May 23, 2025

Blame – How Did We Get Here?

By Ruth McLatchie

In The Beginning

Nearly every ancient culture has its own creation story that starts out with perfection.  But before long comes some kind of perversion, disappointment, contamination, or conflict to take advantage of free will and mar that perfection.  This is clearly borne out in the story of Adam and Eve well-known to Christians, Jews, and Muslims, all of whom recognize disobedience against God as sin.  This sin is then followed by a discussion of who is to blame.  For Christians and Jews, Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the serpent.  For Muslims, Adam and Eve blame themselves.  Either case necessitates forgiveness.  Blame thus becomes inextricably linked with the narrative of the fall from perfection and the long arc of the human story.    

Blame in World History

One of the most common outcomes of blame is a tribe mentality, a dichotomy of “us versus them.”  This mentality has been operative in all human conflicts, beginning with the first war in recorded history between Sumer and Elam in Mesopotamia in 2700 B.C.E.  

In closer proximity to events, people tend to blame their fellow humans, while, with greater distance, people learn that more factors are at play than human behavior, such as drought, famine, flood, and pests.  For example, at the time when the Old Kingdom of Egypt (2200-1900 B.C.E.) fell, plenty of people at the time could have blamed it on the decentralization of power from the kings to the local governors, but in retrospect, most historians agree that megadrought was the main reason.

When the Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century C.E., plenty of people at the time could have blamed it on the barbarian attacks.  However, the divisions between the eastern and western empires, the introduction of Christianity, lead poisoning, military degradation, economic downturn, and disease epidemics all played a role in the fall.  

The rapid spread of Islam from the seventh to the 13th century C.E. could be blamed on the intolerance demonstrated by the Christian world.  But it could also be explained by Islamic advances in education, science, and trade.  

The protestant reformation could be blamed on the practice of Roman Catholic churches of selling indulgences to guarantee eternal placement, as disputed by Martin Luther in his 95 Theses, which was the manifesto marking the beginning of the reformation on October 31, 1517.  However, English historian Hilaire Belloc proposed that the abandonment of Rome by the popes, the rise of nationalism, war between England and France, the Black Death, the decline of Latin, and corruption in the church were all in some part responsible.  

And more recent history has no lack of examples, from blaming the American Revolution on taxes to blaming the civil war on slavery to blaming the First World War on an assassination.  History is more complex and less linear than that.  Scholars have only begun to understand history from the point of view of complexity theory in the 21st century according to Carlos Eduardo Maldonado of the Universidad El Bosque of Bogota, Colombia.   

The Psychology of Blame

Blame is a maladaptive way of looking at the world and often leads to negative consequences.  In the 1960s, Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive-behavioral therapy, still considered one of the most effective therapies for anxiety and depression, identified blame as a cognitive distortion.  In 2023, Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc published an article on cognitive distortions in Simply Psychology.  In it, she described the distortion as blaming others or blaming oneself as fully responsible for a negative event without taking into consideration other possible causes.  

Extrapolating this to politics, individuals and groups in a society can behave in a way that mimics these cognitive distortions when they blame public figures, parties, or groups for negative events without opening themselves to the consideration of other potential factors.  This can result in all kinds of societal upheaval and damage to human relationships.

This potential damage also requires that extreme care must be taken when making observations about the behavior of others.  The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) used by clinical psychologists and other mental health practitioners, which is overwhelmingly geared to individual behaviors, has placed the Shared Psychotic Disorder (historically known as folie a deux or folie à plusiers) diagnosis into an unspecified group of “other” psychotic disorders, suggesting that they are not yet as well understood as, say, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.  

WebMD reports: “Shared psychotic disorders can also happen in groups of people who are closely involved with a person who has a psychotic disorder (called folie à plusiers, or “the madness of many”). For instance, this could happen in a cult if the leader is psychotic and their followers take on their delusions.  Experts don’t know why it happens. But they believe that stress and social isolation play a role in its development.”

Is there a simple cure for the cognitive blame distortion?  No, it’s a stubborn one that, when challenged directly, may result in rejection of the challenger.  But addressing stress and social isolation is a starting point.

Leviathan and the Virus

by Mark D. Harris

The current political landscape is fractured along many lines. The struggles of our daily lives are so real and intense that we cannot see past them. Political figures compete for our attention by playing on our very real fears, leaving our political moment feeling much like a Hobbesian war of all against all. In this tumult, one weapon reigns supreme: blame.

In seeking answers to our struggles, it is only human nature that we seek a culprit, and whether true or not, someone always has someone else to blame. In the world of politics and media, this tendency of human nature is magnified into movements and rallying cries.  Underneath, however, a virus infects our government and society that uses this quirk of human nature for its own ends.

Blame is based on the simple assumption that effects have causes and those causes stem from the actions or inactions of oneself or another. In the world of government and politics, this simple, near-universal concept is magnified to the scale that  impacts the bodies of government. 

At this scale, the stakes begin to work against our simplistic understanding and instead encourage us to look for nuance. Yet nuance lacks the catharsis of blame. Blame begs us to see the conflict as an “us” versus “them” relationship. Not even content with such reductive framing, it asks us to say these grand effects are by the hand of one person or entity. 

In the dealings between the government and public, it is easiest to see the conflict itself, as against the proverbial machine, behind the curtain of which hides a small man with no real power except the power we ascribe to him. The simple fact is, trouble will always be caused not only by the actions of the machine of government and media, but also by how we interact with it. We can choose to act as if it is the actions of one man cause the system to function in a certain way, when in truth we all contribute to the system functioning the way that it does. When we blame individuals for the actions of the state, we fundamentally undermine the idea of a statesman or civil servant by removing consideration of the Hobbesian Leviathan, the state, as a beast in its own right.

We can have a powerful state controlled by the public’s interest if we stop blaming individual figures and instead point to the deeper rot in the system. This is not to remove culpability from individual political figures, but to cast instead an ideal, one that all representatives of the state can strive to model.

In our representative system, individuals will always be making decisions within the body of the government, and these actions are their own, but good servants of the public put the needs of the state before their own. This is a foreign concept to many in government now, due in part to the way the public frames their actions. When officials are portrayed as heroes and villains, they find support for themselves at the cost of the state’s ability to function healthily.

Returning to the Hobbesian metaphor of the state as a living creature on a grand scale, we might think of blame, corruption, and hyper-partisanship as cancer or autoimmune disease, where the components of the state war within it. This makes our state weak, vulnerable, desperate, and violent.

Perhaps no single politician is more capable of activating blame and hyperpartisanship for his or her own purposes than a politician who comes from the world of celebrity.   Celebrities, like politicians, need recognition and people to support them. However, celebrities tend to work solely in their own interest, whereas representatives of the state ought to act in the public’s interest. Though it is not impossible that celebrity leaders might set aside personal interest in the name of the public good, their motives ought to be questioned.

Celebrity is about the individual and tends towards narcissism; statesmanship is about the function of the state. The public is meant to benefit from its relationship with the state, not from its relationship to the faces that comprise it. This is highly visible in sycophantism but is less so when we cast blame on an individual, or worse yet, write that individual off as a cartoonish villain.

We must realize that in our representative system, those figures we admire, worship, blame or ridicule represent many of our fellow citizens and speak to their very real fears or aspirations. By calling out the individual who represents the fight against what they fear, you are easily misrepresented as disregarding those fears. The savvy politician seizes on such an opportunity to maximum effect. The army of lobbyists has a simple objective: target and manipulate the politicians savvy enough to keep the public’s true concerns at bay. By letting ourselves be manipulated so readily, we may find ourselves turned over to the interests of the virus class.

The virus class: the corporate elite, the oligarchy, bourgeoisie, or whatever you want to call individuals who have accumulated enough wealth and power to disproportionately shape the political landscape, will always be able to influence politicians. However, they do not, as of yet, have the power to vote for our representatives. Like a virus, they cannot perpetuate their existence without corrupting the components that make up the state. Blame is the weapon of choice for this virus. Blame is used to build celebrity political figures in the media as villains while simultaneously casting them as heroes to another group. These celebrity political villains/heroes then duke it out like player characters in a fighting game, who spur conflict by blaming each other for the problems that the virus is causing. 

Then citizens infected by the virus blame each other for the representatives they see as heroes/villains, believing that they are fighting for the issues they care about, when instead they are fighting against their fellow citizens. This makes for an endless culture war of all versus all. While the citizens fight each other, members of the virus class leverage their wealth to get the political figures to do what they want. Blame can be just, but it also can be used to perpetuate injustice.

Why and How To Get Blame Out of Politics 

By William M. Taggart IV, Guest Contributor

William M. Taggart IV – A professional engineer for over 30 years, Taggart worked on major projects in industry and served as an investigator for incidents and events. He is recognized as a subject matter expert for the systems that control industrial applications and protect the personnel, equipment, and the environment from those industrial processes. 

In 2020, he walked away from his lucrative job as an engineer to focus on solving big societal problems. The result was the book “Fixing America: An engineer’s solutions to our social, cultural, and political problems”.   In addition to this, he is now focused on large-scale energy storage as well as serving as a consultant to industry. 

Our politics have been consumed by blame for many years. Blame, when it is a result of tribal politics, is deathly to any organization, but especially democracy. Blame in tribal politics is not just about identifying who did something wrong. It’s about trying to pull down the other side and put one’s own side into power. When an organization’s priority shifts to blame, the group is no longer about working together to achieve something; it is about who is in control. And once the point of governance becomes to assert dominance, then the ability to solve problems suffers, as we have seen in the last thirty years. 

Blame causes suffering because it is founded in negative emotions, supported by negative emotions, and focuses those negative emotions onto a scapegoat. The point of blame is to assign someone the pain and embarrassment that a group is suffering. And the benefit in politics is to focus the negative emotions on the other side, to achieve political victory, and to achieve or maintain power. A government consumed with blame does a very poor job of governing for the whole country.

Once the blame cycle starts, it is very hard to stop. If one side uses blame to push out the other side, the other side will use the same power of blame when the first side stumbles while in power. 

While most knowledgeable people agree that the polarization of blame is responsible for our current predicament and needs to be removed, the question is what will replace it. If emotion got us into this mess in the first place, the answer should be economics and logic. The logic of problem-solving goes like this: first you acknowledge that you have a problem. There are many from which to choose, but let’s start with the one of the worst – a massive national debt. If you include the debt that the government owes to the Social Security Trust Fund and other intergovernmental debt, we are over $37 trillion dollars in debt and climbing. And $32 trillion has been run up in just the last twenty-five years, an unsustainable course created by both parties, that neither party will address, but for which each is quick to blame the other. 

Once you acknowledge the problems, the next step is to gather all the data so you can analyze the problems. This data would include the history which enables you to see how we got here. 

It is important to note that, in the real world, you do not have the luxury of only focusing on one problem at a time.  If you focus on one problem, you may make others worse. Someone focusing on education may advocate for federally paid college, which runs smack into balancing the budget to address the national debt. We have a lot of problems, they are interlinked, and as such the solutions need to work together and allow for the systemic complexity of all the problems. Solving the debt while destroying the economy isn’t going to work out very well, just as massive spending doesn’t help the debt. 

Solving complex problems involves avoiding making claims that aren’t supported with data and analysis. It involves data-based rather than emotion-based decision-making.  It involves acknowledging that we don’t have unlimited resources, so we need to fund the basics and get everything working before we spend money on stuff that is not essential. 

And at the core of that is establishing the very basic idea of what we are trying to accomplish. What is America? And for that you only need to look at the core documents of America, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence – documents that defined a government to be based on liberty and compromise, separation of church and state, and checks and balances, not the emotion of blame. 

The founding fathers used the historical data to design the new republic.  They had only to look at Europe, where wars of religion had convulsed the continent for years, to understand that there was a need to separate church and state. At the time of the Constitution, those European problems were bleeding into Virginia, where James Madison and Thomas Jefferson championed the cause of an oppressed religion that was fighting against the state-sponsored Anglican church. That oppressed religion – the Baptists. 

When it came to preventing tyranny, the founding fathers had numerous historical examples of tyrants to show what happened when one man became too powerful. The whole system of three branches of government – executive, legislative, and judicial – was drawn up to prevent any one man from acquiring too much power. 

In the last thirty years, we have seen that system of checks and balances fall apart for one basic reason: the legislative branch has been consumed by blame. As the Democrats and Republicans have evolved from being partners in an elected republic, to being tribal forces at war with one another, we have seen the rise of blame as being the major focus. 

And as the legislative branch has become gridlocked with blame, the power has been taken up by the executive through executive orders and growth in the departments. The amount of executive orders issued by the last four presidents is staggering. It reflects a Congress unable to act as it is consumed with blame. 

The solution is amazingly simple. The electorate must choose to stop disproportionately electing far right and far left idealogues who are more interested in their tribal politics and blaming the other side than in effective government.  The electorate must choose to start electing more moderates who are willing to use data and logic to find compromises to solve our problems. In the late 1990s, Congress was composed of about 10% moderates and people were regretting that, crying out for the 1970s and 1980s when Congress was 30% moderates. Today the number of moderates in congress is vanishingly small. 

Moderates don’t even need to be 30% of Congress to make a difference, just enough moderates so that the Republicans and the Democrats don’t control the House, so that each side has to go to the moderates in the middle and ask for help to get a bill passed, making the moderates the gatekeepers. 

For this to happen, people committed to good governance, and willing to use logic and economics to figure out what good governance is, need to run for office. And voters who care about effective government need to see beyond the divisive labels and emotion of extremism, and vote.

What We’re Reading 

The Blame Game: Spin, Bureaucracy, and Self-Preservation in Government

By Christopher Hood

Political and social science nerds will love this book.  For others, it may seem like a long slog through the Slough of Despond for the first seven chapters, which describe the “blame world” in excruciating detail, relieved only by highly identifiable real-world examples and the occasional spark of gallows humor.  Hood, who taught political science and public administration on three continents, identified negativity bias (the tendency to focus on errors and faults rather than give credit for good actions) as the main instigator of blame avoidance engineering and architecture in our governance and culture.  He wryly shared the insight that his writing about blame games could itself be construed as negativity bias.

In describing “blame world,” he identified the different types of blame avoidance strategies, discussing in detail the reasoning, timing, sub-types, and their effects on blame makers and blame takers.  He supported these structures with substantive theory and research from the political and social science academic fields, as well as anecdotes from well-known political movers and shakers from diverse points of view.  

If you can get through the slog to the eighth chapter, Hood finally offered his readers the good news that some blame avoidance strategies in some situations can actually be beneficial to us all.  Once you’ve read his take on what those are and why they are beneficial, you will understand and appreciate in hindsight what you had to go through to get there.  And you are likely to conclude with me that The Blame Game is as relevant today as when it was published in 2011.  

Reviewed by Ruth McLatchie

This Month In History 

• May 2, 1933 – Nazi Regime Abolishes German Trade Unions
  
  It was May of 1933 when the Nazi regime dissolved independent unions, blaming them for social unrest and communist infiltration. Many historians believe this was a calculated move to eliminate opposition and consolidate power under the guise of restoring order.

• May 4, 1886 – Haymarket Riot in Chicago
  
  A labor protest turned violent when a bomb killed police officers. Politicians and the press blamed anarchists and labor unions, sparking a national backlash that shaped labor policy for decades, regardless of ambiguous guilt.

• May 15, 1918 – U.S. Government Forms the Sedition Act Committee
  
  Amid WWI, the U.S. expanded its Espionage Act to target dissenters. The Wilson administration blamed anti-war activists and socialists for undermining the war effort, providing the administration with enough support to test the First Amendment.
  
• May 25, 1787 – Constitutional Convention Begins
  
  Convened to revise the Articles of Confederation, delegates blamed the existing system for the nation’s instability. The result: a stronger federal constitution that redistributed blame and power across branches.

• May 31, 1889 – Johnstown Flood Disaster
  
  When a dam owned by an elite hunting club (including members of Congress) failed, killing over 2,000, blame was diffused through vague “acts of God” language. Political elites avoided direct accountability despite clear negligence.

Compiled by Elizabeth Frost and Volunteers

Coming Next Month:  

Apportionment – The Math Behind Representation

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