An executive that structurally cannot accumulate excessive power. Leaders paid for how long their work survives. Institutions born with lifecycles — spun up, held to their purpose, and sunset when the work is done. And a constitutional bet you can evaluate as a prediction: under this design, apathy buys smallness, not tyranny.
This is a proposal about institutional lifecycle management. Every institution we live under knows how to be born and grow; almost none knows how to stay aligned with its purpose, and none knows how to die. This proposal designs all four stages — how an institution is spun up, how it earns credibility, how it is held to its purpose while it runs, and how it is retired once its work is done — so that maintaining itself out of habit stops being an option.
It is one composition, not the answer. The mechanisms assembled here are drawn from the whitepaper's research into governance mechanism design, which maps many more than appear here. Governance is search (chapter 2); this proposal is one point in the search space, published so it can be tested — first by argument, then smaller before larger. Throughout, trust in leaders is treated as an output of the mechanism — earned through legible incentives and revocable power — never as an input the system depends on.
And it is a subset of governance, deliberately. Courts, policing, taxation, and the civil administration a society needs are outside this document's scope; what is explored here is the legislative-and-accountability core — how rules get made, judged, and retired. None of it is offered as easy. Governance is hard, there is no shortage of actors who see advantage in co-opting its powers, and Franklin's answer, at the close of the 1787 constitutional convention, about what it had produced — a republic, if you can keep it — is still the truth of the genre. We are not proposing easy things; we are proposing doable things: mechanisms with low friction for engagement, built to reduce apathy rather than assume it away. The platform underneath is itself agnostic — like a contract runtime, a system that neutrally executes whatever rules are written on top of it, it offers the levers, and each polity composes its own program from them. This proposal is one such program.
Citizens can kill but not draft; delegates can decide but not propose; leaders can propose but not decide. Each tier is incomplete without the others.