Unconditional standing does not mean no coercion. Wherever participants can seriously harm one another, some restraint is unavoidable, and the framework has to say plainly that it permits it — restriction, confinement, emergency intervention, narrowly justified mandated treatment. The question this forces is not whether coercion happens but what standing amounts to for the person inside it. The answer is not a comforting label laid over restraint. Standing does real work here, and the work it does is to reverse a presumption.
The burden of proof sits on power
Without standing, the logic of coercion runs one way: the institution has custody, therefore it decides. Standing inverts it. The participant remains the presumptive holder of jurisdiction over their own life, and the institution must justify every power it takes. Liberty is the baseline; coercion is the exception that has to earn itself, again and again, for as long as it lasts. So the institution continuously demonstrates the legitimacy of continued restraint; the participant does not continuously demonstrate their readiness for freedom.
That reframes a phrase the framework used to lean on. “Jurisdiction contracts; standing persists” quietly permits the wrong picture — a person’s sovereignty shrinking globally toward near-total restraint while an abstraction called standing is said to survive. The truer statement is that self-jurisdiction does not contract as a whole. It stays presumptive and intact, and specific powers are overridden one justified exception at a time — a bounded override, never a global contraction. That single change blocks the dangerous slide from incapacity to diminished jurisdiction to institutional ownership.
Coercion may override a decision. It does not acquire the person.
Four kinds of restraint, four burdens
“Coercion” is too blunt a word for what are really four different acts, and they cannot share one justification. Boundary enforcement — you cannot assault another participant — is an ordinary reciprocal limit. Consequence after violation — restitution, exclusion from a setting, incarceration — follows a wrong already done. Emergency protective override is temporary, warranted only when immediate conditions make ordinary process impossible. And paternalistic override — we are stopping you from harming yourself because we judge you unable to decide — is the most dangerous of the four and carries the highest threshold: not that others believe an intervention would improve the person’s life, but that the participant has temporarily lost the functional ability to make this decision and a serious harm cannot be prevented by a less intrusive means, with uncertainty favoring self-jurisdiction.
Beneath all four sits a hard boundary no threshold reaches. Coercion may restrain conduct or address a narrowly established incapacity; it may never be used to normalize identity, belief, temperament, or nonconformity, because that would make “treatment” a mechanism for field conformity and dissolve interior sovereignty. This limit binds the framework’s own ambitions too: No Wasted Geometry wants participants to develop and become genuinely alive, but capacity is offered and enabled, never imposed — the ecology enlarges a person by widening their options, not by overriding their refusals.
Don’t transfer the person
A particular condition justifies a particular override of a particular power — and nothing beyond it. Immediate danger may justify temporarily restricting movement; it does not license controlling unrelated relationships, reading all communications, permanently managing finances, imposing unrelated treatment, or deciding where the person will live in the future. The burden sits on the coercive authority to justify each extension separately. Two consequences follow directly. A judgment of dangerousness cannot harden into a dangerous person — the legitimate finding is always “under these conditions, at this time, this behavior creates enough risk to justify this intervention,” reconsidered when the conditions change, for the same reason a metric may never become an identity. And reentry has to mean more than eventual release: a legitimate restraint may not impose avoidable future exclusion beyond the restraint itself — preserving legal identity, relationships, housing continuity, skills, records, and civic status — which is non-cascading standing applied to coercion.
The floor under maximal restraint
Even under the strongest legitimate override, an intrinsic participant remains a subject, never merely an object of management, and keeps a floor that can each be written as an institutional requirement — unlike the softer language of “dignity.” They retain existence, with no arbitrary destruction or abandonment; bodily integrity, with no invasion or suffering beyond what the specific intervention requires and none for convenience or punishment; subject status, as someone to whom reasons are owed; interior sovereignty, so that belief and inner experience never become the institution’s property; residual agency over everything unrelated to the restraint; communication through some channel beyond the restraining institution; independent representation where self-advocacy is impaired; review by a body not identical with the coercive actor; temporality, so severe coercion cannot justify itself indefinitely merely because it was once justified; a route toward restoration of overridden jurisdiction; and remedy when coercion proves excessive or wrongful.
That floor is not only a list of things the institution may not take. Taking a person into custody creates positive duties: the institution assumes responsibility for what the person can no longer provide for themselves — food, healthcare, protection from violence by others held alongside them. Neglect inside a closed institution is not an unfortunate gap; it is a standing violation, the same someone-must-own-the-failure logic applied where the person cannot act for themselves.
Residual self-jurisdiction, and signal that still counts
Everything the coercive purpose does not actually require remains under the participant’s authority — this is residual self-jurisdiction, and it covers clothing, food among reasonable options, communication, relationships, spiritual practice, personal routines, and participation in treatment decisions. Without it, coercion spreads past its justification simply because one major liberty was removed. And reduced decision authority is never zero signal authority. Even a heavily constrained or represented participant keeps bearing: “I am frightened,” “I hate this medication,” “I want to see my sister” are not irrelevant because someone else holds the final decision. They are part of the ecology’s information about the participant, and they should be mandatory, documented, weighed inputs — an institution that stops listening because “this person lacks capacity” has erased bearing along with jurisdiction.
Making the limits real
Least-restrictive intervention, sunset, independent review, and advocacy are only real if they are operationalized, so each coercive act should carry an authorization record: what specific harm justified it, which specific powers were authorized, which alternatives were considered and why they were insufficient, when the authority expires automatically, who represents the participant independently, who reviews continuation, what factual conditions end it, what rights remain explicitly outside it, and what remedy exists if it was improper. Coercive authority should expire unless renewed rather than persist until someone challenges it, and the more severe the override, the shorter its presumptive term and the stronger the burden to renew it — the consequence ladder applied to restraint. The independent advocate needs real powers: access, records, the ability to trigger review and challenge continued restraint, protection from retaliation, and independence from the restrainer.
The real difficulty is that this floor is least enforceable exactly where it matters most. The coerced participant is the most powerless person in the ecology, inside the institution with the most control and the least outside visibility — which is the framework’s enforcement problem at its sharpest, since closed institutions are where external leverage decays to almost nothing. So the floor, like every other constraint on power, is a norm the enforcement architecture has to win against the hardest case rather than one the doctrine can simply grant, and the irreversibility register watches for the failure mode where emergency authority quietly becomes permanent.
When restoration is impossible
Sometimes a participant will never recover enough capacity for full self-jurisdiction, and a promised “route to restoration” would be dishonest. The framework does not pretend otherwise. Where incapacity is genuinely irreversible, the objective becomes to maximize retained jurisdiction and minimize substituted jurisdiction continuously — standing does not promise eventual independence, it means dependence never licenses unnecessary ownership. That is the guard against custodial capture: care that quietly becomes control because the person can no longer object.
Unconditional standing, then, does not abolish coercion. It insists only that no legitimate coercion reaches farther than its justification, converts restraint into ownership, or changes the participant’s underlying status — and it matters most precisely where consent disappears, because that is where the temptation to treat a person as an object is greatest.
Standing is never suspended. Self-jurisdiction remains presumptive. Coercive authority must therefore be specific, necessary, bounded, temporary where possible, independently reviewable, and incapable of claiming any part of the participant beyond the justification for the intervention.