Is truth always worth discussing?
At the level of principle, that question hardly ought to exist. Of course truth matters. But once it enters real life, things stop being so clean. Whether a truth should be made public can depend on all kinds of considerations. Sometimes a truth is buried on purpose, simply because exposing it would shatter a fragile peace that is being held together by lies.
I’ve thought about this before in another context: elderly people with terminal illnesses. Some are told the diagnosis directly; others have it hidden from them by family. The outcomes are often different. Someone has probably studied why patients with a strong state of mind sometimes outlive the countdown they were supposedly given. Yet this is the sort of thing that never sits comfortably inside a scientific explanation—how human consciousness, or will, seems at times to push against what we call natural law.
Then again, there are also people who are told exactly how little time they have left and still manage to live happily, day by day. The truth is disclosed, but not endlessly dissected. The person who learns it still has to go on living. More often, it is the people waiting nearby, watching that truth draw closer by the day, who lose their composure first.
Lately, more so-called truths have been announced. But many of them are not revelations so much as long-accepted realities finally reaching a point where they can no longer be ignored. Those who kept trying to fool themselves have to react at last. Do they accept the truth, or do they fabricate another lie to cover it—just to preserve what little calm and trust remains?
What comes to mind here is a story about a student suicide.
I’m not even sure whether I’ve told it before. One evening in high school, there was a strange commotion in the teaching building. Word spread that a student had jumped. He had leapt from the fifth floor into the central courtyard of the building and died beside the flower bed below. It was close to the college entrance exam season that year, so people immediately suspected academic pressure.
The school reacted with remarkable speed. Before the ambulance even arrived, all students had already been ordered to stay inside their classrooms. Homeroom teachers were made responsible for keeping everyone in place. If a student rushed out to watch, it was obvious who would be punished: the teacher, not the student. The scene itself was sealed off quickly, but the news still spread.
Classmates secretly pulled out their phones and started passing information around—from inside individual classrooms, then through the building, then across the school, and finally from one school to another. But the truth traveled in the opposite direction. A version of events formed outside first, between schools, then made its way back into the school, back into the building, and finally into the classroom itself.
Moments like that are rare opportunities for people to enjoy the thrill of trading gossip, even shaping it. So the “truth” changed at an incredible speed. Within ten minutes there were already seven or eight versions. It was study pressure, then campus bullying, then a painful teenage romance, then some bittersweet tragedy of youth. The truth was being manufactured and circulated over and over, moving from the inside out and then from the outside back in.
In a strange way, it was fortunate that this happened back then. Technology was nowhere near as advanced as it is now. At least the school still had no way to completely lock down communication by cutting off the network. My deskmate and I did something oddly amusing that day: we started counting how many different “truths” there were. One of us compiled, the other gathered information.
As I remember it, school leaders came by to inspect things, and there was also the claim that the rooftop surveillance camera had conveniently “broken.” That kind of conclusion was clearly issued early because people were afraid the student’s death might drag out a whole chain of other truths. After a little more than an hour, the official explanation began to emerge: the dead student, we were told, wasn’t from our school at all, but an outsider who had deliberately come to our campus and jumped from the building used by students preparing for the exams.
Was that even true? Looking back now, I’m surprised I could once be taken in by such a ridiculous finding. Maybe it’s only because in recent years there have been too many absurd cases like this that, when I look back, I realize the same logic had already been in use long ago.
The moment the official truth was released, a second surge of information began. The truth, even as “truth,” immediately generated fresh suspicion and rumor. Because there was now an authorized version to anchor it, the stories being passed around sounded more convincing than before. Truth itself was only a simple conclusion, but rumor could turn that conclusion into a full narrative. You really had to admire people’s talent for spectacle and invention.
What people did was not abandon their earlier rumors in light of the official explanation. Instead, they fused the official truth with their own previous guesses. What feels laughable now is that the conclusion about the “outside student” was itself false, which only made everything that followed even more absurd.
By the end of the day, my deskmate and I reviewed everything we had collected. I remember there were five different versions of the suicide note alone, never mind the many explanations for the death itself. People dared to invent them, and others were willing to believe them. By then truth no longer mattered. What mattered was whether people could blend their own assumptions, emotions, and expectations into these so-called truths, adding dramatic detail along the way.
Eventually the school stopped bothering to manage the matter. No one made a scene. No one was going to investigate. The real cause of death may well have been something painfully simple, without any of the plotlines people feared or desired. But if the plain truth offers no drama, then something “entertaining” has to be left behind for the public to consume.
Another truth has been announced in the past few days, and I can’t help wondering whether it still means much at all. There are already too many competing versions of it. Sometimes the truth itself feels like that student in free fall—slamming into the ground in a final impact that wipes everything to zero. Even if that brutal truth is later condemned, debated, or denounced, the person who fell has already died inside the lie.
Truth does not necessarily save the dead.
But for the living, rumor is often the only “truth” they can obtain from within a deception.