The Danger of Concentrated Interpretive Authority

Sor Juana challenged the Church's monopoly on textual interpretation and biblical meaning. When one institution, leader, or group controls how rules are interpreted, corruption flourishes: they redefine wrongdoing as acceptable, manipulate language to obscure misdeed, and use interpretive authority to excuse themselves while condemning others. This concept applies to law, policy, accounting, and ethics. Fighting corruption requires distributing interpretive authority: independent courts that check executive interpretation, auditors external to management who interpret financial records, ethics boards independent of those they oversee, media and civil society that offer counter-interpretations to official narratives. When multiple legitimate interpreters exist—when statutes can be challenged in court, when accounts are audited by outsiders, when power is divided among branches—the corrupt find themselves constrained. No single actor can unilaterally redefine what their actions mean. This principle suggests that institutional design itself is anti-corruption strategy: build in redundancy, establish independent review, protect diverse perspectives, and resist consolidation of interpretive authority.