Interpretation is institutional infrastructure.

Institutions do not act directly on reality. They act on encoded representations of reality.

Where encoding is partial, action becomes distorted.

Where encoding is structurally absent, institutional judgment does not fail suddenly. It degrades gradually through accumulation.

Institutions do not misinterpret isolated signals. They stabilise misinterpretation into operational norm.

The condition Veil addresses is not informational scarcity. It is interpretive misalignment. Information about complex environments is abundant. The structures that make information legible are not.

Contextual intelligence is not a layer added to institutional capacity. It is part of institutional function.

Where interpretive infrastructure is absent, institutions substitute proxies such as standardised reporting, abstract benchmarks, comparative metrics and systems. These produce legibility without understanding.

Veil exists because institutional decisions made without contextual interpretation accumulate systemic distortion over time.

This distortion is not contained within the institution that produces it. It propagates into the environments those decisions act upon.

The cost of interpretation deferred is distributed rather than isolated. It is carried across systems, contexts and operational realities beyond their original encoding.

Interpretation treated as infrastructure stabilises the relationship between institutional judgment and the realities it acts upon.