The unit here is the institution, movement, faction, or belief system as an entity — not the people inside it. Each level is inferred from what a collective does, read across nine organizational channels. Because institutions are built to project a level above what they enact, the professed calibration is treated as unreliable by design — and the gap between claimed and enacted is itself a first-class diagnostic. The rungs are re-read from observable collective effects rather than inherited as a fixed scale; each level is named for the institutional pattern it enacts, not the feeling it borrows.