# Flag

> Flag is mapped as the public story: it makes authority, membership, sacrifice, continuity, and dissent emotionally and visibly credible.

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Stable ID | `node:kiduna:political-change:legitimacy-ritual-symbol:flag` |
| Family | Legitimacy, Ritual & Symbol |
| Domain | Culture |
| Kind | symbol |
| Archetypal function | The Public Story |
| Epistemic status | synthesis; supported |

## Concrete anchor

Flag belongs to the **Legitimacy, Ritual & Symbol** family. It is treated as a specific political object, role, institution, tactic, event, ideology, or mechanism before any symbolic transfer is made.

## What it does

Flag makes authority, membership, sacrifice, continuity, and dissent emotionally and visibly credible, changing who can act, what becomes visible, and which costs are distributed to others.

## Who gains and who loses power

The mechanism can increase the capacity of actors able to use Flag, while shifting cost, delay, risk, exclusion, or dependence toward actors with less authority, information, organization, money, or safe access. The distribution is conditional, not an essence of the node.

## Archetypal function

**The Public Story.** Flag is mapped as the public story: it makes authority, membership, sacrifice, continuity, and dissent emotionally and visibly credible.

## Gift

coordinates meaning and belonging beyond policy detail; through Flag, that capacity becomes available for deliberate use.

## Wound / Shadow

turns myth into immunity from evidence or spectacle into substitute action; Flag can then reproduce the very arrangement it claims to change.

## Conditions

- scale and jurisdiction are explicit
- affected people and absent stakeholders are named
- time horizon and countermoves are considered

## Strategic meaning

Use Flag to identify the operative target, resource, dependency, decision forum, and likely countermove. Ask what would make the mechanism stronger, weaker, more legitimate, or less necessary.

## Divinatory meaning

The Public Story enters through Flag. Read for the capacity seeking expression, the cost displaced from view, and the relationship that changes if the frame moves.

**Question:** What changes when Flag becomes the unit of analysis rather than background?

## Game function

**constraint.** Reveal one hidden dependency connected to Flag; another player names a countermove. Initiative 2.

## Relationships

- **depends on — National Anthem:** Flag depends on National Anthem by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(synthesis; supported)_
- **constrains — Unfalsifiability:** Unfalsifiability constrains Flag by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_
- **enables — Security Council:** Flag enables Security Council by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_

## Countermaps and polarity prompts

- Read Flag from the viewpoint of the actor who bears its cost.
- Reverse cause and symptom: what if Flag is an effect of the system it appears to drive?
- Change the clock: what looks different over a day, an election cycle, a generation, and a century?
- Ask when the Gift becomes the Wound through scale, secrecy, intensity, latency, or unequal reciprocity.

## Epistemic and Sentinel note

Claim layers: synthesis, interpretive, symbolic_divinatory. Scope, jurisdiction, period, and source perspective may change the claim.
No node-specific Sentinel factors were recorded; ordinary source, audience, and context checks still apply.

## Visual direction

A text-free enamel expression of Flag: one dominant mechanism, one counterforce, raised warm-metal linework, midnight field, restrained civic red, teal, ivory, and amber. No party logo, national flag, sacred symbol, or recognizable person.

## Research / provenance

- [The Federalist Papers](https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text) — Library of Congress, 1787–1788. Arguments for the U.S. constitutional design; read as advocacy, not neutral description.
- [Fascism](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/fascism-1) — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2019. Historically bounded definition and features; avoid use as a generic insult.
- [No Kings](https://www.nokings.org/) — No Kings coalition, 2026. Movement self-description, principles, events, and participation claims; crowd estimates require independent corroboration.

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Engine Output version 1.0.0; generated 2026-08-24T00:00:00Z. Sentinel annotations are stored separately in `sentinel/handoffs.json`.
