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, precarity and 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 looped back and helped produce them. Precarity, mental illness etc. are treated as bounded, essentialized persons and populations rather than outcomes of historical and ongoing social relations and processes or absences. Civilization invents the category and helps generate the person first, then congratulates itself for responding to them.

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. Precarity hurts precisely because it is continuously reproduced—materially and symbolically—by institutions, upbringings, relatives, neighbourhoods, classifications, economies, governments, 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 foundational tragedy narratives are exposed as deeply conservative technologies. To a degree they stabilize hierarchy while pretending to alleviate suffering. The system helps invent and create the injured, names them, individualizes them, interrogates them, studies them, funds itself and then acts shocked that they 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.