The right to the question mark is the most direct safeguard of ontological fidelity, and the point where it meets interior sovereignty. A society cannot detect that a form has drifted if its institutions hold authority over interior reality, because the first sign of drift is a participant who senses a mismatch before it can be demonstrated:
No institution may eliminate the participant’s ontological question mark — not religion, government, employer, family, AI, or the model itself.
Protecting the question does not make the questioner correct; it keeps their interior signal legitimate rather than pathologized or punished — the crucial difference between a field that can learn it has gone wrong and one that has sealed itself against the news. It depends on standing (you keep legitimacy while disagreeing) and on free signal (the question can travel), and it is the seed from which emergence, forking, and every other route of correction grow. A field that can extinguish the question mark has made itself, quietly, uncorrectable. See The Drift Detectors.