Beware the Leopard is Hitchhikers Lore for a particular kind of institutional dishonesty: the system claims you were informed, but it made sure you could not realistically become informed.
In the book, Arthur is told the council’s bypass plans were “on display” for months, but discovering them requires a farcical obstacle course: he has to go down to the cellar (the “display department”), with a torch, where the lights and even the stairs are gone, and the notice turns out to be at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door warning “Beware of the Leopard”.
In governance terms, Beware the Leopard describes narrative control through selective transparency. Information is technically public, but buried in procedural inconvenience, hostile UX, unreadable language, strategic timing, or social threat, so “you could have known” becomes a weapon rather than a safeguard.
This is a corruption opportunity because it weaponises process. The institution can point to compliance, audits, and published documents while still protecting insiders and punishing outsiders, creating audit theatre that looks like accountability from a distance but collapses on contact.
The antidote is not maximal visibility. The antidote is enforceable, legible accountability: disclosures that are timely, comprehensible, and hard to game, plus escalation paths that do not require walking past the leopard, which is why Literate Transparency matters.