We love to pass the blame onto someone or something else. I remember as a kid, I’d never want to admit that I’d done something wrong, it was always my sister or my parents or my circumstance that were to blame. It was never my fault. I mean, it was, but that was hard to admit. That meant admitting that I was responsible for something that went wrong, that I was at fault. We do this for others as well, when a friend’s relationship breaks down, we’re quick to point out all the faults of the other person and say things like, “they didn’t listen enough”, “they didn’t give you enough attention”, “you’re so much better than them anyway”. We do this, of course, in love. We want to make our friends feel better, even if we know deep down that maybe they were the one at fault, at least partially.
Scapegoating like this can be relatively harmless, however there’s a much darker form of scapegoating that happens on a bigger level. The one that’s given to us by politicians and the media. The dehumanising and dangerous kind that passes the blame onto entire groups of people, rather than the true culprit, the system we live in.
The term ‘scapegoat’ originates in the Old Testament book of Leviticus. Once a year, the community would project all of its sin onto a goat and cast the animal away into the desert. This was a symbol of their sins being forgiven, literally being taken away. It meant they were ‘clean’ again. They no longer had to accept the responsibility of their failures and wrongdoings; the slate was wiped clean. While we no longer project our ‘sins’ onto a literal goat and cast it away, we still have scapegoats. Whether they be migrants, muslims, the LGBTQ community or people stuck in a cycle of homelessness.
The world is in a bad way, in the U.K. inequality is at an all time high. The gap between the rich and the poor is getting larger and larger, and rather than doing something about it, the government is passing the blame. Utilising the media to spread a message that immigration or Islamic beliefs are the issue, rather than their own policy. The level of hate crime in the U.K. rose up to 49% higher in the three months after Brexit, with hate crimes towards the LGBTQ community rising as much as 147% higher. This is breaking communities apart and causing more and more division and isolation. It’s happened for years, it’s what the Romans did to the Christian community in the early days of the church, it’s what Hitler did to the Jews during the holocaust. We’re blinded by the lies we’re told that somehow the Western political system is less corrupt than previous world powers, that somehow as a society we’ve evolved past that. Yes, times have changed and society has evolved, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not happening again, we just can’t see the corruption because it’s been drilled into us by the media for so long. We need to open our eyes and see it for what it is, propaganda that dehumanises a certain group of the population who we can hold responsible for a problem that exists in the very fabric of the system we live in.
Now, one might argue that I’m merely passing the blame onto a different group of people. Pointing to politicians or the right wing media as my scapegoats. Of course that doesn’t really solve the issue, because it’s still saying there’s some kind of ‘us and them’, it’s still saying that someone else other than myself is to blame. My argument is not that we scapegoat a different group of people, that doesn’t get rid of the problem. Rather, we admit that the problem is within all of us, every one of us is broken. Every one of us needs to take responsibility for our own faults, as well as holding others accountable for theirs. We need to name and shame the politicians and media that are scapegoating minority groups. We need to stop believing the lies and buying the newspapers that print them. Demand for a fairer world and actually get out and vote for people that will bring that about when we are given the chance. But as well as that we need to look at our own lives, our own opinions and choices and make sure that we aren’t passing off responsibility for our own faults or inaction.
I believe that we can break this cycle before it breaks us. We have to, and I’m determined that my generation will rise above it towards a fairer, more just world. But we have to pull our fingers out and start making that happen.
To get involved in a movement fighting to stop newspapers from publishing hateful content and scapegoating minority groups, check out Stop Funding Hate.
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