This last Saturday, I had dinner with my acquaintance Mark at El Chorro, near his house. Afterwards, he invited me to watch the 2023 Superman movie. The special effects were so lifelike that he thought the dog in the film was real. When I told him, “No, the dog is also produced by AI,” he didn’t believe me until he looked it up. Even though I knew the dog wasn’t real, I still felt sorry for it when the villain hurt it. That’s the power of illusion: the heart responds as if it were true.
The same is happening in society, only on a far more destructive scale. We confuse the surface illusions with reality—and we miss the deeper wounds behind every act of violence.
Fire Instead of Guns
In the United States, angry young men pick up guns to destroy life. In Portugal, where firearms are less accessible, angry young men literally burn down the country.
A few days ago, Portuguese police arrested a 14-year-old boy who admitted to deliberately setting wildfires. He would ride his scooter into the forest and use matches to start blazes. Police noted he was frustrated over poor school results and isolated from his peers.
It’s not the first time. In 2016, a 24-year-old man set Madeira ablaze. Abandoned by his parents, estranged from his adoptive family, and numbed by drugs, he “decided to put an end to Madeira.”
Behind the flames is the same cry we hear in every corner of the world: unseen, unloved, unwanted children, now adults in pain, destroying life the way their lives were once destroyed.
Behind Every Crime, a Personal Tragedy
As I wrote back in 2016: Behind every crime, a personal tragedy lies hidden. But few dare to ask where this anger comes from. Society prefers to moralize, condemn, and punish rather than look into the roots.
This is why I could never risk bringing a life into the world only to give it up for adoption. Yes, there are exceptions—some adoptive parents are conscious and help children heal. But most are not. Adoption, like childbirth itself, is like playing Russian roulette with the most vulnerable lives on earth.
Alice Miller saw this clearly. She wrote:
“Unwanted children are usually mistreated. But there exists, as a rule, also a huge amount of people who were ‘wanted’ indeed, but only for playing the role of the victims that their parents needed to be able to take revenge on… Their children learn this perverted behavior, also very early, and will later do the same; and so this perverse behavior continues for millennia. Unless people are willing to SEE the perversion of their parents and are ready to consciously refuse to imitate it.”
Violence Is Not Genetic
Alice Miller also insisted:
“I have no doubt that behind every crime a personal tragedy lies hidden. If we were to investigate such events and their backgrounds more closely, we might be able to do more to prevent crimes than we do now with our indignation and moralizing.” (For Your Own Good, pp. 196–197)
Violence is not inborn. It is learned. The first years of life shape the brain: a child who is loved grows differently than a child who is beaten, humiliated, or neglected.
Miller explained this plainly:
No child is ever born violent.
Violence is wired into the brain when children are beaten or neglected in their earliest years.
Unable to fight back against parents, children suppress their rage—only to release it later on scapegoats, society, or themselves.
This is why some shoot, others burn, and others turn their anger inward with drugs, depression, or eating disorders. Different weapons, same wound.
A Preventable Tragedy
Wouldn’t it have been better if the mother of the young man who burned Madeira had access to an abortion when he was just a fertilized egg, rather than bring a life into the world destined to suffer and make others suffer? Anyone who says otherwise is blind to reality—or worse, a sadist.
As I wrote in A Dance to Freedom (p. 137):
“Everything we become as an adult is connected to our childhood: Our experiences are a chain of events that bring us to the present moment, for better or worse. A criminal is never guilty just by himself. If society at large could ever find the courage to learn from the chain of events that occurred in each criminal’s life from day one, we could prevent many future crimes and a lot of unnecessary suffering.”
The question is: do we have the courage to look behind the flames, the bullets, and the smoke, and finally see the broken childhoods they reveal?
Because the truth is simple: The roots of violence are not unknown. We just refuse to face them.
