Protected by Silence: How Societies Shield Their Own and Scapegoat the Rest

 In a world that worships appearances, even murder can be covered with silence — as long as it’s committed by the “right” person.

The young American tourist who was stabbed to death in Cascais on October 16 has been named. The 23-year-old Portuguese man who killed him has not. Nearly three weeks later, Portuguese authorities have still withheld the suspect’s identity. They released his age, confirmed he had “no criminal record,” and added that he worked at a nearby bar. But no name. No photo. No accountability.

The recent case in England: a British man, Anthony Williams, who stabbed ten people on a train, was named and publicly identified within hours. But could you imagine the outcry if it were an immigrant? When the perpetrator is an immigrant or someone who doesn’t belong to the national “family,” the outrage and outcry are instant. When it’s one of their own, the curtain of protection falls.

The Psychology of Collective Denial

This pattern is universal. Societies, like families, reenact their childhood dramas. Governments act like defensive parents, covering up the misdeeds of the “golden child,” while projecting guilt and blame onto scapegoats. It’s an unconscious loyalty to illusion.

A child’s loyalty to illusion becomes a society’s loyalty to hypocrisy.

Portugal is not unique in this, but it is a striking example. The country has one of the highest rates of depression and antidepressant consumption in Europe. The surface is calm — polite, melancholic, “safe.” But beneath that calm is a collective repression so thick that truth suffocates in it. When violence erupts, it’s treated like an “exception,” an accident that must be quietly buried to protect the nation’s self-image.

The Family Drama, Replayed in Institutions

I saw this same mechanism up close in my own life with the prestigious Dr. Julio Machad Vaz. 

When I worked for the company that later suffered a major bank robbery scandal, the real criminals were protected — sociopaths wearing suits, smiling for the cameras. They were the “family’s golden children.”
But if I had done what they did, my name, face, and story would have been splashed across every media outlet, painted as a warning, not a mystery.

That’s how emotional repression works in groups. The corrupt are protected because they reflect the system’s own self-deception. Exposing them would mean confronting the truth about power, illusion, and the emotional blindness that keeps the hierarchy intact.

The Cascais Silence

So why the silence around the Cascais murderer? Because he likely comes from a family with prestige, perhaps political or economic influence — and revealing his name would force Portugal to confront something it cannot bear: that violence does not come from “outsiders,” but from within. That even the most “well-bred” citizens can harbor unprocessed rage. That beneath the courteous saudade lies a river of unresolved pain.

This is the same denial that allows nations to romanticize their “character” — gentle, devout, resilient — while hiding the wounded children who grow up to explode.

As Alice Miller wrote:

“Only unflinching realization of one’s own past reality, of what really happened, can break through the chain of abuse. If I know what my parents did to me when I was totally defenseless, I no longer need victims to befog my awareness.”

Collective Blindness: The Root of Hypocrisy

When societies refuse that realization, they reenact the same dynamic endlessly: protect the privileged, punish the powerless. The scapegoats change, but the story stays the same.

• When a poor immigrant commits a crime, he represents “danger.”

• When a wealthy local commits one, it’s a “tragedy.”

• When a whistleblower exposes corruption, they’re “unstable.”

• When a golden child harms others, they’re “under pressure” or “mentally ill.”

It’s the emotional logic of a dysfunctional family — scaled to an entire country.

From Family to Nation: The Same Ocean

This is why I often call humanity the human ocean. Each drop contains its history. Each family’s repression becomes part of the collective tide. We swim in it daily — at work, in politics, in media bias, in the selective empathy of our institutions.

Until we face our collective childhood — until we stop idealizing our nations as “good parents” — the same tragedies will keep washing ashore. We will keep building systems that protect abusers, silence victims, and punish truth-tellers.

What Healing Would Look Like

Healing, at both personal and national levels, means exposure, not concealment. It means naming the perpetrator and understanding the roots of his violence — not to demonize him, but to dismantle the conditions that produced him. It means honoring victims with truth, not platitudes.

“As long as children allow themselves to be used in this way, it is entirely possible to live to be one hundred without any awareness of one’s personal truth.”
— Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies

Most people — and most nations — would rather die than face their own painful truth. But a few do. And those few, like islands in the human ocean, help guide the rest of us toward consciousness.