Stanley Fish, in his January 11 Opinionator column in the New York Times, wrote that in matters both trivial and grave, "true" and "right" aren't necessarily the same thing. Great article: it introduced me to a category of not-truth that I hadn't considered before.
In Nothing But the Truth: 49 Classic Stories About Truth and Lies we explore these awkward encounters, but none of the stories address this specific phenomenon: the bureaucratic "right" answer that has no relation to objective truth.
Perhaps the closest appears in the story of the Salem Witch trials, retold by Elizabeth Gaskell in her novella "Lois the Witch," which is included in End of the Line: five short Novels About the Death Penalty. In witch trials, those who confessed to witchcraft were sometimes spared although they were not witches; those, like Lois, who insisted on their true innocence were hanged.
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