Scapegoating has become commonplace in our world today. We see it in politics, our communities and churches. We tell ourselves that the ‘other’ person is the reason for the entirety of the problems we face.
Scapegoating is the cycle of power. People make victims out of others because they themselves feel the victim. Scapegoating evades us from the difficult work of introspection and allows for an easier resolution while abating our immediate sense of guilt, shame and anxiety.
We see this clearly in South Africa as non-South Africans are quickly made the reason for structural inequality in a context of widespread corruption and maladministration. The political elite uses the blame of non-South Africans to mask their own shame and negligence of their responsibility and need to be accountable for the current state of things.
Richard Rohr explains the sequence of scapegoating: we compare, we copy, we compete, we conflict, we conspire, we condemn, and we crucify. We as individuals and the structures of our world are all somewhere in this sequence. Before reaching the worrying end of this process, we need to have asked ourselves who we are making the victim for our own end.
Spend some time thinking today - who you have made a scapegoat in your own life? Who are the scapegoats in your church community and South Africa today?
Then ask yourself, for what purpose are we blaming others? And what then is the truth underneath my need to blame them?
