How Childhood Repression Creates a World Where Everyone Loses
The phrase “Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich” has echoed in my mind for years. Every time another tragedy erupts in the human ocean — a bombing, a shooting, an invasion, a retaliation — I see the same tragic truth repeating itself:
The emotionally blind reenacting their childhood wounds on the world stage.
In 2017, this insight struck me after watching a video about terrorism that was circulating online. Today, it resonates even more deeply, now that I’ve lived through the psychological warfare of a workplace mob, now that nations have become more volatile, and now that digital manipulation has replaced religion as the new global poison.
“All religions are poison — in some, the poison is more potent than in others.”
The poison is not faith. The poison is the lie — the lie that children must tolerate cruelty, obey blindly, and numb themselves to their own truth.
Children raised on lies grow into adults who cannot see reality clearly.
And emotionally blind adults are the perfect raw material for terrorism and war.
The Terrorism of the Poor: Retaliation by the Emotionally Blind
The poor, the disenfranchised, the rising generations of young men who feel humiliated, unseen, and powerless — they are the easiest to manipulate.
Rich sociopaths lay the trap.
Emotionally blind young men fall into it.
The poor who turn to terrorism believe they are fighting injustice, defending honor, protecting their people. But what they’re really doing is reenacting childhood:
the humiliation,
the rage,
the powerlessness,
the unresolved pain that was never witnessed and understood.
They mistake the abuser.
They attack the wrong target.
And in their desperation, they become tools for the powerful.
Just as emotionally abused children often imitate their abusers to survive, emotionally blind adults imitate the violence that was once used against them.
This is why religion is never the cause — it is only the costume and a tool for manipulation.
As James Warren said:
“Terrorism is always political and can easily dress itself in the cloak of religion.”
Religion is a convenient excuse.
A convenient enemy.
A convenient script for the emotionally blind.
The Terrorism of the Rich: Manufactured Enemies, Manufactured Wars
Here is the part society never likes to hear:
The real terrorists sit in boardrooms.
They do not strap bombs to their bodies.
They strap bombs to economies, nations, and populations.
They manipulate the poor into retaliating.
Then they use that retaliation as justification for more war, more surveillance, more power, more money.
Terrorism is the war of the poor,
and war is the terrorism of the rich.
And both sides are emotionally blind.
Both sides reenact the same childhood wound:
the desire to punish, to dominate, to “win,” to feel powerful at any cost.
After my own experience with the sociopaths at my workplace of nine and a half years, I understood this dynamic in a visceral way:
Abusers provoke reactions so they can call their victims “evil.”
This is the entire architecture of terrorism and war.
Marie-France Hirigoyen describes this perfectly in Stalking the Soul — the invisible violence that leaves no external wounds, the manipulation that pushes victims into desperation so the abuser can point and say:
“See? She’s unstable. She’s dangerous. She’s the problem.”
This is exactly what happens on the world stage:
The rich provoke.
The poor react.
The rich cry “terrorism.”
The cycle begins again.
And the emotionally blind public believes the lie every time.
When Society Is Too Emotionally Blind to See the Game — Everyone Loses
The rich abusers at my job wanted me jailed, dead, or institutionalized. They wanted me to act out their transferences and projections so they could justify destroying me.
They failed — I didn’t become one of them.
But when one of them, a bank robber, ended his life in a police standoff, they all went silent, just as powerful nations do when their own crimes come to light.
Emotional abusers depend on two things:
The silence of the crowd
The emotional blindness of their victims
The same dynamic fuels terrorism and war.
The real danger is the system, not the individuals caught inside it.
Emotionally blind societies reward sociopaths and punish truth-tellers. They call the abuser “leader” and the victim “crazy.” They cheer for war and condemn the retaliation they helped create.
As Hirigoyen wrote, emotional abusers drag everyone into their orbit, contaminate moral values, and aim to corrupt the other so the evil becomes “normal.”
This is the logic of war.
This is the logic of terrorism.
This is the logic of emotional repression.
There is no winning for the emotionally blind.
Only bleeding.
The Only Escape: Emotional Clarity and Breaking the Cycle
Alice Miller taught us that liberation comes only through truth — through breaking free from childhood repression, refusing lies, refusing manipulation, refusing to carry the poison into the next generation.
The poor will stop being recruited into terrorism only when they heal.
The rich will stop engineering wars only when they face their own childhoods.
Society will stop collapsing only when we stop rewarding emotional blindness.
When society lets sociopaths win — everyone loses.
The cycle of terrorism and war is nothing but childhood trauma reenacted across generations. And until humanity faces this truth, it will continue repeating the same tragedies, calling them “politics,” “religion,” “foreign policy,” or “national security.”
But the root is always the same:
The war between the wounded inner child and the truth they were forbidden to feel.
This essay was written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) as a tool for reflection, synthesis, and articulation. The responsibility for the ideas and interpretations expressed here remains my own.
