Propagation without dependency is the diagnostic that separates healthy vitality from charismatic capture. Because a field can outsource its life to one compelling source, the aliveness function needs a way to tell the difference between vitality that spreads and vitality that concentrates:
After encountering this source of vitality, does the surrounding field become more alive itself — or more dependent on returning to the source?
The healthy form spreads activation rather than demanding permanent orbit: a great teacher makes students more alive, a great leader creates other leaders, a great musician activates something in listeners, a great community produces more participants rather than more spectators. It scales from people to institutions — a great school produces increasingly alive students rather than one dazzling teacher amid dependents; a great company develops distributed capacity rather than relying forever on a founder’s charisma. It is the same test applied to work as the vitality delta of a project, and it is the elegant polarity at the heart of the function: the generation of aliveness must always circulate into wider capacity rather than pooling around a source.