To answer the question of whether the world will be all right, there is another question that has to be faced first, even if it seems unrelated at a glance: can truth itself be divided into right and wrong?
At a certain age, people begin to feel drawn toward questions that are supposed to belong to the adult world. Things like whether people prefer a pleasant lie to an unpleasant truth. These are usually packaged as neat A-or-B moral choices, as if they only become meaningful once you grow up. But in reality, those lessons arrive much earlier.
Think back to elementary school. How many diary entries or essays were really about something that actually happened, in the fullest sense? Once you set aside all the expected themes—love of country, respect for elders, caring for the young, studying hard, serving society—it turns out there were not that many things worth writing down. And even when there were, if they did not point toward a "correct" moral takeaway, they were dismissed as nothing more than a dull chronological record.
Even a simple field trip journal usually needed a standardized meaning attached to it. Either it had to rise to something grand, like witnessing the nation’s rapid development with your own eyes, or it had to settle into something slightly smaller but equally approved, like protecting the natural environment because it is the home shared by all humanity. In those compositions, classmates were always picking up trash before leaving the park, or promising that one day they would help build a better country.
I once wrote a field trip essay that did not match the expected answer. I wrote about a lunchtime picnic where classmates took out the food they had carefully prepared and quietly compared what each of them had brought. It was simply an account of what I had seen. For that, I got thoroughly scolded by my language teacher.
So when a question like "pleasant lies" versus "harsh truths" first appears in a child’s world, it naturally feels loaded with the philosophical weight of adulthood. Especially for children who have just begun to believe they have grown up overnight—children eager to distance themselves from younger students, eager to stand on equal footing with the world, and half convinced that their parents no longer understand their happiness or sorrow. They do not actually know the answer to such questions.
In that sense, it is not so different from the present, where no one can really answer the question: will this world turn out well? And if someone could answer it, perhaps the person who asked in the first place would have been dealt with before any answer was allowed to circulate.
Because it is only in the adult world that another, more fatal question appears: should the truth be made public at all?
I remember something from middle school. A teacher took a group of students he was especially close with out at night to ride bicycles on a riverside road near the school. One of those students ended up in a traffic accident.
If something like that happened now, the teacher would almost certainly be fired, and might even face legal action. But at that time, the students who were close to him had not yet developed a clear sense of legal boundaries. They valued personal loyalty and social bonds more than rules or systems. On top of that, many of them treated this teacher like a kind of spiritual leader. Even the student’s parents, as far as I could tell later on, did not make too much trouble for him.
Compared with everyone else, though, I was probably one of the problems.
By the next day, I had more or less guessed what had happened. I also understood that, by any reasonable standard, it should have been considered serious. But the people involved all looked terrified and determined to keep silent. Since I was not part of their inner circle, I did not press the issue. Unfortunately, I have always been the sort of person who can sense what other people are thinking, or at least read their emotions. So I quietly asked one classmate in that inner circle, someone who was privately on good terms with me, whether a certain student had gotten hurt.
That question frightened the whole group.
They began suspecting one another, wondering who had leaked what they had all promised to keep secret. Since some of them were relatively close to me, they became the first targets of suspicion. Maybe they had talked too much. Maybe they had slipped.
Then the teacher called me into his office and warned me not to make the matter public.
At the time, I felt a little wronged. I had only guessed. I had not even confirmed whether what I guessed was true. By talking to me alone like that, he made me feel as though I had stumbled onto some terrible secret.
Of course, that was the age when being excluded could sting more than it should. Even though I usually mixed with them easily enough, when it really mattered I was not part of that intimate circle. That left me, to some extent, resentful.
But after thinking it over again and again, I still followed the rules of their game. I did not reveal anything I had guessed.
Because by then I had realized that this truth did not injure only the student lying in a hospital bed. It also threatened the person who had ordered everyone who knew to stay silent.
Still, once a third party knows, silence becomes harder to maintain. In the end, the teacher had to choose controlled disclosure over total suppression. He announced to the class that a student had been injured in a traffic accident and was in the hospital, and he hoped no one would spread rumors. When he said the second part, he was very obviously looking at me.
At that point, you begin to see something more complicated. The truth no longer harms only the person who lived through it, or the person trying to hide it. If the truth were fully exposed then, it would also hurt the entire circle of people who had hidden it together, who had repeated the same appearance of events so many times that the version they protected had become, in a sense, the truth they themselves could live with.
And if I had stood up then and told everyone what had really happened, after someone more authoritative had already instructed the class not to spread rumors, I would have been hurt too. No one would have trusted me.
That is the part that makes this difficult: the incident itself was not cleanly divided into right and wrong. The student and the student’s parents had, in effect, forgiven the teacher. The teacher, by choosing partial disclosure instead of total silence, also protected the truth in a certain way—or at least protected everyone who might have been damaged by it, myself included. That fragile outcome was not sustained by moral clarity. It survived because, among all the available possibilities, he found the most compromised one, the one that seemed to do the least damage.
From that moment on, I could believe that, for everyone involved, the world was still good.
Whether it might later stop being good is another matter.
Maybe one day the injured student looks at the scar left on his body and realizes it came from an accident that might have been avoided. Maybe his family one day realizes that the costs attached to that scar were never defined in writing from the start, never turned into any formal accountability for the teacher. If that happens, then the question returns to where it began: if the truth is revealed later, is it still in time? Or should that truth have been made public at the very moment it happened?
But in the end, that is somebody else’s world. Whether it turns out well or badly—what does that have to do with me?
If I were the one holding the truth, I do not think I would dare be the person who ruins a hard-won peace either.
Will the world be all right?
Wait for further notice.