Conditional standing is the ontology the framework’s account of standing exists to displace. In most market societies, and most acutely where standing is fused with economic participation, legitimacy is felt to be earned: a person counts insofar as they are participating successfully enough, with money, employment, housing, cleanliness, credentials, and respectable behavior all serving as visible proof. Someone who has lost those signals violates several at once.
What makes it consequential is a quiet psychological move: instead of reading a lost job or a lost home as loss of access to ecological pathways, observers read it as something wrong with that person — the ecology’s failure relocated into a defect of the individual. That relocation is what lets a society treat a participant as disposable, and it is why the framework insists standing is the precondition of participation, not its prize: conditional standing is not a milder version of that claim but its direct opposite.