I needed a pep talk. Here’s what I got and thought I’d share it given that today truth is a dangerous thing to possess, many who had the courage to speak are in jail, if not dead.
“Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.”
Wole Soyinka. Nobel Prize Literature.
A Reflection on Truth and the Duty to Share It
There are moments in life when the personal stops being personal.
When the story you lived through becomes, by sheer weight of experience, something larger — a shard of collective knowledge. Georges Sand saw that clearly: the life of one is the life of all. Rousseau, too, knew that autobiography at its best is not self-display but contribution. A lantern held up for the next traveller on the same dark road.
Survival creates obligation.
Not the sentimental kind, but the clear, flint-edged duty of someone who has come through fire and knows where the burn lines run. If you’ve lived what others are heading toward, you carry information they need. Not theory. Not speculation. The unvarnished truth — the kind Stevenson insisted was the only kind worth speaking.
But truth in complex matters is rarely welcomed. Especially when it touches power, sex, institutions, and the cultural myths people cling to for comfort. You learn, quickly, that some truths are heavily patrolled. Entire systems rise up to mute them: law, shame, moral panic, public relations, and that strange modern fog that calls itself “protective” while obscuring precisely what needs to be seen.
You know this yourself.
You saw what boys disappeared into in Piccadilly, Brussels, Amsterdam.
You saw what predation looked like from the street level, long before academics or policymakers dared to map it. And because you survived — because you didn’t become a name in a field outside London or a body at the base of a hotel — you carry something sharper than commentary. You carry lived intelligence.
But lived intelligence is dangerous.
It disrupts narratives.
It implicates people long protected by rank, reputation, or convenient categories.
It shows where responsibility was shrugged off, and where evil wore the mask of “higher good.”
Institutions hate that.
Societies do, too.
They prefer their monsters cloaked in abstraction, safely distant, not woven into their own halls of power. When someone stands up and says, This is how it was — here are the names, the mechanisms, the blind eyes, the complicities, suddenly the truth becomes radioactive. Not because it is false, but because it is true.
And evil — the real kind, not the theatrical version — thrives in the gaps between what people know and what they are willing to say. Zen names it “ceaseless negation,” the force that undoes meaning, compassion, coherence. Western religion makes it a figure, a fallen angel chasing God’s throne. Ginsberg, reading Blake, saw how law can harden into tyranny, how order can calcify into cruelty. Pauwels and Bergier imagined evil as beautiful singing flowers — the inversion of beauty, seductive and wrong all at once.
But evil has a simpler habit: it hides behind respectability.
Behind bureaucracy.
Behind social discomfort.
Behind the instinct to protect reputation instead of children.
Behind the fear that telling the truth will tear down the cathedral.
Yet cathedrals built on silence have crypts full of bones.
The real danger is not in speaking the truth, but in what grows when truth is forbidden speech. When the lived past is censored, redacted, or brushed aside because it implicates the wrong people. When the suffering of the vulnerable becomes politically inconvenient. Then evil becomes self-renewing — a garden of those singing flowers, tended by the very systems meant to keep them from blooming.
So the question returns:
If you carry the truth — the difficult, lived truth — do you not have a duty to speak it? Even if it unsettles? Even if it offends the comfortable?
My answer: yes.
But with a caveat:
Truth spoken from experience is a scalpel.
It cuts, but it also heals.
It shows the wound so that others might not be wounded.
You aren’t motivated by vengeance or spectacle.
You’re motivated by the simple, human knowledge that boys are still disappearing — if not in the same places, then in new ones; if not under the same excuses, then under updated ones. The patterns persist because the truths behind them remain unexamined or unspeakable.
Your story isn’t self-indulgence. It’s testimony.
Testimony is always uncomfortable.
Testimony is always resisted by those who benefit from silence.
Testimony is always necessary.
Because if the life of one is the life of all, then the truth of one belongs to all who need it to survive.
And if there is a duty in this world, it is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment.
It is to protect the vulnerable from erasure.
You’re standing at the crossroads where many truth-tellers, whistleblowers, survivors, and reluctant witnesses have stood:
the place where duty and self-preservation glare at each other across a narrow room.
It’s not a trivial decision.
It’s not a moral cartoon.
It’s not simply “be brave” or “stay silent.”
It’s much older, heavier — the old mythic struggle with Urizen, that tightening god of law, order, structure, bureaucracy, the one who always says: Not now. Not like this. Not from you.
But here’s something worth holding:
You don’t have to fight Urizen to tell the truth.
You only have to refuse to worship him.
You’ve lived the raw material.
You didn’t study it from the outside.
You walked the ground barefoot, and you survived the terrain. That gives you a kind of authority that no one can grant and no one can take away.
But authority doesn’t mean obligation without limit.
There are a few questions that matter, and only you can answer them:
1. What is your real aim?
If your aim is revenge, or exposure for exposure’s sake, Urizen will devour you — because he thrives on the energy of conflict.
But if your aim is prevention, illumination, or help, then you stand on stronger ground. Not moralistic ground — practical ground.
Saving one life is not a small thing.
But losing your own peace of mind matters too.
2. What form does the truth need?
Truth doesn’t always have to be an accusation.
It can be a map.
It can be a warning.
It can be a record.
It can be a testimony shaped so that it protects the vulnerable without necessarily naming the protected.
There are ways to speak that cut through fog without inviting a war.
Sometimes the truth needs to be a blunt instrument.
Sometimes a lantern.
Sometimes a needle that stitches a wound closed.
3. Who is the truth for?
If you write directly for boys, or for social workers, or for parents, your purpose clarifies. You’re not writing to fight the powerful. You’re writing to guide the lost.
That’s not a battle.
That’s a gift.
4. What is the cost of silence?
This is where your question carries weight.
The cost of speaking is obvious:
stress, scrutiny, legal lines to navigate, unwanted attention, reopening old rooms you’d rather leave locked.
But the cost of silence is quieter and more corrosive:
the knowledge that what you lived — and survived — stays folded away while others repeat the same path, unalerted.
Only you can decide which cost you can bear.
5. Must the truth be “everything,” or can it be enough?
You don’t need to empty the whole vault.
You can write what is necessary, useful, life-saving — and leave the rest in the archive of memory.
Full disclosure is a myth anyway.
Even a whole autobiography is only a thin outline of a life.
You can craft truth responsibly, selectively, meaningfully, without betraying either your past or the people who need the message.
About fighting Urizen
Here is the secret Blake understood:
Urizen doesn’t actually win by force.
He wins when you believe the structure is absolute.
He wins when you self-censor before he even arrives.
He wins when you imagine him larger than he is.
If you choose to speak, you don’t need to go three rounds with him.
You can write outside his ring.
You can write beyond his jurisdiction.
You can write in a way that bypasses the machinery he controls.
Truth doesn’t need to be shouted to be dangerous.
Sometimes a quiet truth travels farther.
And if you choose not to write — that’s also a truth. But then the task becomes forgiving yourself for that choice.