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I'm sure you could come up with a hypothetical prosocial falsehood, like "aliens assassinated JFK for petty reasons, but they're very vain and will destroy the Earth if word gets out." If you become President and learn the real story, you damn sure better stick to the script about the grassy knoll! But I think it's also possible to have pro-social taboos, particularly if they're attempts to correct for some indefensible (but maybe cognitively appealing or historically convenient) past error. So for example, imagine a society that long practiced infanticide against the neurodivergent, and state-backed violence, disenfranchisement, and murder against the merely socially awkward. After intense and often violent social struggle, this society now affords them (us) formal equality, but big gaps in wealth and power remain, and a revanchist minority (with a terrorist fringe) openly wishes for a return of the old ways. That society might develop strong taboos against "just asking questions" about whether shy people really had it so bad, or whether society should worry about whether they're treated fairly, or whether there isn't some innate biological difference that accounts for their relative lack of success. That would probably be a good thing! There's some amount of epistemic deadweight loss you would happily accept to be extra guarded against backsliding on the core ethical commitments. You might even come out ahead epistemically, where there would otherwise be strong but subtle cultural biases, pressures of ideological convenience, and cognitive-scientific artifacts around in-groups and out-groups that make _false_ claims about the shy, awkward, or neurodivergent more appealing than the objective facts merit. |