My doubts about living in New York follow a predictable pattern, re-emerging whenever I haven’t been leaving my house much, or seeing my friends enough, or finding the energy to tend to myself or my environment. During these periods, I don’t so much question whether New York is the problem as much as fantasize about leaving; the diagnosis is already decided. And why wouldn’t it be? The city makes the perfect scapegoat. Tired? It’s the pace. Lonely? It’s the anonymity of the city. Stressed? So competitive, so expensive. Of course, sometimes New York really is the problem. But generally speaking, it’s much easier to chalk up your ennui to “not having a yard” than to whatever the hell else might be causing it. This is the collective fantasy of many city-dwellers. We nurture it like a pet.
I started thinking more about the pathology of scapegoating when I became a parent. Anyone who has a kid understands the human propensity to place blame on anything, no matter how absurd. You wouldn’t believe the number of things Avi and I have blamed on “teething” over the past 18 months (anything from strawberries chucked on the ground to a singular scowl). It’s become a punchline, like the way we blame dinner whenever we have weird dreams: Had white-bean-chili dreams last night, gotta be careful around that stuff. Scapegoating imbues our lives with a certain narrative order. If you can point to a reason or a cause for everything that happens, then maybe life isn’t a chaotic mess of joy and suffering, but a logical program spitting out predictable outcomes.
The most traditional aim of the scapegoater is to skirt accountability. Apparently the term came from the biblical ceremony for Yom Kippur, which creatively involved placing all the sins of a people on a goat and sending it into the wilderness as an offering.1 This is still how the term is most often used, as a metaphor for centralizing blame to a contained, otherized source. In the world of psychology, scapegoating most often refers to a toxic dynamic wherein parents pick a child to blame for all their problems, a familiar tactic. But my New York and teething examples feel like a slightly different form—scapegoating to centralize blame, yes, but also to avoid a fundamental truth, which is that none of us are entitled to explanations or consistent outcomes or to feeling good all the time. Uncritically blaming New York whenever I’m feeling off, in other words, is a rejection of the entire notion of feeling off.
If there’s any truth to the accusations that millennials and younger generations are “entitled,” I’d say it’s contained in our inherited optimism about what’s possible. Not just from the standpoint of technology scrubbing away a lot of the little struggles that used to define daily life (struggle isn’t necessary; it’s in the way of our salvation!), but from the oft-preached idea that our potential ought to be the engine of our happiness, and that happiness was not just achieved by way of formula, but a state in which one could live. When you grow up in a world that appears to be singularly focused on ridding human activity of friction, while being fed the idea that the right steps will free you from a life of obscurity and strife, you probably won’t mature into an adult who understands struggle as anything but a problem to solve, or at the very least, as a means to an end.
When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you think consistency, simplicity, or happiness are the goal, reality looks like a problem that needs constant tending. But what if it’s natural, or even necessary, to dislike yourself or life or life circumstances sometimes—to fail to understand them, to find them inconceivable or tiresome? Americans tend to be allergic to this line of thinking because it feels complacent to us. To improve our situation is tantamount to caring. It’s also far less threatening to imagine there’s always a solution out there if we look and work hard enough. Who wants to believe that our fate is instead one of struggle and ambiguity?
This flavor of cope doesn’t just happen on the individual level. In the political realm, Make America Great Again is nothing if not an attempt to apply a simple solution to an ambient struggle. The MAGA movement was premised on the misguided idea that the complications inherent to “multicultural progress”—that is: chaos, divisiveness, everyone scrambling to be heard and recognized—could be done away with if we just went back to how things were before. Of course, whatever “greatness” existed in the midcentury was experienced by such a specific, predetermined margin of society and only achieved through such extreme oppression and suppression that to romanticize it is to be either dumb or cruel. But if you set aside all those details, this style of longing is nonetheless relatable if you’ve ever prayed for a simple solution that, whether you were willing to admit it or not, was ultimately a fantasy.
Hannah Arendt referred to the messiness of many views and voices as “plurality,” and she believed it was necessary for a healthy political body, and a healthy society.2 If it’s not insulting to apply this concept to something as comparatively insignificant as my personal life, I find that embracing plurality might resemble accepting that I may feel many different ways at different times, and that this tension is necessary and healthy. Of course, sometimes I may need to solve problems, make changes, but jumping to solve for plurality is misguided; a fantasy. While this may sound defeatist, I actually find it opens me up to far more possibilities than a scapegoat might. When I accept there is no choice I could make that would shield me from occasional bouts of doubt, loneliness, depression, and even self-loathing, I’m free from the burden of plotting my escape.
To scapegoat, in many cases, is to refuse to accept disorder as a fact of life. When we believe it’s in our power to solve basically any problem, we inadvertently dedicate our lives to it. I’ve been thinking about the phrase, It’s always something!, which I’ve unfortunately taken to as a parent. A thrown-out back, another virus, another round of “teething,” a pipe leak in the bathroom. To bemoan that it’s always something is to believe that real life exists somewhere underneath all these interruptions, and that life is wasted while playing problem whack-a-mole. The truth, of course, is that life is the somethings, and the real loss is in failing to see that.
This week on the podcast, I’ve invited Jessica DeFino (of FLESHWORLD) on to explore scapegoating’s role in the beauty world. Beauty was actually where this idea started for me, so I’m excited to discuss it with her.
Last week on Dear Danny: Should I get a boob job?, we discussed a forbidden work crush that’s gone too far, a boyfriend who’s taking a new hobby too seriously, a boyfriend who’s laundering his anxiety under the purview of “protectiveness,” a woman whose drop-dead-gorgeous fling isn’t good in bed, a woman questioning whether to get a boob job, and a meet-cute involving…..rabies. Don’t miss it!
Last Friday’s 15 things included five articles, a boot hack, a playground hack, a mango hack (on my hack shit), a new (old) top, and more.
Excited about the podcast this coming Wednesday, but no spoilers.
Hope you have a nice Sunday!
Haley
Cover image via Getty | Francesco Riccardo Iacomino
Not to bring up Huda again, but let the record show that the term "scapegoat" was actually shortened, in translation, from the word "escapegoat"
Jenny Odell's chapter on cults in How to Do Nothing is a great exploration of why cults—which attempt to scrub away this plurality—either fail or are predicated on exploitation.
On point, as always. Alongside the scapegoating, I've also said how it's a desire for simplistic solutions to layered issues— it's also the crux of MAHA. Instead of addressing the intersectional issues we have with food access, lack of federal supports, environmental contaminants, let's scapegoat it with red dye and vaccines because A) it provides a clear enemy to "eliminate" and offers a (fake) silver bullet solution that B) gives the illusion of control and a choice of moralistic superiority.
It's truly a natural human instinct to seek parameters to define our realities, but we are seeing it malevolently utilized.
Love this! I just read the chapter in Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals that basically said, life is a long string of problems, we won’t ever reach a problem-free state, and we can either despair at that or accept it, and in accepting it, we might find that it can sometimes actually be fun or at least engaging.