Core Argument 

The techniques through which harm is enacted are rarely exceptional. They are, instead, mundane and routinized, embedded within ordinary interpretive frames that render violence invisible, reasonable, and ultimately inevitable. Central among these techniques are processes of naturalization, the deployment of harmful or lethal salience frames, and strong or absolute forms of essentialism. Social, cultural, and historical phenomena—produced through interaction, contingency, and power—are stabilized as ontologically discrete entities. Impersonal-systemic and biographical historical processes are reified into things; relations are converted into identities.

Within this logic, realities generated through dynamic social interaction are not apprehended as provisional or intelligible/diagnosable discrete processes (for example, as injuries, illnesses, adverse childhood experiences, deprivations, or exclusions). They are, instead, individualized, subject to violent administrative simplification and segmented via demographic statistical study and administrative practice. They are treated as complete persons or populations; this is how states "see" according to James C. Scott and it is how individuals see when they see like states.

These categories of people do not merely describe; they produce. As Ian Hacking argued, such “interactive kinds” loop back into the world, shaping conduct, institutional "response", and self-understanding, thereby reinforcing the very phenomena they purport to identify. While, for Scott, states simplify complex social realities into legible broad-brush categories (e.g., through censuses, standardized names, demographics, uniform measures) often with disastrous consequences because, when they have the final say, they erase finer grained and more focused categories or detail in general, local knowledge and interdependencies.

Marshall Sahlins’ observation that poverty is not a quantity of goods but a social relation remains instructive. Poverty is not a natural condition but a social status—one invented, stabilized, and reproduced within specific civilizational arrangements. This invention extends beyond abstract structures to include industries, organizations, and professionalized moral economies whose stated purpose is amelioration. Charity models and tragedy-based explanatory frameworks do not simply respond to distress or disadvantage; they require these subject positions to persist in order to sustain their own legitimacy, funding, and authority. As per Sahlins, hunter-gatherers, with few possessions, were not "poor" because their wants were limited and met; poverty requires social hierarchy, tributary relations, and invidious comparison.

To recognize precarity or mental distress as socially constructed is not to deny their reality; construction does not imply illusion. Tables are socially constructed within economic systems and material practices, yet they remain entirely capable of supporting bodies or inflicting injury, if one is thrown at you, ontology will suddenly feel very real. Likewise, poverty, homelessness and distress are real precisely because they are continuously produced—materially, discursively, interpersonally, and institutionally—through epistemic regimes that organize perception and through organized abandonment, intervention, upbringings, segmentation and governance.

These regimes are not neutral; they are structured in ways that advantage power, stabilize the status quo, and reflect the normative assumptions of dominant groups. What appears natural or inevitable is always relative to a particular social order. In a nomadic society, the use of permanent housing might warrant shunning or persecution; occupants might be subject to exclusion or stigmatization, justified as the natural order of things. Normality is not discovered—it is enforced.

These social statuses, subject positions, placements and broad identity based classificatory systems don’t just organize perception — they reorganize moral responsibility. Once harm is mediated through risk scores, eligibility rules, or population metrics, responsibility becomes diffuse: No one is choosing the outcome; “the model,” “the policy,” or “the category” is “choosing.” Ethical judgment is displaced into technical procedure. This is moral outsourcing or responsibility laundering: violence becomes administratively necessary rather than arrived at ethically. This helps explain why ordinary actors can participate without feeling culpable — not because they are cruel, but because agency has been structurally obscured.

The bystander effect plays a role here, and so do self-preservation ethics: the slow, reasonable sounding erosion of responsibility, decent people talking themselves into doing nothing. No villains, no heroes—just payroll, fear, and the soothing lie that thinking less is maturity.

Subject positions and blanket categories don’t just tell people who they are — they train what they are allowed to feel: shame, fear, entitlement, resignation, vigilance, deservingness. Populations internalize emotional norms appropriate to their status, this introduces a micro-level mechanism linking abstraction to lived experience.

Within contemporary hyperreal conditions, attempts to articulate these dynamics are systematically neutralized. Structural critique is absorbed into a flattened consensus that may acknowledge suffering while foreclosing its causes, or else it is dismissed as mere opinion, relativized into irrelevance. In either case, the ontological question is displaced by affect, and political analysis is replaced by moralizing sentiment. The result is a self-reinforcing reality in which harm is perpetuated not despite widespread awareness, but through it.

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Closing Paragraph 

There is, therefore, no position of innocence from which these classifications, from which these regimes that organize perception, can be observed, deployed, reformed, or ignored. To name, frame, manage, or ignore precarity or mental distress within existing ontological and institutional arrangements is already to participate in their reproduction. Appeals to pragmatism, benevolence, non-involvement, freedom, or inevitability do not mitigate this complicity; they conceal it. If these conditions are relations rather than things, then putative non-involvement, and intervention that leaves those relations intact, cannot plausibly claim neutrality or virtue. The choice is not between construction and reality, or critique and care, but between sustaining a system that requires harm in order to function and confronting the political conditions that make such harm appear natural, necessary, helpful, and beyond question. To refuse this confrontation is not an intellectual oversight. It is a moral and theoretical decision—one whose consequences are already well documented.

Anticipated Objections and Pre-emptive Responses

1. “This argument overstates social construction and risks relativism.”

This objection relies on a category error. To describe a phenomenon as socially constructed is not to claim that it is arbitrary, illusory, or epistemically unstable. It is to insist that its form, distribution, and intelligibility are produced through historically specific social relations. The material effects of precarity or of mental distress are not negated by their constructed status; they are intensified by it. To invoke relativism here is not a rebuttal but a refusal to engage with the distinction between ontology and etiology—a distinction well established in the social sciences and repeatedly ignored only when its implications become politically inconvenient.

2. “While the critique is theoretically compelling, it offers little in the way of practical solutions.”

This response presumes that critique must present immediately implementable alternatives in order to be legitimate. Such a demand misrecognizes the function of theory and, more importantly, reproduces the very logic under examination. When epistemic systems themselves constitute a primary mechanism of harm, calls for “solutions” that leave those systems intact are not pragmatic; they are conservative. The insistence on managerial remedies functions as a disciplinary device, redirecting analysis away from structural conditions and back towards administratively legible services. That this text does not offer such remedies should be understood not as an omission, but as a refusal.

3. “The paper underestimates the genuine benefits of charity and service provision.

This argument confuses local alleviation with systemic transformation. That individuals may experience temporary relief through charitable, welfare state or therapeutic interventions does not negate the broader claim that such models depend upon, and therefore stabilize, the persistence of the categories they address. To note this is not to disparage intervention or solidarity, but to interrogate the political economy in which epistemic regimes are professionalized, depoliticized, and rendered contingent upon ongoing harm. The moral appeal of charity does not exempt it from structural analysis; it necessitates it.

4. “The analysis risks denying agency to those categorized as poor or mentally distressed.”

On the contrary, it is precisely essentialist and reified epistemic regimes that constrain agency by fixing individuals within ontologically closed identities. By foregrounding relational and processual accounts, this analysis reopens the space for agency as situated, collective, and historically contingent. The charge of “denying agency” here reflects a narrow liberal conception of agency as individual choice, rather than a serious engagement with the conditions under which choice becomes meaningful or foreclosed. To defend regimes in the name of agency is to mistake recognition for empowerment.

5. “This argument is overly critical and insufficiently balanced.”

Balance is not a methodological virtue in itself. In contexts where harm is systematic, normalized, and institutionally reproduced, demands for balance often function to protect existing arrangements from sustained scrutiny. The asymmetry of the analysis reflects the asymmetry of power it describes. To soften the critique in the name of balance would be to misrepresent the object of analysis, not to improve it.

6. “These claims are not new.”

That such arguments can be recognized does not diminish their force; it underscores the conditions under which they are repeatedly marginalized. The persistence, intensification and expansion of soluble deprivation and distress in the face of decades of critical scholarship is not evidence of theoretical exhaustion, but of the limited capacity of dominant frameworks to absorb critiques that threaten their foundational assumptions. Repetition, in this context, is not redundancy but diagnosis.

gpt rewrite