Ontological fidelity is the function that keeps every other function honest. Where the others ask whether the ecology can do something, this asks whether it can tell when all of them have stopped corresponding to what matters — and reopen. It rests on a distinction most institutions are built to miss:
Ontological drift is not that a system stopped working. It is that the form may still work, and no longer corresponds to what life is asking to become.
A company can be profitable, a role performed, an institution functioning, and something underneath can have become untrue — the hardest kind of wrongness to correct, because its success defends it against the question. The function therefore refuses the assumption that functioning validates form, treats all forms as provisional, and cannot be delegated to any central authority without becoming the power to decide what may be doubted. What it guarantees is deliberately modest:
The model does not keep society ontologically correct — that is impossible. It keeps ontological correction possible.
It is the discipline that keeps no form — including ecological capacity and the model itself — from being crowned. See Ontological Fidelity.