On Our Propensity to Scapegoat and Taking a Fierce Inventory of the Self
How often do we as humans take our inner brokenness and project it onto others as a means of feeling superior, cleansed, justified, pure, or even as a release of anxiety? This propensity to scapegoat is as ancient as the mountains, and cultures all over the world have even created elaborate ceremonies to enact this very thing. It is surprisingly effective at a surface level, though not long-lasting, which means it must be repeated—again and again—for the equilibrium of a society to hold together. The victims are usually not guilty of what they are accused of, and are forced to bear the brunt of the shame, woundedness, blame, and guilt of everyone else in the system.
If we were mature enough, we would hold onto our own pain and transform it within us, rather than projecting it onto someone or something else. This is even more powerful at the level of communities and entire societies who, rather than deal with their past harms, attempt to deflect, redirect, suppress, or attach it to some sacrificial lamb. (Check out a summary of René Girard’s work to learn more—his work is the best I’ve found on this topic.)
Understanding our natural tendency to scapegoat is especially crucial at this time. In a highly polarized society, being aware of this propensity can significantly diminish its power. When we recognize and name it, we can disrupt this unconscious force in us. We can more easily see it at work when “they” are doing it to “us.” Still, emphatically, this is operative at every level of society in fundamentalist ideologies, whether they be liberal or conservative, and everywhere else as well.
These days, folks blame and judge scapegoats for their own maladies, as if each person’s suffering is entirely of their own making. We judge homeless street kids who may have escaped abuse at home. We judge addicts, those who suffer from mental illness, the poor, and people living with the effects of intergenerational trauma. Some castigate and judge the cancelled White man, and others judge the immigrant. Some shockingly blame the rape victim for “asking for it” by the way they dressed; others judge Trump voters as one massive, homogenous group of hateful and ignorant people. The coal miner condemns the environmentalist, and the environmentalist condemns the corporation. The tolerant judge the intolerant. The intolerant at least own their condemnation of queer folks. There seems to be no end to the lists of the ominous “they” who are the problem and deserve the suffering they’ve created for themselves, and surely, we think, if only we could kick those folks out and send them away, everything would be fine.
But what does it look like to subvert this systemic issue? Perhaps a mythic story can say it best …
Once upon a time, on the outskirts of a small fishing village far, far away, a man named Jesus came upon Legion, an outcast, who had a thousand devils in him. The fishermen and other townfolk, being good Jewish families, were interested in maintaining ritual purity. Thus, the poor outcast lived outside the town in the local graveyard, suffering not only his wounds, but clearly bearing the wounds of ancestors, of the current townsfolk, and so many others.
Legion knew no rest; only suffering.
In this mess, Jesus perceived the root of the problem. He had compassion on Legion, for suffering the pain of so many. He had compassion on the townsfolk, who would never be healed, whole human beings, as long as they drew the line between good and evil outside themselves rather than through their own hearts. He had compassion on even the thousand devils, who couldn’t just disappear into vapor. Even the devils needed some place to be until their pain could be addressed and metabolized. In short, he had compassion on the whole sad and sorry lot.
Jesus began with the devils and told them, “You must leave this man and let him be.”
“But where can we go?” they asked. They begged him not to be sent away, for this was their ancestral home.
“What shall become of us?”
How would we respond if we were in that situation? If we’re honest, our instinct might be to annihilate the devils permanently, sending them either into the abyss or to the ends of the earth. Then we could delude ourselves into thinking they could no longer bother us. Yet these devils, created in that particular fishing village, connected to all that had happened that shouldn’t have, and all that should’ve happened that didn’t, begged to remain nearby.
Somehow, Jesus knew that killing the devils would just perpetuate the same system of ritual violence that created the devils in the first place. Furthermore, sending them far, far away would be no healing at all, rather just a suppression, a delay, an illusory, cheap bandaid offering temporary relief, but no actual healing.
The devils, the traumas, the unspeakable histories of our communities can never be dissolved by ignoring them. These stories live on in our bodies and in the land and are passed on from generation to generation, until folks are ready to do the healing work of facing them head-on with Truth and Love.
Jesus, though, sought a radical path that might return the devils of the village from afflicting Legion alone, back squarely onto the shoulders of everyone, which is where collective pain belongs after all.
At first glance, the plan seems problematic—at least for pig lovers! For on a cliff overlooking the sea, there was a massive herd of wild pigs, and Jesus granted the devils’ wish to enter the swine. What the pigs did to deserve this fate, who can say, but perhaps it made sense for folks in this culture, simply because pigs are considered unclean to many Jews.
Upon Jesus granting the devils’ request, the devils needed no second invitation. At once, they left the man and entered the pigs. In turn, the bedeviled pigs promptly ran down the hill and into the sea. Kersplash! In this great baptism in the sea, the bedeviled pigs sank under the surface of the waters. And as they died, what was previously pig flesh became fish food.
Bite by bite, the bodies of the bedeviled pigs transformed into the bodies of carp and sardines, tilapia and barbels, and day by day, the fishermen of the village hauled these fattened fish into their nets.
Week by week, the villagers baked bread and made fish stew in their homes. Bite by bite, the villagers feasted on the bedeviled, once-unclean swine-now-fish-flesh, somehow mysteriously taking back into their bodies that which they had previously projected onto Legion. In its composted form, they could no longer easily distinguish one person’s pain from another’s, nor who had eaten which devils. It was all one pain, and everyone’s individual pain was connected to everyone else’s.
In the end, it turns out the “profane” pigs become the selfless Christ-figure heroes in the story for composting the collective pain back into the great circle of life. Those composters of our food waste, who will eat our discarded scraps and metabolize them into muscle and bone, seemed to intuit their part in the great drama.
Things seemed to end well for Legion, who was freed from carrying the burdens of everyone else, and only had to carry his own portion. But the terrified villagers in seeing the liberated Legion and the pigs running into the sea, asked Jesus to leave and never come back.
Who among us hasn’t done the same thing at times? We aren’t always ready for the teacher to arrive, and when we’re not ready, this is a normal response.
Jesus taught that the “truth will set you free,” but left out the warning that before we experience the ease of freedom, truth will bring significant ego death and suffering. Perhaps it is because truth invites the composting of too-small patterns, along with a fierce inventory of oneself and of the collective, knowing this can become the foundation of any lasting hope for change. The unspeakable things in us and in our midst must be named for there to be a chance at healing, rather than palliative pain suppression. Hope that doesn’t take seriously the direness of our collective situation is naïve fluff and, indeed, no hope at all. But getting people to take seriously the truth of what is, is an adventure in hitting a wall again and again, or at worst, the experience of being railroaded out of town. The role of a prophet is not enviable.
Lao Tzu once said, “Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.
In other words, let’s not mistake this story as a commissioning of prophets to run out and start naming all the unspeakable things in our communities. The wisdom of this story asks us to first become aware of where we are scapegoating others. Let us awaken to where we are colluding in the illusions that there are no “devils” around us (there are) or that we can somehow remain separate and unimpacted by these collective traumas and pains of our society (we can’t). In the end, it is almost impossible to get others to change, and entirely out of our control. What we can do, however, is confront ourselves with loving truth and grace. To this task, there is no end.