Provisional legitimacy is the deepest safeguard of ontological fidelity: no form receives permanent authority. All forms drift — institutions, identities, roles, laws, metrics, business models, philosophies, relationships, and No Wasted Geometry itself — so none earns permanent ontological legitimacy merely because it once worked.
Not disposable — provisional. Forms may deserve continuity, respect, and stability; they do not get permanence.
The asymmetry it establishes is the load-bearing one: participants have standing; forms have conditional legitimacy. That is what lets an ecology keep the living while releasing what has finished, and it applies with most force to the strongest forms, since success is exactly what makes a form hardest to question — hence the inversion that the stronger a form becomes, the stronger its obligation to remain open to review. It is the principle behind provisional identity at the personal scale and behind the rule that no form has an inherent right to perpetuity at the institutional one. See Ontological Fidelity.