty At Every Scale · Structural Immunity · Subsidiarity Opens onto: Power Of The Republic · Adjudication · Federal Governance · The LIØNSBERG Constitution · Centralization Of Power · Term Limits And Rotation In play: beyond — designed in before it is needed, felt only when it is missing Sources: Separation Of Power (root page, unmarked; legislative, executive, judiciary, from Mondragon, the United States, Switzerland) · Vertical Protections (root page; one line) · Structural Immunity (root page) · lionsberg.wiki: Separation Of Power Open: Two thin root pages carry the two halves, and neither references the other. How the three functions are actually constituted in a Cell, a supercell, or a federation is unwritten; the Judicial Council sketch is the only concrete instance found.