Reading about the young man who set the Palisades fire in California filled me with both sadness and recognition. So many troubled young people surround us — lost souls wandering in a world that itself has lost its way. Planet Earth has become a vast mental hospital filled with emotionally blind patients reenacting the pain of their repressed childhoods.
According to prosecutors, six months before the fire, the young man had prompted ChatGPT to create a “dystopian painting” of a burning forest, with people fleeing toward “a gigantic gate with a big dollar sign on it.” On the other side, “the richest people” were “chilling, watching the world burn.” A month later, he burned a Bible and wrote that it had felt “amazing.” “I felt so liberated,” he said.
That prompt — that painting — was not simply imagination. It was a confession. It revealed a young man’s inner world: a burning landscape of despair, division, and rage. He didn’t need AI to create a dystopian image; he was already living in one. His creation was the mirror of a wounded child who saw injustice everywhere and had no one to truly see him.
As Alice Miller taught us, when the pain of childhood humiliation and abandonment remains unacknowledged, it turns into destruction — either against the self or others. The fascination with fire is often the wish to purify unbearable emotions through flames, to destroy what one cannot transform. But fire cannot heal. Only feeling can.
This tragedy is not about AI. It’s about repression — the mother of all violence. AI merely reflected his inner reality, the same way the world reflects humanity’s collective blindness. Until we begin to feel the pain of the child within us, we will keep burning the world around us.
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