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

Spanking, Power, and the Danger of Putting Repressed Rage in Charge

This morning, I read an article that made my blood run cold—not because it was surprising, but because it was so perfectly predictable.

Markwayne Mullin, the man to become the next Secretary of Homeland Security, once stood before an audience at a church-hosted event and boasted about spanking his children. His daughter Larra sat in the audience as he recounted how she would plead, “No, Daddy, no… I’m sorry, Daddy,” and how she would then get “madder and madder” for up to a day afterward. He described his son Andrew as “the hardest kid I ever had to spank” because Andrew would cry with “huge crocodile tears” and was “so hard on himself.”

The audience applauded.

Let that sink in. A room full of adults applauded a man for describing the terror of a child pleading with her father to stop, a child whose developing brain was recording—in that moment—that love and violence are the same thing, that Daddy hurts you and then you must crawl into his lap to be forgiven for your anger.

The Mechanism of a Dangerous Mind

Mullin’s confirmation hearing brought up additional concerns: he called a fellow senator a “freaking snake,” said he “completely” understood why someone assaulted that senator (breaking six of his ribs, damaging his lung, and causing two cases of pneumonia), and nearly got into a physical fight with the Teamsters president during a Senate hearing before Bernie Sanders had to intervene.

Senator Rand Paul, the victim of that assault, asked the critical question: “I just wonder if someone who applauds violence against their political opponents is the right person to lead an agency that has struggled to accept limits to the proper use of force.”

But the question is even deeper than that. It is not just about whether this man can restrain himself from violence. It is about what lives inside him.

What Alice Miller Taught Us About Men Like This

Alice Miller wrote extensively about the roots of violence, and her words could have been written with Mullin in mind:

“Humiliations, spankings, and beatings, slaps in the face, betrayal, sexual exploitation, derision, neglect, etc. are all forms of mistreatment, because they injure the integrity and dignity of a child, even if their consequences are not visible right away. However, as adults, most abused children will suffer, and let others suffer, from these injuries. This dynamic of violence can deform some victims into hangmen who take revenge even on whole nations and become willing executors to dictators as unutterably appalling as Hitler and other cruel leaders.”

Mullin was raised “by the fear of a belt,” as he proudly stated. He learned that love is administered through pain. He learned that a child’s pleas mean nothing. He learned that the bigger, stronger person gets to decide what is “good” for the smaller, defenseless one. And now he is being put in charge of Homeland Security—the agency responsible for the safety and dignity of millions, including the most vulnerable.

The pattern could not be clearer.

Dictators and the Dynamics of Cruelty

Miller also wrote:

“Every dictator torments his people in the same way he was tormented as a child. The humiliations inflicted on these dictators in adult life had nothing like the same influence on their actions as the emotional experiences they went through in their early years. As almost every dictator denies his sufferings (his former total helplessness in the face of brutality) there is no way that he can truly come to terms with them. Instead, he will have a limitless craving for scapegoats on whom he can avenge himself for the fears and anxieties of childhood without having to re-experience those fears.”

Mullin does not see himself as a victim. He says he “deserved” the beatings. This is the voice of a child who had to believe his parents were right in order to survive. But the body remembers. And the rage that was forbidden to be felt toward his parents now seeks outlets: political opponents, union leaders, and ultimately, the vulnerable populations that will fall under his authority.

This is not speculation. It is the documented psychology of how unexamined childhood cruelty reenacts itself in power.

The Roots of Violence Are Not Unknown

Alice Miller laid out the facts clearly:

*“1. The development of the human brain is use-dependent. The brain develops its structure in the first four years of life, depending on the experiences the environment offers the child. The brain of a child who has mostly loving experiences will develop differently from the brain of a child who has been treated cruelly.*

2. Almost all children on our planet are beaten in the first years of their lives. They learn from the start violence, and this lesson is wired into their developing brains. No child is ever born violent. Violence is NOT genetic, it exists because beaten children use, in their adult lives, the lesson that their brains have learned.

3. As beaten children are not allowed to defend themselves, they must suppress their anger and rage against their parents who have humiliated them, killed their inborn empathy, and insulted their dignity. They will take out this rage later, as adults, on scapegoats, mostly on their own children. Deprived of empathy, some of them will direct their anger against themselves, or against other adults (in wars, terrorism, delinquency etc.).”

This is not opinion. This is neurobiology. And we ignore it at our peril.

Why Do We Keep Giving Power to the Wounded Who Refuse to Heal?

Only very emotionally blind lawmakers will confirm a dangerously repressed person into a position of power. But here we are. Again.

We are witnessing the same dynamics with Putin, with past dictators, and now with leaders in our own country. Once we give power to these dangerously repressed malignant personalities, they will never give it up without destroying the livelihoods of many innocent beings and causing mass destruction.

“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.” — Alice Miller, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, p. 82

When will the masses wake up? When will we stop idealizing parents and childhood and start seeing the direct line between the belt and the bomb?

The Only Path Forward

We cannot keep pretending that a man who boasts about terrifying his children, who calls political opponents names and threatens violence, who “applauds violence against his political opponents” as Rand Paul noted, is somehow fit to lead an agency that holds the power of life and death over millions.

We cannot keep pretending that what happens in the nursery stays in the nursery. It doesn’t. It becomes policy. It becomes foreign policy. It becomes the willingness to bomb women and children, as the Mr. K in my own past so eagerly advocated.

“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

We can end the production of evil. But it requires that we stop denying the truth. It requires that we stop applauding men who boast about making their children cry and plead “No, Daddy.” It requires that we feel—truly feel—the terror of that child, so that we never again place that child, now grown and still unconscious, in charge of the lives of others.

No More Denial

The great malady of our society, implicated in all our troubles and affecting us individually and socially, is the idealization of our parents and childhood and the denial of childhood suffering. When we idealize our parents and childhood and deny childhood suffering, it does not go away. It appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, greed, deceit, and loss of meaning. Our temptation is to isolate these symptoms or try to eradicate them one by one, but the root problem is the idealization of our parents and childhood and the denial of childhood suffering.

Markwayne Mullin is a symptom. So is Mr. K. So is every leader who uses power to avenge the helplessness they once felt.

The cure is not better policies or different politicians. The cure is waking up. The cure is feeling what we were never allowed to feel. The cure is breaking the chain of abuse by no longer passing it on—not to our children, and not to the world through the people we put in power.

Let us be the ones who finally see. Let us be the ones who refuse to applaud the terror in a child’s voice. Let us be the ones who protect the vulnerable—not put their abusers in charge.

— Sylvie Shene

This post is dedicated to Larra and Andrew Mullin, and to every child whose “No, Daddy” goes unheard. May you someday find the freedom to feel what you were never allowed to feel, and may we all learn to stop putting your father’s pain in charge of the world.

The Belt and the Badge: Why We Must Stop Entrusting Power to the "Repressed"

 Alice Miller wrote that the need to "bring a child into line" stems from a parent's need to split off the disquieting parts of their own inner self and project them onto the child. When Mullin describes how his father doubled up a belt to hit him, and how he "deserved it," he is showing us his own unhealed wounds. He has idealized his abuser to survive. When we idolize our parents, we become just like them.

Now, as an adult in a position of power, he is the "avenging child." As Miller noted:

"The enemy within can, at last, be hunted down on the outside... Projections can easily become part of any Weltanschauung [worldview]."

When a leader has not felt the legitimate rage of their own childhood, they take that rage out on "scapegoats"—be it political opponents they call "snakes," neighbors they justify assaulting, or nations they wish to bomb.

The Dictator’s Blueprint

We have seen this "dynamics of cruelty" before. From Hitler to Ceaușescu to Putin, the pattern is identical:

1. The Childhood Injury: Extreme neglect, beatings, or humiliation.

2. The Repression: The child denies the pain to survive, often "forgiving" the parent.

3. The Reenactment: The adult gains power and torments a nation in the same way they were tormented, all while claiming to be "moral" or "noble."

Mullin’s admission that he expects his children to "crawl into his lap" two minutes after a spanking is perhaps the most tragic detail. It is the forced "forgiveness" that Alice Miller identified as actively harmful. It forces the child to deceive themselves, destroying their inborn empathy and wiring their brain to accept cruelty as a prerequisite for love.

Giving Nuclear Weapons to Children

As I’ve written before, humanity is not ready for the power of AI or high-level governance as long as we remain "unconscious." Entrusting Homeland Security—an agency defined by the "proper use of force"—to a man who applauds violence against opponents and practices it against his own children is like giving matches to a child in a room full of gasoline.

The development of the human brain is use-dependent. A brain wired by the "fear of a belt" will always see the world through the lens of threat and retaliation.

Breaking the Chain

The only way to stop producing "evil" and "oceans of suffering" is the unflinching realization of our own past reality. As long as we idealize our parents and deny our childhood suffering, that pain will appear symptomatically in our leaders as greed, deceit, and mass destruction.

We must resolve childhood repression to stop being "emotionally blind." We must recognize that the "great leader" is often just a small, beaten child acting out an unintegrated potential for hatred.

The truth is simple, though painful: Violence is not genetic. It is a lesson learned. And it is a lesson we must stop electing into office.