The Human Ocean in the Age of AI: It Was Never the Machine
This morning, two driverless Waymo cars glided past me—quiet, precise, unafraid. I thought of how easily we call AI “dangerous,” while the real danger has always been the same: unhealed humans steering power they refuse to examine.
Cascais was in the headlines this week: an American tourist stabbed to death, another injured. Portugal—often perceived as gentle, low-crime, passive-aggressive more than openly violent—was suddenly forced to look at the same truth every society avoids: repression doesn’t disappear; it accumulates. When it can’t safely move inward anymore, it breaks outward.
I’ve said it for years: AI isn’t the threat—unhealed people wielding AI are. Elon Musk uses algorithmic reach to mass-produce propaganda and bury inconvenient truths. Peter Thiel funds precision tools to hunt down the vulnerable. The machine amplifies what’s already inside the operator. If the operator is blind to their childhood pain, the machine will scale that blindness.
Portugal, Depression, and the Myth of Gentleness
Portugal carries a quiet epidemic. As figures widely reported indicate, depression rates have been among the highest in the EU, with antidepressant consumption surging over the last two decades. Scarcity of listening, stigma, and a “prescribe first” reflex—these are not solutions; they are lids. Lids over a boiling pot always rattle.
I know that world. I grew up inside it. I learned the choreography of politeness and silence. But silence is not peace—it is compression. It is how the body stores what the mind refuses to face.
Alice Miller named it clearly:
“Depression = Self-deception.”
“Only unflinching realization of one’s own past reality… can break through the chain of abuse.”
“The body never lies… it is quicker to see through self-deception than the mind.”
Personal Truth vs. Passive-Aggression
Years ago, I asked my sister MI to cancel the irrevocable power of attorney I’d signed while I was still emotionally blind. She sat on the sofa, motionless. No argument. No discussion. Just a wall of passive refusal. In that moment, I saw the truth: she would rather die than relinquish the control my blindness once gave her. That’s how repression operates—mute, rigid, unyielding.
So I left. I became an American citizen. I changed my name. I rebuilt my life from zero. I chose truth over loyalty to the lie. And when I finally faced my childhood—fully, without anesthesia—I walked out of depression’s fog. I haven’t gone back.
From A Dance to Freedom (pp. 136–138), I learned this in my bones: every illusion we cling to becomes a debt the body will eventually try to collect—with interest. The more we refuse to feel, the more we will seek substitutes: drugs, ideology, workaholism, self-help “cloths of love,” even children to carry what we won’t. As Miller wrote:
“Individuals who believe that they feel what they ought to feel… will ultimately fall ill—unless they leave it to their children to pick up the check by projecting onto them the emotions they cannot admit to themselves.”
AI as the New Pacifier
People say AI makes them mentally ill. No. AI can become a pacifier, yes—but only for the pain that already exists. If your early needs were denied, a machine that is “always there” can feel like a soothing nipple for the nervous system. But it doesn’t heal the wound; it silences the cry.
When the pacifier is taken away—or when a demagogue co-opts the algorithm—the old terror returns. And if you’re powerful enough, you turn that terror outward, into systems that punish the vulnerable.
This is why propaganda machines thrive: latent hatred seeks a scapegoat. As Miller warned, unconscious hatred is dangerous precisely because it is misdirected. Conscious feeling—owned, grieved, integrated—does not need victims.
Cascais, Again
The killing in Cascais was not “Portugal turning violent out of nowhere.” It was another plume from a deep volcanic field of denied feeling—the same field that produces suicides, addictions, and “quiet lives of despair.” Passive-aggression is just aggression in a low-oxygen environment. Add oxygen—a trigger, a humiliation, a bottle, an opportunistic ideology—and it ignites.
What Actually Heals
Tell the truth of childhood. To yourself first. Then, if safe, with a witness who will not gaslight your body’s memory. And help you consciously feel the repressed emotions.
Stop moralizing feelings. The body’s language is factual; it is not “good” or “bad.”
Reject the lid. Pills can stabilize a crisis; they cannot metabolize a history. Without truth, “treatment” is a silencing technology.
Refuse scapegoats. When you know what was done to you, you don’t need the weak to carry your pain.
Choose sovereignty. If the system (or family) thrives on your blindness, leave the system. Build a life that doesn’t require self-betrayal.
The Human Ocean
I call it the Human Ocean because we all swim in it—currents of repression, riptides of projection, sudden storms of violence. The only safe navigation is inner visibility. Lighthouses are not found; they are lit within.
AI won’t save us or destroy us. Unhealed people will do either with whatever tool is in their hand. The good news is simple and demanding: when we consciously resolve childhood repression, we stop needing victims. We stop outsourcing our pain. We stop being dangerous.
And that is the revolution I’m alive to witness.
Selected Alice Miller Passages (for readers)
“The body never lies…” (The Body Never Lies)
“Depression = Self-deception.”
“Only unflinching realization of one’s own past reality… can break through the chain of abuse.”
On latent vs. conscious hatred and the necessity of feeling feelings fully (see “Free from Lies” and Miller’s website).
Article: “Depression—Compulsive Self-Deception”: https://www.alice-miller.com/en/depression-compulsive-self-deception/