Blamethrowing- why blaming the victims is easier than fixing the problems

“Scapegoating will go on forever. We need someone to blame – illegal immigrants, single moms, people in prison. We need someone to victimize.”

— Winona Ryder

Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

John F. Kennedy

Flamethrowers use compressed air to propel huge amounts of burning liquid to their targets- spreading destructive fires and igniting escalating chaos in the process. Blamethrowers operate much the same way. People consciously cast blame far and wide, often to cover up their own misdeeds, to sow chaos and confusion. The damage may be less noticeable than a fire, but it can be just as destructive.

Other terms for this phenomenon are blame shifting, passing the buck, pointing fingers, or deflection. They all result in one party feeling guiltier and another escaping accountability. There are millions of examples where blamethrowing has been used to protect perpetrators and blame victims, but here are ten of the most common:

1- Jewish people have been blamed throughout history for a host of problems, making them the perfect, if random, scapegoat for problems large and small. Antisemitism has caused death, division, and hatred wherever it has popped up worldwide. Other religions such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, certain sects of Christianity, and Wiccans have taken the blame as well for societal ills when it was convenient.

2- Rape victims are often blamed for sexual violence. Because somehow they invited it, or encouraged it, or didn't fight back hard enough. Rapists use this as a an excuse to victimize the nearly one in four women nationally who've had to experience it.

3- Victims of gun violence are to blame because they weren't properly armed and prepared. At least, that's the blame-shifting ethos of the gun lobby when confronted with mass shootings. Guns are never to blame. Too few guns are to blame?

4- The Great Recession of 2008 was the fault of people who took out bad mortgages, not the unscrupulous lenders who created those loans according to the bankers. Banks were bailed out, while many homeowners lost their homes to foreclosures and many more citizens lost their jobs.

5- Fat people are shamed and punished for being overweight in a society that values thin bodies. Never mind that obesity nationwide has increased as more and more calorie dense foods have been engineered to be addictive. Somehow willpower is supposed to keep up with fast food, but it hasn't worked so far.

6- Speaking of addiction, pharmaceutical companies tried to pin the blame for the opioid epidemic on the people who got addicted. Even though they knew from the start that addiction could be a big factor with powerful pain medications.

7- For centuries politicians and leaders have tried to blame poverty on immoral behavior and laziness. The causes of poverty are many and complex, but it's easier to blame the victims, who have faced many more obstacles in life than their privileged peers.

8- People who are mentally ill are often blamed for their afflictions, and shamed into silence by the stigmas that surround mental illness. Would you shame a person with cancer?

9- For that matter, people who are old, disabled, or sick are shamed as being a drag on society. If they aren't young, beautiful, healthy and contributing to society most of the time, there must be something wrong with them.

10- And finally, immigrants are the new scapegoat for many of our problems now. Are they here to steal our jobs and commit crimes, or are they here to escape persecution and seek opportunity? Because they have little to no voice in what happens to them, they are the perfect group to pin the blame on. Undocumented immigrants can't fight back.

I find this list embarrassing and maddening. In our zest to feel good about ourselves, we are often guilty of pointing the finger at someone else as the source of our problems. Some will blame a parent, an ex-spouse, a boss, a minority, or "wokeness", but it doesn't make anything better. The harder challenge is looking deep inside and figuring out a new way to make progress.

Blamethrowing solves nothing. Like a flamethrower, it just destroys things and spreads the misery around. Problems won't get solved unless the root cause is addressed directly. Are women to blame when they're sexually assaulted? Not at all. No matter how they dress, how drunk they get, or how flirty they act, consent is absolutely required or else any sexual contact is rape. Blaming women is the easy route. Blaming toxic masculinity and misogyny is harder to deal with, especially when men have most of the money and most of the power. The answer has to include dealing with men's attitudes towards the opposite sex.

Businesses have to be accountable if their activities cause a recession. Pharmaceutical companies must shoulder their share of the blame when their drugs cause nationwide deaths and figure out how to fix it. Politicians have to realize when their policies do more harm than good, especially when it comes to helping the most vulnerable. Our entire political system is compromised to favor the rich and connected, so how is anything meaningful ever to be fixed? And those companies that destroy the environment have to stop blaming us for their problems- which leads to my two favorite examples.

In 1971 an infamous commercial from the nonprofit Keep America Beautiful came out and made a big splash nationwide. It was a powerful message that showed an American Indian canoeing through waters littered with trash, eventually standing with a single tear down his face while trash is thrown at his feet. Who can argue with keeping America beautiful?

For one thing- the Indian was of Italian heritage. Iron Eyes Cody, a popular actor at the time, was actually born Espera Oscar de Corti. And also, the organization behind the ad was supported by mostly big corporations, like Nestle, Anheuser Busch, Coca Cola, Tobacco companies, and groups that generate most of the trash that Mr. Cody was crying about. This sneaky bit of advertising wasn't about littering at all- it was about deflecting blame from the enormous amount of trash being generated by consumer goods and pinning the blame on individual human beings, aka litterbugs. Today we call this type of campaign Greenwashing. It makes a corporation look like they are doing something to help the environment, when actually they are doing the opposite behind the scenes.

Litter is a serious problem, but it could be better addressed at the source through biodegradable packaging, container deposit requirements, and less plastic use overall. Plastic, unlike aluminum and glass, is mostly not recyclable and making its way up our food chains as we grow more dependent on it.

The second example has to do with British Petroleum, aka BP. Oil companies have been at the center of the climate debate for nearly fifty years now, and they know it. Oil profits depend on pumping and selling more fossil fuels regardless of how they effect the climate. But somehow they need to make the public feel okay about that as the effects of a warming climate become more apparent. BP came up with the idea of carbon footprints to distract us and shift the blame. This was not a real strategy to combat global warming- instead it was a cynical attempt to again shift the responsibility from oil companies to individual Americans.

The carbon footprint campaign launched in 2004. The idea has since spread and even some climate activists are using the idea. But here's the problem- it's shifting a global, systemic problem to the people who can do the least about it- individuals. Sure, we can buy energy-efficient light bulbs and do our laundry in cold water, but the effects are minimal at best. According to the IPCC, the top 100 polluting companies account for over 70% of CO2 emissions worldwide. Currently each American contributes about 16 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere per year, more than three times the worldwide average. But most of that carbon comes from industrial uses, not individual ones.

The reasons for the carbon footprint campaign are obvious. It puts the onus on the individual and shifts the responsibility from corporations that profit from perpetuating the carbon economy. Oil companies don't want us organizing, voting, or regulating them out of profits, so their goal is to shift the blame to us, and make us feel like they are helping things when they really aren't. Their corporate political donations go to the politicians who pledge to keep things just the way they are.

A better solution would be a true transition to carbon-free energy sources, which petroleum companies are fighting against even as they pay lip service to them. You can't own the sun, so where is the profit to be made? There are many good ideas to cut down our carbon footprint, but most of them have to be done at the source, not downstream. Each person can help some, but pretending it's all on us is ridiculous.

FYI- this calculator is gone, but there are many like it online.

Who exactly is to blame for what's wrong with the world? Good question. Everyone has some agency here, but the ones with the most resources have the most responsibility for where we are today and where we might go tomorrow. Clearly there is a lot that we can take responsibility for in our lives, but not as much as we'd like. Take advantage of the areas where you can make the most difference and refuse to support or believe powerful people who try to weasel out of accountability for the things they are ultimately responsible for.

Big problems require big solutions, and blamethrowing is a diversion tactic to pass the buck to those who don't have much power to do anything about it. In any society there's a dynamic between cooperative ventures and individual ones. America has been on the side of individualism and that has gotten it very far. But individuals (and big corporations) don't like to take responsibility. And until they can join together on the really big problems, nothing will happen.

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