It’s an ironclad rule of rhetoric that we often seek personal redemption through the act of victimizing another.
The master critic Kenneth Burke was a great observer of our communication routines, and never more so than when he described the “scapegoat principle.” For most of us working to understand why we say the things we do, this familiar rhetorical form is a frequent reminder of the psychological benefits of transferring guilt to others.
Burke noted that groups or individuals face two options when a decision or action didn’t turn out as well as they wished. If we screwed up, we can accept responsibility and note with regret that our efforts failed to work out. He called this the “mortification” option, as in “I thought I could fix the bad feeling between Bill and Fred, but I think I just made it worse. I’m not very good at playing the role of mediator.” But doing this, of course, carries no obvious rewards, and requires a certain degree of grace and humility.
So we usually opt for the second choice: we scapegoat the problem to others. It’s easier to blame Bill or Fred because doing so is an act of personal redemption. In this form our words are all too familiar: “Things are not going very well in my life right now and it’s her fault.” Like a fast-acting pill, the shifting of unwanted effects to others lifts us from the burdens of self-examination. In Burke’s language, we have “cast out” the problem. Perhaps this is why we have parents, pets, uncles, Republicans, socialists, college professors, Iranians, labor unions, members of Congress and in-laws. We can feel better when we believe that others are worse.
Most forms of scapegoating have a familiar ring:
“They have created the mess we’re in.”
“My life is not going well; I blame the President.”
“True, I flunked the course. But I had a lousy teacher.”
“We’d be a good organization if only we had different leadership.”
“The problem with America is that it has too many illegal immigrants.”
Or, my favorite: if I am teaching a class and I’ve run on too long about some pet idea: I’ll pick one of any one of the thoughtful members of the course and blame them for making us fall behind. By now my students are used to the joke.
Tribes have always used sacrifices to purge the group of its problems. The usual victim was a four-legged animal that would be sacrificed to cleanse away problems usually caused by other humans. In the 21st Century we are less likely to round up a hapless critter for this ritual “casting out” of guilt. Instead, we usually pick a plausible member of our own species and simply attribute our problems to them. Think of internet trolls and their venom. Anonymous comments online represent a perpetual Lourdes of guilt transference.
It would be nice if we could chalk up this human habit as but a small foible in the species. But the consequences of blaming others can’t be so easily dismissed. It’s worth remembering that Hitler’s murderous purge of supposed “non-Aryans” from German society—first with words and later with death camps–was fresh in Burke’s mind when he summarized the scapegoating principle.
Frieze of Columbus and Indigenous Americans in the New World, US Capitol Rotunda
There is truth in the irony that our most cherished possession is not exclusively ours to own.
We think that our most precious possessions are the things we have acquired or the relationships we have. But for many people the “right” to tell their own story looms just as large. Narratives of our personal or tribal lives may be the keys to understanding who we are and where we came from. But in fact they are not exclusively ours to tell. We don’t have proprietary rights to our own personal histories.
This is both self-evident and enormously consequential. It’s not just that we can’t easily agree even about the foundational stories about our collective past. What Christopher Columbus or Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln actually achieved will always involve contentious narratives. We can also be unpleasantly surprised by accounts of ourselves offered even by friends or relatives.
It’s apparent that anyone can write someone else’s biography. Even biographers who are out of favor with their subjects or never met them are frequently eager to weigh in with their own versions. For example, we are presently surrounded by multiple narratives that recreate the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. There’s Walter Isaacson’s 2011 best-selling biography (Steve Jobs, 2011) and the forthcoming Aaron Sorkin film based on it. Both recognize Job’s vision for turning computing into a necessary life skill. And both portray a garage innovator with a knack for ingenious design and an inability to acknowledge his co-visionaries. Then there’s Alex Gibney’s very different documentary (Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, 2015) detailing a single-minded marketing genius reluctant to engage with the unpleasant facts surrounding the Chinese factories that produce Apple products. Amazon currently lists about ten books on Jobs. The point is that we can count on each version to offer a different person to readers.
The same is true for groups that seek power or legitimacy in the larger culture by presenting what are sometimes very different accounts about their pasts and their aspirations. What’s the story of Scientology? It depends on who you ask. How has the institutional life of Catholicism evolved since revelations of widespread child abuse were widely reported at the beginning of the new century? Skeptics and admirers routinely compete for attention to relay their stories. In many ways the fissures that are spread across the culture deepen over time, often expanding into complete fault lines as interested parties vie for media access to “get their story out.”
There’s a whole lexicon of useful terms to represent these divisions. We talk not only about “narratives,” but also “contested narratives,” “counter-narratives,” “preferred narratives,” “backstories,” “storylines,” “myths,” “legends,” “lore,” “rumors” and “histories” that are disputed as “more fiction than fact.” Facebook champions an individual’s own preferred narrative: a kind of carefully constructed window display of one’s life. Most other digital outlets focusing on the culture of celebrity capture readers by taking a very different turn: favoring counter-narratives and backstories. Sometimes they are even true.
Novelists who would seem to have the advantage of exclusive use of the products of their imagination are inclined to end up in tangles of their own making when readers find possible connections to the writer’s biography. Readers can also be unforgiving if a scribe borrows another’s particularly traumatic narrative. A few years ago the prolific Joyce Carol Oates came under criticism in New Jersey for embellishing on a news story about a college student found dead in a campus garbage container. The short story, Landfill, was published in the New Yorker, to the chagrin of the student’s family and others in the region.
For all of our hope that our stories can be communicated in ways that bring us the credit we seek, the fact is that we can never claim rights to exclusivity. Ask anyone who has recently been in the news how well their views have been represented or how they were characterized. You are apt to get a response of mild frustration. What we see in ourselves is probably not what those who retell our stories are going to report. For individuals or groups without power this is sad to witness. Groups lose something basic when they lack the means to communicate their preferred narratives. The rest of us battle on, even occasionally discovering a narrative that gives us far more credit than we deserve.
