In bad times, human nature starts looking for some new scapegoats

By David McElroy · October 31, 2011

Few people like to take responsibility when their lives go off the expected path and end up in a ditch. So what do we do? Instead of finding the real source of problems, we have a strong tendency to find other people to blame.

The ancient Hebrews had a practice that we get our modern word “scapegoat” from. (The word was actually a mistranslation from the Hebrew, but that’s another story.) To oversimplify it a bit, basically the Hebrews would keep a record of their sins all year and then they would “transfer” that sin to the goat — before driving it out into the desert wilderness to die alone. In this way, the people were considered to be clean from their sins.

The ancient Greeks had a practice that was a bit the same, but was closer in spirit to what we do today. When there was a disaster of some sort — famine, invasion or plague, for instance — the Greeks would choose a pharmakos, who was a slave, a cripple or a criminal who was cast out of the community as a sacrifice to quiet the gods. (There’s scholarly debate as to whether they were actually killed or simply expelled from the community.)

Throughout history, humans have chosen people to blame. When bad things happened in some communities — such as a crop failure or a baby dying — unpopular women were sometimes accused of being witches and were burned as punishment. In other cases, entire groups of people were blamed. For much of history, Jews in Europe were blamed for a variety of problems. For instance, because Jews as a group did well financially, people who didn’t do as well blamed them for their problems, ascribing all sorts of negative character traits to the more-successful Jews.

So what’s making me think of this now? I first started thinking about why the Occupy Wall Street people are so fixated on “the 1 percent” who they see as the source of their problems, and it occurred to me that it’s natural that people who are angry, scared and confused are going to look for someone to blame for their problems. They certainly aren’t generally going to look at their own decisions or even the policies they favored in government. Just as the wealthy Jewish banker was a popular target in Europe in centuries past, the modern Wall Street bankers are a convenient and simple explanation for the economic woes of today.

Beyond that, I see that various groups are looking for scapegoats. Many conservatives are looking to blame immigrants who didn’t come to this country legally for lots of economic problems. The evidence says just the opposite — that immigrants, legal or otherwise, are a net positive for the economy — but it makes people feel better to have someone to blame.

For other people, it’s various conspiracies. It’s the Masons or the Illuminati or the Rothschilds or the Rockefellers or the nefarious people from Skull and Bones. For those who are more interested in believing a narrative and finding someone to blame, the specifics don’t really matter that much. All that matters is that someone tells the tale well and with great emotion — and there’s no shortage of crazy people today who are passionately committed to selling those conspiracies. (Alex Jones and David Icke quickly come to mind.)

It’s difficult to avoid scapegoating, because it’s emotionally satisfying to find some person to blame for your woes. It’s much harder to take responsibility yourself or to accept that some abstract idea is responsible. So most people end up assuming that people they disagree with have bad motives and are intentionally taking them down the road to ruin, whether it’s George W. Bush or Barack Obama.

We are where we are today — politically and economically — because we (as a society) have accepted ideas that are dangerous and wrong. It’s difficult to get to the root of those ideas intellectually and see the errors. And it’s an unemotional process that doesn’t give us the satisfaction of assigning blame. But playing the blame game isn’t going to change anything, because rounding up the usual suspects is no better than sending a goat out to die.

As long as we continue the frustrating cycle of finding new people to blame — instead of letting other people live as they choose — we’re going to continue having the same problems. The idea of coercion is the cancer that lies at the heart of our economic and social issues. Until we deal with that, it won’t matter how many bankers or politicians we metaphorically burn at the stake.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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