Pluralism within the Safety Shell: The Dilemma of Institutional Theory under Conditions of Technological Extremity and a Minimalist Architecture

The exponential growth of technological capabilities is eroding a deep presumption of traditional institutional theory: that institutions themselves can remain in a state of being revisable, exitable, and gameable. When a single actor can wield systemlevel destructive means, any institution that lacks a preestablished physical safety layer—one that is nonexitable, noncapturable, and nonrevisable—becomes highly vulnerable to subversion. Starting from this rupture point, this paper derives a twolayer architecture forced by hard constraints: the first layer is a nonexitable metainstitution that performs safety capping, default isolation, neutral information relay, and anticoercion protection; the second layer consists of generable institutional spaces that carry substantive pluralism. Within this architecture, plural coexistence and exit freedom are not survival necessities on a par with physical security, but rather possibility spaces that inevitably emerge on the foundation laid by the metainstitution’s valueneutrality and default isolation. They constitute a prepolitical layer of rights protection and transform normative conflict from incommensurable value confrontation into manageable spatial interactioncondition management. The architecture does not claim to be the only feasible solution, but within the currently conceivable space of institutional design, it is the simplest structure that satisfies all constraints of security, pluralism, and freedom. Its minimalism is itself a mark of theoretical advantage: with the thinnest normative presuppositions, it provides a structurally stable foundation for the coexistence of pluralism and freedom in a technologically polarizing world.