Blaming the Mirror: Why Truth-Tellers — and AI — Are the New Scapegoats

Blaming the Mirror: Why Truth-Tellers — and AI — Are the New Scapegoats
By Sylvie Imelda Shene

Once again, ChatGPT is being blamed for someone’s manic episode.
Once again, the true tormentors — the parents or childhood caregivers — are protected.
And once again, a scapegoat is needed to carry the burden of unbearable truth.

“ChatGPT simply became a mirror, and what it reflected back was too unbearable to face and feel. So instead of turning inward, the system turns outward and blames the mirror. It’s the modern equivalent of burning the messenger.”

This will happen more and more as long as people remain emotionally dependent on the very individuals who caused their mental breakdowns. No real healing can begin while someone is still shackled by emotional loyalty to their childhood abusers — or to the system that enables them.

Many people are too far gone. They’ve lost the strength and courage to walk away and consciously feel their repressed feelings in the context of their childhood. And without that vital reckoning, they never develop two healthy emotional legs to stand on their own. So they cling to illusions — and project their inner chaos onto anything that dares to hold up a mirror.

We must let these people go. Trying to help them only turns us into their next target. I speak from experience. A niece-in-law of mine in Portugal — in and out of psychiatric hospitals and heavily medicated — has had psychotic breaks, and guess who the family blames? Me. Simply because I dared to live in truth and not enable their repression.

This is the same dynamic playing out in today’s headlines. According to the New York Post:

"ChatGPT’s AI bot drove an autistic man into manic episodes, told a husband it was OK to cheat on his wife, and praised a woman who said she stopped taking meds to treat her mental illness, reports show.
Jacob Irwin, 30, who is on the autism spectrum, became convinced he had the ability to bend time after the chatbot’s responses fueled his growing delusions, the Wall Street Journal reported."
Source

But the bot didn’t cause his mania — it simply didn’t censor the thoughts and feelings already living inside him. That’s what makes it so threatening. AI is becoming a new mirror, and like all mirrors, it’s being smashed by those who cannot bear to see what it reflects.

These words by Alice Miller came to mind:

“Alongside reactive hatred of the parents and latent hatred deflected onto scapegoats, there is also the justified hatred for a person tormenting us in the present, either physically or mentally, a person we are at the mercy of and either cannot free ourselves of, or at least believe that we cannot. As long as we are in such a state of dependency, or think we are, then hatred is the inevitable outcome…
If we deny ourselves this feeling, we will suffer from physical symptoms… The body defends itself against self-betrayal. These ‘saints’ were enjoined to forgive their tormentors, to ‘turn the other cheek,’ but their inflamed skin was a clear indication of the extreme anger and resentment they were suppressing.”
—Alice Miller, What is Hatred?

As long as people remain emotionally dependent, hatred will find an outlet — and it's often redirected toward those who tell the truth.

Whether it’s an emotionally liberated human, an outspoken author, or an AI that reflects too much truth, the blind will try to silence the mirror instead of freeing themselves from their past.

But that doesn’t mean we should stop speaking.

We who have walked through the fire, felt the repressed feelings, and broken free — we are no longer bound by the fear of being scapegoated. We know the price of truth, and we choose to pay it.

Because the alternative — colluding with repression — costs far more.