Scapegoating

How it works

Rents are up. Wages are flat. The hospital waiting list is long. These things have causes: usually several, usually boring, usually involving decisions made by people with names. Scapegoating replaces all of that with one face: it’s the migrants. It’s Brussels. It’s the elite. It’s the NGOs. It’s the boomers. It’s the Roma. It’s the corporations.

The word comes from an ancient ritual in which a community loaded its sins onto a goat and drove it into the desert. The modern version works the same way: the problem stays, the goat leaves, and everyone feels lighter for a while. A good scapegoat has three features. It is visible: easy to picture and point at. It is weak: unable to answer back, or not around to. And it is flexible: the same group can explain housing this month and crime the next.

History’s most catastrophic example is well documented: Nazi propaganda made Jews the explanation for Germany’s lost war, its inflation, its unemployment and its cultural change, all at once. The scale was unique; the mechanism was not. EUvsDisinfo has catalogued thousands of pro-Kremlin items that attribute every European problem (energy prices, crime, farm protests) to the same two or three villains. And it is not a one-side tool: “the 1%” or “the boomers” can be used in exactly the same lazy way as “the migrants”.

The tell is an explanation that explains too much. Real causes are specific: this policy raised this cost by this much. A scapegoat explains everything and predicts nothing.

Example

@real_wake_up_call, 7h Rent in the city up 20% in two years. Gee, I wonder what changed. Maybe the thousands of “guest workers” and the NGOs flying people in? Nobody is allowed to say it.

@eat_the_landlords, 6h Rent is up because boomers hoard flats and vote for whoever protects them. Every single problem in this country traces back to one generation.

Two posts, two different goats, same move: one group, no mechanism, no numbers. Neither mentions interest rates, short-term rentals, building permits or wage growth, the things that actually move rents.

Why it works on you

• A villain is more satisfying than a spreadsheet. Anger needs a target. “Interest rates and zoning” cannot be hated; a group can. See emotional hijacking.
• It flatters you. If they caused the problem, then you and your side did nothing wrong. Scapegoating is us vs. them with a bill attached.
• It feels like courage. “Nobody is allowed to say it” turns a lazy explanation into a brave one. You get to feel like a truth-teller for repeating the easiest story in the room.

What to do

When someone does it to you: ask for the mechanism. “How exactly does that group raise my rent? Walk me through it.” Then try the removal test: “If they vanished tomorrow, would the problem?” Usually the honest answer is no, and the conversation can move on to the real causes.

When you catch yourself doing it: notice when one group starts explaining several unrelated things. If the same name shows up for housing, crime and your bad week, that is your frustration looking for a face, not an analysis. Look for the decision, the policy, the number, and the person whose job it was.

In a comment section: do not defend the goat; that gets you cast as its lawyer. Add the missing causes instead. “Rent is also up because of X and Y” is harder to dismiss than “you’re a racist”.

Don’t confuse it with

• Naming a real culprit is not scapegoating. If a company dumped the chemicals, say so. The difference is evidence and a mechanism, and responsibility sits with the people who decided, not with everyone who looks like them.
• Criticising a policy (migration policy, EU rules, tax law) is legitimate debate. It turns into scapegoating when the policy’s supposed beneficiaries become the villains and the policy’s authors vanish from the story.