Scapegoating

Based on Wikipedia: Scapegoating

The Goat That Carried Everyone's Sins

In ancient Israel, once a year, a priest would perform a strange ritual. He would take a goat, place his hands on its head, and speak aloud every sin the community had committed. Then he would release the animal into the wilderness, where it would wander off carrying the weight of an entire people's wrongdoing. The community, now symbolically cleansed, could start fresh.

This is where we get the word "scapegoat."

The original Hebrew text mentions a mysterious figure called Azazel, a pre-Judaic deity associated with the underworld. The goat wasn't just wandering into the desert—it was being sent to this chthonic god, a spiritual dustbin for collective guilt. The ritual appears in the sixteenth chapter of Leviticus, and while the practice itself died out millennia ago, the psychological mechanism it describes never went away.

We still do this. Every day. All over the world. We just don't use goats anymore.

What Scapegoating Actually Is

At its core, scapegoating is the practice of singling out a person or group for unmerited blame. Notice that word: unmerited. The scapegoat hasn't actually done the thing they're being blamed for, or at least not to the degree claimed. That's what distinguishes a scapegoat from someone who is simply being held accountable.

The mechanism works at every scale. A child points at a sibling: "He did it, not me!" A failing team turns on its newest member. A nation in economic crisis finds an ethnic minority to blame for its troubles. The pattern is identical whether you're looking at a family dinner table or the pages of history.

Scapegoats can be anyone. Children. Adults. Employees. Religious groups. Entire nations. The medical literature defines scapegoating as a process where "feelings of aggression, hostility, frustration" are focused on another individual or group through psychological mechanisms like projection and displacement. The key element is that the blame is unwarranted.

This last point matters enormously. Scapegoating isn't about finding the guilty party. It's about finding a convenient party.

The Difference Between Passing the Buck and Finding a Goat

There's a related concept that's worth distinguishing: buck passing. The phrase comes from poker, where a marker called the "buck" indicated whose turn it was to deal. Passing the buck meant shifting that responsibility to someone else.

Buck passing and scapegoating might look similar from a distance, but they operate differently. Buck passing is about shifting responsibility—you actively participate in moving an unwanted task or decision to someone else. It's collaborative in a perverse way. The buck can keep moving. Everyone involved is an active player.

Scapegoating is different. It's about blame, not responsibility. The scapegoat doesn't participate. They're cornered, targeted, and made to bear the weight of something they didn't cause. Where buck passing is a game of hot potato, scapegoating is more like a firing squad.

The Psychology of Projection

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung spent considerable time analyzing why humans scapegoat each other. His answer was characteristically unsettling: we project onto others the parts of ourselves we cannot accept.

Jung called these unacceptable parts the "shadow"—the aspects of our personality we've rejected, suppressed, or simply cannot bear to acknowledge. Rather than face these uncomfortable truths about ourselves, we push them onto someone else. The scapegoat becomes a walking container for everything we hate about our own nature.

Jung noted dryly that "there must be some people who behave in the wrong way; they act as scapegoats and objects of interest for the normal ones." This observation contains a dark implication: society may actually need scapegoats to function. Without someone to carry our projected shadows, we'd have to carry them ourselves.

The Jungian analyst Sylvia Brinton Perera went further. She described how those who do the scapegoating are often themselves deeply wounded. They tend to be, in her words, "sadistic, superego accusers with brittle personas"—people who have driven their own darkness so far underground that it erupts as aggression toward others. The scapegoat becomes a pressure valve for psychic material the scapegoater cannot process.

Meanwhile, the victim of scapegoating often retreats into what Perera calls "a hell of felt unworthiness." They internalize the blame, hide from the pain of self-understanding, and become burdened by guilt that was never theirs to carry.

When Economies Fail, Scapegoats Emerge

If scapegoating were merely a family dysfunction or an individual quirk, it would be troubling enough. But the pattern scales to entire societies, and when it does, the consequences turn lethal.

Researchers studying violence in the American South between 1882 and 1930 discovered something chilling. They tracked the relationship between cotton prices—the primary economic indicator of the region at the time—and the number of Black men lynched by white mobs. The correlation ranged from negative 0.63 to negative 0.72.

In statistical terms, that's remarkably strong. What it means in human terms is this: when cotton prices fell and economic conditions worsened, white Southerners murdered more Black people. When the economy improved, the violence decreased.

This wasn't coincidence. It was the scapegoat mechanism operating at the level of an entire region. Economic despair creates frustration, frustration creates a need for outlets, and scapegoats provide convenient targets for displaced rage. The victims had nothing to do with cotton prices. They died because they were available.

This pattern—economic despair leading to violence against outgroups—has repeated throughout history. It forms the basis of what social psychologists call the scapegoat theory of intergroup conflict. When times are hard, look for someone to blame.

The Mechanism, Described

The literary critic and philosopher Kenneth Burke first named and analyzed this dynamic in the 1930s and 1940s. Writing in his books Permanence and Change and A Grammar of Motives, Burke described what he called the "scapegoat mechanism"—the way human groups systematically identify, blame, and expel individuals to restore social cohesion.

Burke's work caught the attention of René Girard, a French anthropologist who would spend his career developing the concept into a comprehensive theory of human culture.

Girard's thesis is provocative. He argued that human beings are fundamentally imitative creatures. We don't simply want things; we want what others want. He called this "mimetic desire"—from the Greek word for imitation. When you see someone else longing for something, you begin to long for it too. Desire is contagious.

This creates an obvious problem. If everyone wants what everyone else wants, conflicts multiply. Girard envisioned a kind of escalating crisis as mimetic desire spreads through a community, creating more and more rivalry and tension. At some point, the social fabric begins to tear.

Enter the scapegoat.

At the moment of maximum crisis, Girard argued, the community unconsciously identifies a single individual as the source of all its troubles. This person is expelled or killed. And remarkably, it works—not because the scapegoat was actually responsible, but because the act of collective violence creates unity. Everyone participated in the expulsion. Everyone shares the catharsis. The community believes it has identified and removed the problem.

Social order returns. The cycle begins again.

A Different Kind of Scapegoat

Girard, who was Catholic, saw in this mechanism an explanation for the central narrative of Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth, in his reading, was a scapegoat—a innocent person killed by a mob to restore social peace.

But Girard believed something unusual happened in this particular case. In most scapegoating, the victim's innocence is never recognized. The community genuinely believes the scapegoat was guilty. The mechanism's power depends on this blindness.

The resurrection narratives, Girard argued, shattered that illusion. By depicting Jesus as risen from the dead, the Christian scriptures revealed him to be an innocent victim—and in doing so, exposed the scapegoat mechanism itself. Suddenly, humanity could see what it had always done. The cycle, at least in principle, could be broken.

This interpretation aligns with what theologians call the Christus Victor theory of atonement—the idea that Christ's death and resurrection achieved victory over the powers of sin and death, rather than being a sacrifice to appease an angry deity.

Whether or not you find Girard's theological conclusions persuasive, his anthropological insights have influenced thinkers across disciplines. The scapegoat mechanism, once named, becomes visible everywhere.

The Corporate Sacrifice

You don't need to look to antiquity or religious texts to find scapegoats. Modern workplaces provide fresh examples daily.

In corporate environments, scapegoating follows a predictable pattern. When senior executives make mistakes—strategic blunders, failed projects, missed targets—someone must answer for the failure. But executives rarely blame themselves. Instead, the search begins for a lower-ranking employee who can plausibly be connected to the disaster.

This person becomes the "fall guy," a term that itself reveals the mechanism. They fall so that others don't have to. The practice persists, management researchers note, because of a fundamental lack of accountability at the top. When leaders aren't held responsible for their decisions, they develop strong incentives to find others who can absorb the blame.

The "identified patient" in family therapy represents another variation. Dysfunctional family systems often unconsciously designate one member—frequently a child—as the "problem." This person carries symptoms that actually belong to the whole system. Therapists learn to look past the identified patient to the family dynamics that created them.

And then there's the "whipping boy," a historical role that makes the mechanism grotesquely literal. In medieval courts, young nobles were considered too important to be physically punished, even when they misbehaved. So each prince was assigned a companion of lower birth who would receive the beatings meant for the royal child. The prince would learn his lesson by watching someone else suffer for his mistakes.

The Opposite of Scapegoating

If scapegoating involves projecting blame onto the undeserving, what's the opposite? Several concepts point toward alternatives.

Accountability means taking responsibility for your own actions and their consequences. It's the refusal to look for a goat when things go wrong. This sounds simple, but the psychological pull toward blame-shifting is powerful. True accountability requires the ability to tolerate guilt without immediately expelling it onto someone else.

Reintegration rather than expulsion offers another path. Some indigenous justice systems practice what's called "restorative justice," which focuses on healing relationships rather than punishing offenders. The person who caused harm isn't expelled from the community but rather brought into a process of making amends. This approach rejects the scapegoat mechanism's logic entirely.

Perhaps most fundamentally, the opposite of scapegoating is the willingness to sit with complexity. Scapegoating offers the comfort of simple explanations: this person is the problem. Remove them, and the problem disappears. But human systems rarely work that way. Problems usually have multiple causes, and removing a convenient target seldom addresses the underlying dynamics.

The Scapegoat's Burden

For those who find themselves carrying the projected sins of others, the experience is devastating. The Jungian literature describes scapegoated individuals retreating from consciousness, burdened by transpersonal guilt—shame that properly belongs to the collective but has been deposited in one person.

Therapy for scapegoat survivors often focuses on two things. First, building what Perera calls "self-protective skills"—the ego strength to resist absorbing blame that isn't legitimately yours. Second, helping the victim find their own voice, separate from the identity that's been imposed upon them.

This work is difficult because scapegoating is so often internalized. The victim comes to believe the narrative. They may spend years feeling fundamentally unworthy, convinced at some deep level that they deserved what happened to them. Undoing this damage requires not just cognitive reframing but genuine grief—mourning the self that was distorted by carrying others' shadows.

Why We Keep Doing It

After millennia of civilization, after psychologists have mapped the mechanism in detail, after philosophers have explained its operation and theologians have named it as sin—why do we keep scapegoating?

Because it works. In the short term, at least.

Scapegoating provides psychological relief. It offers the satisfaction of identifying a cause for our suffering. It creates group cohesion through shared opposition to a common enemy. It allows us to expel our shadow rather than integrate it. It's faster and easier than the genuine work of self-examination and systemic change.

The price comes later. The underlying problems remain unsolved. The community's capacity for violence has been exercised and validated. And somewhere, an innocent person—or group—carries wounds they did nothing to earn.

The goat, after all, didn't commit any sins. It just wandered into the wilderness, bearing what humans couldn't face about themselves.