Understanding Scapegoating and Blaming for Better Thinking and Mental Health
Nick Lechnir, ACB, CPD
Vice President Education TM - Learning and Development Administrator at Optum Serve
Scapegoating is an ancient fallacy that says whenever something goes wrong, there's always someone other than oneself to blame. Although this fallacy sometimes is a practical denial of randomness or chance itself, today it is more often a mere insurance-driven business decision. For example: "I don't care if it was an accident! Somebody with deep pockets is gonna pay for this!"
In ancient times, a tribe or person would literally sacrifice an animal to the gods, or send an animal into the desert, declaring that the animal was carrying away the tribe's sins. In today's culture, psychology uses the term to discuss certain forms of victimization.
A particular child of an alcoholic family can be deemed the scapegoat, for instance, and may be the object of a parent's abuse and the reason for seeking professional help. The child is "innocent," but receives the blame for the problems in the household.
Scapegoating is often no more than a cynical ploy to shield those truly responsible from blame, and it can be used to refer to the tactic of casting collective blame on marginalized or scorned "others". This is evident with history of prejudice and discrimination towards such groups and minorities as African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, handicapped people and women.
Historically, entire groups of people have been scapegoated. In Nazi Germany, Hitler and his army scapegoated the Jewish people. The Nazis declared the Jews to be the reason for their societal ills and further believed that if they eliminated the Jewish people, then their problems would be solved.
Currently in America, there is scapegoating of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer people. Some heterosexuals, often with strong religious ties, blame those with different sexual orientation for the moral decay in America, when in fact, there may be no correlation at all.
A particularly corrupt and cynical example of scapegoating is the fallacy of Blaming the Victim, in which one falsely casts the blame for one's own evil or questionable actions on those affected. In extreme cases, this can also be described as coercion or extortion.
For example:
Affective fallacy is a term from literary criticism used to refer to the supposed error of judging or evaluating a text on the basis of its emotional effects on a reader. The term was coined by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in 1949 as a principle of New Criticism which is often paired with their study of The Intentional Fallacy.
The concept of affective fallacy is an answer to the idea of impressionistic criticism, which argues that the reader's response to a written text is the ultimate indication of its value. It is the antithesis of affective criticism, which is the practice of evaluating the effect that a literary work has on its reader or audience.
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See also:
How have you seen scapegoating in society or in your personal life with relationships?
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