The truth will set you free, but it will make you miserable.

Kota Sato

The truth will set you free, but it will make you miserable. I suppose this sentence is true. Let me elaborate. There are truths around us and we are able to understand them. However how many people want to know and get truths which are given to them? While it depends on the kind of truth which people get, I think so many people don’t want to know truths because getting and knowing truths is sometimes quite miserable and demanding of courage for people. I’ll illustrate the two cases with examples. The first one is a sort of personal example and the second one is a very large-scale example.

First of all, when you meet a person you admire like the president of your company or your favorite actor or musician, your mind is divided into two aspects, one which is exhilaration and the other fear to know the real truth about the person. If your admired person doesn’t have the personality which you expected, it means you know the miserable truth. Your image of the person would be broken immediately. It might be a little bit difficult to get over the damage.

Secondly, in 2003, the United States started the Iraq War. The reason why the USA government decided to begin the war was Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The government stated there is a possibility for Iraq to possess weapons of mass destruction and also stated Iraq hadn’t accepted open inspections from the United Nations. However after the end of the battle, an investigating commission from the USA conducted a search for the weapons of mass destruction. In October 2004, the USA government introduced a final report which said there were no weapons of mass destruction. If this story is the truth, why did the USA government start the war? Why were innocent people in Iraq dead? What remains except the misery?

Knowing the truth sets us free. In other words, we can understand the naked reason or fact, getting the truth. However, it’s not always good for us. There are miseries following truth, which you receive. But I want to suppose anyway that if you got a truth which involved misery, in some cases, you should accept it and think about it, especially in a case like the Iraq War so not to make something similar happen.