Why Do We Want Problems to Be Someone’s Fault?

The victim narrative reflects a wider societal trend in which we’re all prone to seeing ourselves as the victims of circumstance and deserving of compensation or reward for our suffering. Even when people have been victimized, if the narrative never moves beyond victimhood, it’s difficult for healing to occur.

In the 1970s, psychologists began experimenting with the implications of our highly evolved feeling of self-confidence. The psychologist Richard Nesbitt identified, for instance, an “actor-observer asymmetry”: a difference between how we explain our own behavior to ourselves versus how we explain the behavior of other people. I wish I’d known about

The scapegoat mechanism works by diversion; the more we see it in others, the less we can see it in ourselves.

Pride doesn’t just say “I am good,” it says “I’m better than someone else.” Envy doesn’t just make us want stuff, it makes us want at least as much stuff as someone else. Wrath isn’t random; it’s targeted at someone else. When we lock into errors of righteousness, we invariably point at someone else and turn them into what therapist Bill Eddy calls

It’s easier to create sets of rules that let us have the illusion of control than it is to accept that, even when we do everything “right,” horrible things can happen. In one form or another, this blame-as-a-form-of-safety idea has been around as long as humans have.