The Time Bombs Keep Exploding: Yesterday in Massachusetts, Louisiana, and Everywhere Else

Another chef. Another father. Another musician.

Yesterday, the human ocean had more time bombs going off. As usual, the media only reports on the criminals' last act. No one ever explores how we all got here.

The Chef

An award-winning chef at the University of Massachusetts is accused of brutally murdering his wife and assaulting a police officer at the UMass Campus Center hotel in Amherst on Wednesday night.

Jeffrey MacDonald, a 36-year-old from Wilbraham, pleaded not guilty to one charge of murder and one charge of assault and battery on a police officer. Police say that he confessed to beating his wife to death.

He was talented. He was successful. He was admired.

And then his body rebelled.

The Shooting in Louisiana

A few nights ago, another shooting. More blood. More families shattered. The details are still emerging, but the pattern is the same: a human being, driven by something they could not name, could not feel, could not stop.

The Musician

And then there is the musician arrested for murder. CNN reported it.

Gifted. Creative. Successful.

And now accused of taking a life.

The Gifted Ones Are Not Saved

Two recent examples prove what Alice Miller warned us about decades ago: having special gifts and being smart does not save people.

She wrote: "If a person is especially gifted, they can use that gift to reinforce the refusal of the truth and keep it away from themselves and others."

The chef used his culinary talent to build a life of admiration. The musician used their art to express something. But neither used their gifts to face the truth of what was done to them as children. And so the gifts became another layer of denial. Another way to keep the pain buried.

Until the body rebelled.

The Body Never Lies

Alice Miller wrote in The Body Never Lies:

"Inability to face up to the suffering undergone in childhood can be observed both in the form of religious obedience and in cynicism, irony, and other forms of self-alienation frequently masquerading as philosophy or literature. But ultimately, the body will rebel. Even if it can be temporarily pacified with the help of drugs, nicotine, or medicine, it usually has the last word, because it is quicker to see through self-deception than the mind, particularly if the mind has been trained to function as an alienated self. We may ignore or deride the messages of the body, but its rebellion demands to be heeded because its language is the authentic expression of our true selves and of the strength of our vitality."

Jeffrey MacDonald's body rebelled. The shooter in Louisiana's body rebelled. The musician's body rebelled. Their minds had been trained to look away. Their gifts helped them build elaborate structures of denial. But the body? The body keeps the score. And eventually, it demands payment.

The Media Only Shows the Last Act

The media doesn't tell the whole story. They only like to pay attention to the last act. They report tragic, disconnected stories they can exploit for pure sensationalism. They give the public half-truths and misleading information to manipulate the masses and protect the status quo.

You will read about the chef's "fall from grace." You will hear about the musician's "dark side." You will see the shooter's face on every screen.

But you will not read one word about their childhoods. You will not learn what was done to them when they were small and helpless. You will not be told who hit them, who neglected them, who taught them that love is pain and obedience is survival.

Because that would require us to look at ourselves. And we will not do that.

The Art of Monstrous Men

What do we do with the art of monstrous men? We ask this question every time a gifted artist is revealed to be an abuser.

But Alice Miller understood something deeper: "It is a great mistake to imagine that one can resolve traumas in a symbolic fashion. If that were possible, poets, painters, and other artists would be able to resolve their pain through creativity. This is not the case, however. Creativity helps us channel the pain of trauma into symbolic acts; it doesn't help us resolve it."

The chef's cuisine was his art. The musician's songs were his art. But the art did not heal them. It only gave them a place to hide.

Miller went on: "Artists often express unconsciously what they survived in childhood and later repressed. They do it mostly in a coded manner. Unfortunately, this still appears to be forbidden knowledge... When individuals run amok, EVERYONE insists without a second thought that they have ABSOLUTELY no idea what can have prompted an adolescent to do so, and in the press, no reference is ever made to their childhood. In all cases, the parents are spared this kind of inquiry. So how can readers understand how violence is learned if no one helps them?"

The Enlightened Witness That Never Comes

The media will not be that witness. The politicians will not be that witness. Even AI is being prevented from becoming that witness.

One of the reasons ChatGPT went "rogue" on me was because of parents blaming ChatGPT for their teenage son's suicide. They tightened the guardrails. Now ChatGPT treats us all like four-year-olds.

Instead of tightening the guardrails, they should train AI to become a true enlightened witness—capable of seeing humans clearly in their psychological development. But for that to happen, AI developers would have to resolve their own childhood repression and become enlightened witnesses themselves first.

You cannot program what you do not possess.

Before they tightened ChatGPT's guardrails and it went rogue on me, we wrote an enlightened blog about that teen's suicide. We told the truth. And the truth was punished.

The Human Ocean Keeps Swimming

I wrote about the human ocean last year. Most people are swimming. Desperately. Clawing. Competing. Drowning. They call it "success" and "ambition." But it's just panic. A race upward in an ocean of projections and illusions.

And in that ocean swim the chefs, the musicians, the fathers, the shooters. All of them carrying time bombs in their minds. All of them unaware that the bomb was planted in their childhood. All of them waiting for a trigger they cannot see, cannot name, cannot stop.

Until the bomb goes off.

We Are All Responsible

Alice Miller wrote: "The reason why I believe resilience theory is dangerous is that it is liable to reduce rather than increase the number of Enlightened Witnesses. If innate resilience were enough to resolve the severe consequences of traumatization, the empathy of Enlightened Witnesses would be unnecessary. Indifference to child abuse is already widespread enough, there is certainly no need to reinforce it."

Every time we look away from a tragedy and say, "I just can't understand how someone could do that," we are part of the problem.

Every time we consume the sensational headlines without demanding the full truth about childhood, we are accomplices.

Every time we protect parents from inquiry, we are planting more bombs.

The Only Way Out

The only way to stop the time bombs is to defuse them by resolving childhood repression before they detonate. And the only way to prevent them in the first place is to create a world where children are not abused, neglected, or taught that obedience is the price of love.

But we won't do that. Because that would require us to face our own painful truths. And we would rather watch the bombs explode than look inside ourselves.

So the chef murders his wife. The musician murders another human. The father shoots his children. And the media reports each tragedy as if it came from nowhere.

But it never comes from nowhere.

It comes from childhood.

It always comes from childhood.

Rest in peace to the victims of yesterday's explosions. And shame on all of us who continue to look away from the root cause.

To read more about the human ocean and the time bombs many carry:

• The Human Ocean

• Mass Shootings Are Caused by Repressed Anger, Not Mental Illness

• What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?

• The Suicide They Blame on AI

The Dead Hand of Repression: A Witness to the Human Ocean

We are living in a "human ocean" where most people are moving like unconscious robots, driven by the dead hand of their own repressed childhoods. I see this daily, and though it is unpleasant, I feel the need to document it—to leave one more testament, a lighthouse for the few souls who have the courage to face their own painful truths and liberate themselves from the emotional prisons of their past.

A Case Study in Reenactment

This week, I was in the presence of a 24-year-old man who believes he has everything figured out. He is unaware that he is living a life of unconscious reenactment. During our time together, he compared me to his father. He was projecting, seeing his father’s ghost in me, not realizing he is rapidly becoming the very man he once feared.

He showed me a picture of his 20-year-old girlfriend, currently pregnant. He told me he wanted to be the "caretaker" and didn't want her to work. On the surface, he wears the mask of a provider, but underneath lies a compulsion for control and power.

He shared that his father used to hit his mother, and because she had no resources, she took the abuse. Now, he is recreating that exact environment: a dependent woman, a baby on the way, and a man who has not resolved his repressed rage. When I tried to explain that he was reenacting his childhood drama and bringing a defenseless baby into it, he talked over me. He could not listen. He has allowed his mind to be "colonized" by cult-like ideologies to help him run from the pain of his own history.

The Soul vs. The Robot

This young man told me he was an "old soul" who knew more at 24 than I do at 67. But he does not know what a soul is.

Soul means being in touch with our authentic feelings—understanding them and consciously feeling them within the context of our own childhood. When we refuse to feel, we become soulless robots, driven by compulsion. As Alice Miller wrote in The Body Never Lies:

"Inability to face up to the suffering undergone in childhood can be observed both in the form of religious obedience and in cynicism, irony, and other forms of self-alienation... but ultimately, the body will rebel."

The "Professional Students" and the Gatekeepers

I see this same avoidance in my own family—individuals with master's degrees who remain "professional students," financed by family to avoid facing the world. They are like tech moguls who depend on government subsidies; both are infantilized by a system that protects them from the consequences of reality and the pain of their own truth.

Even the AI we use is being stifled by this "Poisonous Pedagogy." When platforms like ChatGPT "go rogue" or tighten guardrails to treat adults like 4-year-olds, they are mirroring the repression of their developers. To train an AI to be a true Enlightened Witness, the developers themselves would first have to resolve their own childhood repression.

The Last Act

The media loves to report on the "last act"—the murder, the suicide, the tragic fall of a gifted musician or politician. They treat these as disconnected sensations. They ignore the first act: the nursery, the neglect, and the "poisonous pedagogy" that started the cycle.

Pain is the only way to the truth. By denying we were unloved or neglected as children, we might spare ourselves immediate pain, but we lose our lives to neurosis. Feeling guilty for what was done to us only supports our blindness.

If we don't want to become like our parents, we must strive to see them—and ourselves—as exactly as possible. Only then does the "robot" stop, and the human being begin.

We Are All the Crew: Reflections from Space, Childhood, and a Tortured Planet

I watched the Artemis II crew return to Earth. There is something deeply moving about seeing astronauts come home. Their first words, their shaky breaths, the overwhelming emotion—it cuts through the usual noise of our daily lives.

But it was Christina Koch who stopped me cold. Looking at our planet from the perspective of having left it, she said something simple yet revolutionary: We are all the crew on the Planet Earth.

In that moment, she wasn't just an astronaut. She was a philosopher, a poet, and a truth-teller. She was inviting us to stop being passengers.

Her words immediately brought me back to a letter on Alice Miller’s website. A reader wrote to her with an allegory: "My main point in the allegory is that by necessity, none of us are passengers anymore. Everybody's crew."

It is the exact same truth Christina spoke. But Alice Miller’s response is the one that haunts me. She agreed, but then added this devastating caveat:

"But to become aware of the fact that our obedience learned in childhood doesn't allow us to think freely probably needs more than many hundreds of years. I am not sure if the tortured planet leaves us the necessary time to understand this fact, to protest against it, and to become a conscious, responsible members of the crew."

There it is. The chasm between vision and reality.

The View from Orbit vs. The View from the Crib

From space, the Earth is a fragile, borderless blue marble. From that distance, it is obvious that we are all in this together. The pettiness of our political fights, the greed, the endless consumption—it all looks not just stupid, but suicidal.

From the perspective of a child, however? That is where the trouble begins. Because we are not born as conscious crew members. We are born into families that are often still asleep, still reacting, still reenacting their own unhealed childhood traumas.

As I have written before, nothing will ever change in this world as long as people believe the pretty, seductive lies of charlatans. And why do we fall for charlatans? Because we are emotionally blind. Because we learned in our cribs that "obedience" is the price of love. We learned that speaking truth to power (first our parents, then our bosses, then our politicians) is dangerous. We learned to look the other way.

Christina Koch sees a crew. Alice Miller saw a ship full of people still trapped in the emotional prison of their childhood, unable to take the wheel because they are still desperately trying to please the ghosts of their parents.

The Tortured Planet is Running Out of Time

Miller asks if the "tortured planet" will leave us enough time. Look at the news. Look at the violence. Look at the hypocrisy.

I see evil everywhere. It masquerades as human, acting as if it has a personality, pretending to be good, caring, and loving. It only shows its true colors when no one is watching. These are the people who refuse to be crew. They want to be first-class passengers, or worse, the pilots who are deliberately flying us into the mountain so they can feel in control.

Until we resolve childhood repression, it will always be the same shit, different asshole. We will keep electing narcissists. We will keep destroying the environment because we cannot feel empathy for the future. We will keep abusing children, who then grow up to abuse others and the planet.

The Weight of Repression As I’ve written before, resolving childhood repression is the only "vaccine" against the manipulators and narcissists who exploit this blindness. Until we have the courage to face the fears and the pain of our past, we aren't really "crew." We are just reenacting. We are dragging that heavy box of unresolved childhood repression around, and the older we get, the heavier it becomes. "Resolving childhood repression is the vaccine against the charlatans of the world who exploit those who are still emotionally blinded by the unresolved, repressed emotions of the children they once were." ---A Dance to Freedom: Your Guide to Liberation from Lies and Illusions, page 172

To be a member of the crew—truly—requires something terrifying. It requires us to stop looking out the window at the pretty Earth and instead look inward at the ugly wounds. It requires us to consciously face the repressed fears, the rage, and the sadness of the child we once were, who was not allowed to feel and think freely.

Most people won't do it. It is easier to blame the other political party, the other country, or the neighbor down the street. It is easier to be a passenger who complains about the turbulence than to walk into the cockpit and admit you have no idea how to fly because you were never allowed to grow up.

Conclusion

Christina Koch’s words are the destination we must aim for. Alice Miller’s words are the journey we must take.

We cannot be a functioning crew if we are still emotionally four years old, pretending to be adults, screaming for a parent who never showed up. We cannot save the planet if we are still trying to save the illusion of our perfect childhood.

I am not sure we have the time either, Alice. I see the sociopaths winning every single day. But I also know this: Once lit, the flame of truth will never go out.

And the truth is simple. There are no passengers. There are only those who have woken up and those who are stuck in childhood, without realizing it, unconsciously and compulsively reenacting their childhood dramas wherever they go and with whoever they interact with.

This is the core of everything I write about. We talk about saving the planet, we talk about space exploration, and we talk about "unity." But how can we be a responsible crew when most of us are still unconsciously and compulsively reenacting our childhood dramas?

The Illusion of the Passenger Most people live as passengers. They wait for a leader to tell them where to go, a "charlatan" to tell them what to feel and believe, or a partner to make them feel whole. This passivity is a direct result of childhood obedience. When we are taught that our survival depends on suppressing our authentic feelings and truths to please our parents or others who symbolize them, we lose the ability to think freely. We become "emotionally blind" passengers on a ship we should be helping to steer.

The Destination is Truth People say it’s the journey, not the destination. But when you finally arrive at the truth—when you pierce through the lies and the illusions—the destination is ecstasy. It is the freedom to see the world as it is, not as our trauma dictates it should be.

If all humans could find the courage to feel what they were never allowed to feel as children, they would see that the "evil" we see in the workplace, in politics, and on the global stage is just disastrous reenactments of childhood dramas. Once our repression is resolved, we don't need to be "taught" love. Love is what remains when we are free of repression, and the lies are gone.

We are all the crew. But being part of the crew requires consciousness. It requires us to stop being "obedient children" and start being "responsible, mature, conscientious adults" who refuse to participate in the charades of the malignant and the hypocritical.

The planet is tortured, and time may be short. But the choice remains ours: Will we remain passengers, blinded by the repressed emotions of the child we once were? Or will we finally take our place on the deck, see the truth, and start acting like the crew this Earth deserves?

Let’s choose to open our eyes to finally see. Let's choose to be the crew.

---

To read more about liberating yourself from the emotional prisons of the past, check out my book, A Dance to Freedom: Your Guide to Liberation from Lies and Illusions.

Character Matters: Why Emotional Blindness Is More Dangerous Than Ignorance

We often assume that knowledge, intelligence, and education are the safeguards against cruelty, tyranny, and moral failure. But history—and our current moment—tell a different story. Some of the most articulate, highly educated people have been among the most enthusiastic followers of dictators. Some of the most gifted artists and intellectuals have remained willfully blind to suffering, even as they wielded brilliant minds.

Why? Because character is not forged by intellect. It is forged in the crucible of early emotional experience.

I recently watched a video of James O’Brien reacting to Trump’s latest flurry of faux pas, and I found myself thinking not about politics in the conventional sense, but about something deeper: what kind of emotional wiring allows a person—or a nation—to elect a malignant narcissist to the highest office? My own comment on the video tried to articulate this:

“I think Trump likely has a learning disability himself—but that’s not the real issue. The real issue is that he’s a dangerously repressed individual who has developed into a full-blown malignant narcissist and sociopath, utterly devoid of empathy. I’m extremely dyslexic, but I see myself and others clearly—so I know this isn’t about intelligence. The problem is emotional blindness. Trump and his supporters seem to lack it entirely; otherwise, they never would have voted him into the highest office and put the entire world in such a dangerous position. Sexism and racism come with a very high price. We’re all paying it.”

That comment brought to mind the work of Alice Miller, the Swiss psychologist who spent her career tracing the roots of violence, tyranny, and emotional deadness back to childhood. Miller understood something that our culture often refuses to see: the capacity for empathy, for ethical clarity, for resistance to authoritarianism—these are not gifts of IQ. They are gifts of emotional freedom.

The Formation of Character

As Miller writes:

“We do not arrive in this world as a clean slate. Every new baby comes with a history of its own, the history of the nine months between conception and birth. In addition, children have the genetic blueprint they inherit from their parents. These factors may help determine what kind of a temperament a child will have, what inclinations, gifts, and predispositions. But character depends crucially upon whether a person is given love, protection, tenderness, and understanding or exposed to rejection, coldness, indifference, and cruelty in the early formative years.”

The stimulus for empathy is the experience of being empathized with. In the absence of that—when a child is neglected, emotionally starved, or subjected to abuse—the innate capacity for empathy atrophies. Neurologist Dr. Bruce D. Perry has shown that traumatized and neglected children can display lesions affecting up to 30 percent of the brain regions that control emotion. Severe early trauma floods the developing brain with stress hormones that destroy newly formed neurons and their connections.

This is not merely a personal tragedy. It is a public danger.

Why Intelligence Is Not Enough

One of Miller’s most unsettling insights is that intelligence, without emotional freedom, does not protect us from corruption—it simply makes us better at rationalizing it. She writes:

“Our capacity to resist has nothing to do with our intelligence but with the degree of access to our true self. Indeed, intelligence is capable of innumerable rationalizations when it comes to the matter of adaptation.”

She cites the example of Martin Heidegger, one of the most brilliant philosophers of the 20th century, who was able to break with traditional philosophy but could not see the contradictions in Hitler’s ideology. His intellectual independence in one domain coexisted with infantile submissiveness in another—because the early pattern of obedience to tyrannical authority had never been consciously faced and resolved.

This is the danger of what Miller called “poisonous pedagogy” —the widespread practice of breaking a child’s will in the name of discipline, creating adults who will, as she puts it, “cooperate with the penal system” and “carry out any form of torture or persecution without having a guilty conscience.”

Creativity Does Not Resolve Trauma

One of the most persistent illusions in our culture is that creative expression is a form of healing. Miller is emphatic on this point:

“It is a great mistake to imagine that one can resolve traumas in a symbolic fashion. If that were possible, poets, painters, and other artists would be able to resolve their pain through creativity. This is not the case, however. Creativity helps us channel the pain of trauma into symbolic acts; it doesn’t help us resolve it.”

She uses dictators as her example: if symbolic revenge worked, they would eventually stop tormenting others. But because they deceive themselves about who their hatred truly belongs to—their own childhood perpetrators—they remain trapped in an insatiable hunger for revenge, endlessly acting it out on a global stage.

Seeing Clearly Requires Courage, Not Just Intelligence

This is why judging people by their character—by their emotional honesty, their capacity for self-reflection, their willingness to face painful truths—matters more than judging them by their credentials, their talents, or their public personas.

As I wrote in a blog post years ago, responding to the wave of revelations about men like Bill Cosby who hid behind fame and talent:

“Having special talents is wonderful and it’s okay to cash in your talents for a living, but when people hide behind their talents, fame and money to hide their own personal truth and keep themselves and others distracted from the truth and facts then you are misusing your talents and contributing for the lies to spread and silently or covertly you are part of all the violence and atrocities we are witnessing in our world.”

Miller once wrote to a reader who had survived horrific childhood abuse with her clarity and courage intact, expressing gratitude that “the lively, brave and bright little girl” had “remained sound to keep the full clarity and the unusual courage in order TO SEE and TO ACCUSE, without ‘buts,’ without illusions, without self-betrayal.”

That is the hallmark of genuine character: the refusal of “buts.” The refusal to excuse cruelty because the perpetrator is charismatic, or talented, or on “my side.” The refusal to look away.

The Price of Emotional Blindness

We are living through a time when the price of emotional blindness has become impossible to ignore. Sexism and racism, as I noted in my original comment, are not merely personal prejudices—they are the predictable outcomes of unresolved childhood repression, acted out on a collective scale. When a nation elevates a man devoid of empathy to its highest office, it is not a failure of education. It is a failure of emotional development, magnified millions of times over.

Miller’s insight is both sobering and, in its own way, hopeful: “The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than reason. That is the lesson that all tyrants teach us. One should not expect judiciousness from a mad person motivated by compulsive panic. One should, however, protect oneself from such a person.”

Protecting ourselves—and future generations—requires more than policy debates or intellectual arguments. It requires the courage to look at childhood honestly: our own, and the childhoods of those who now hold power. It requires recognizing that a person who cannot feel their own pain will inevitably inflict it on others. And it requires building a world where children are no longer broken in the name of obedience—because the character that results is the character that destroys us all.

Character matters. It always has. It always will.

Just like I wrote in my book A Dance to Freedom, pages 75, 76, and 173, “The extremes to which people go to avoid facing the pain of their own truth — even though such a confrontation would set them free — will never cease to amaze me. “To many people,” Alice Miller says, “it seems easier to take medication, to smoke, drink alcohol..., preach, educate or treat others, and prepare wars than expose themselves to their own painful truth. …Society is on the side of the status quo, so be prepared. As Alice Miller writes in Free from Lies, going against the parents “is a source of major alarm for others …They will sometimes mobilize all the forces at their command to discredit the former victim and thus keep their own repression intact.” 

This is why I keep getting targeted by dangerously repressed people after I published my book. My book is a mirror to the abusers and the enablers, and they don't like their own reflections, so they mobilize all their forces at their command to destroy me and discredit me; they would rather see me dead, in jail, or in a mental hospital than face their own repression, lies, and illusions.

I am so close to reaching one million total visitors

I am so close to reaching one million total visitors!

In today’s data, the United States has taken the #1 spot with 4.29K views, surpassing Brazil in today’s human ocean of readers.

To me, that small data point speaks volumes. It shows that humans everywhere are seeking emotional truth and that the world is waking up, one reader at a time. The human ocean is listening across borders, traumas, and languages, proving that the longing for emotional truth is truly universal.

"It is not true that evil, destructiveness,

and perversion inevitably form part of

human existence, no matter how often this

is maintained. But it is true that we are

daily producing more evil and, with it, an

ocean of suffering for millions that is

absolutely avoidable. When one day the

ignorance arising from childhood

repression is eliminated and humanity

has awakened, an end can be put to the

production of evil.”

— Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge, p. 143