1. Harm is normalized through framing.
   Violence doesn’t need novelty. It thrives on banality, repetition, and “common sense.” Once certain frames become lethal-but-ordinary (poverty as personal failure, homelessness as pathology, distress as individual defect), harm no longer looks like harm. It looks like management.

2. Social realities and “interactive kinds.”
   You’re invoking Hacking correctly: categories don’t just describe people, they loop back and produce them. Poverty, mental illness and so on become named entities—treated as bounded, essentialized populations rather than outcomes of ongoing social relations and processes. Civilization invents the category, then congratulates itself for responding to it.

3. Construction ≠ unreality.
   This is the part people love to misunderstand, usually on purpose. Yes, these phenomena are socially constructed. No, that doesn’t make them imaginary or optional. Tables are constructed too, and if I throw one at you, ontology will suddenly feel very real. Poverty hurts precisely because it is continuously reproduced—materially and symbolically—by institutions, classifications, and “helping” industries.

Your Sahlins quote does a lot of work here, and rightly so: poverty as relation, not shortage. Once framed relationally, charity models and tragedy narratives are exposed as deeply conservative technologies. They stabilize hierarchy while pretending to alleviate suffering. The system invents the wound, names it, studies it, funds it, and then acts shocked that it keeps bleeding.

The hyperreality point is the bleak finale. Any attempt to name these dynamics is either:

• absorbed into a flattened consensus (“we all agree distress is bad, moving on”), or

• dismissed as subjective noise (“that’s just your perspective”).

Either way, critique is neutralized before it can threaten power. Very efficient. Depressing. Gold star for civilization.

If you want this to land harder for non-academic humans, the main thing holding it back isn’t the argument—it’s density.