The structural stack is how bearing infrastructure is organized. Support for a participant’s direction is not a flat list of nice-to-haves but a set of dependencies, read from the bottom up:
- Ground — baseline security: resources, health, safety. Nothing above this functions without it, because a person consumed by survival cannot steer.
- Signal — reliable, uncaptured information about self and world, including honest exit signals about when a path is failing.
- Horizon — the range of futures a participant can actually see; you cannot orient toward a world you have never encountered.
- Navigation — the literacy, mentorship, experimentation, and trajectory modeling by which a direction is chosen and revised.
- Course-correction capacity — the rights, mobility, portability, and honest exit signals that let a direction change without ruin.
- Responsibility for the wake — bearing carries consequences; the right to redirect does not erase responsibility for what the previous course set in motion.
A participant with the top layers but not the bottom is not actually navigable.
The stack is why the model’s material guarantees and its navigational ones are not separate programs but the top and bottom of a single structure. See Supporting Individual Bearing.