You're the GOAT
If you know me personally, you know that I spent each of my few electives in university towards my minor in religion and culture. Not because of any affinity for religion, but because of the universality of this strange social phenomenon and the growing sense that maybe this could mean something (and the courses were online so I could learn them at my leisure).
This is not to say that the pervasiveness of religion is any indication of a universal higher being, or confirmation of a “big T” truth, but rather that there is something innately human about religiosity and therefore, the use of symbols in our daily lives is worth thinking about.
There’s a concept I find particularly interesting that is housed primarily in Judaism and Christianity, and it is called the scapegoat. It may be helpful to understand exactly what a scapegoat is and then we’ll move to where it came from.
The scapegoat is first and foremost a symbol. We hear this term thrown around all the time, frequently referring to someone who is blamed for the acts, transgressions, or behaviours of others. In a sense, it is a largely innocent subject taking blame through the judgement of others, typically, if not always, against their will. In many ways, the scapegoat is the fall guy. Poor thing.
So where did this idea come from? It was first introduced in the Old Testament involving literal goats. In Leviticus 16, God instructed that two goats were to be offered for the absolution of sin, one dying for the sins of the people and the other to suffer in the harshness of the wildness to absolve the community of their impurities for a set amount of time. The goats suffer so they don’t have to. It’s the transmutation of 'sin’ and the redistribution of responsibility for the offence.
From Christian theology, the scapegoat is Jesus. According to the book of Matthew, it was through his crucifixion that humanity was absolved of its sins. Jesus was the sacrifice; humanity can now sin freely. I’m joking here, but the logic is interesting, nonetheless.
Let’s be real for a second because quoting the bible is no easy task for an agnostic ex-Catholic who recognizes the danger of using closed texts as evidence of anything at all. I want to be clear when I say that I am presenting these as stories, evidence of symbolic patterns that are both cross-cultural and dated. This means that at the root, the bible is simply proof of a storyteller exemplifying a very human thing, which is to recognize the presence of a perceivable wrong and to try to do something about it in the most misguided way possible.
So, the scapegoat is what J.C Cooper calls a symbol of delegated guilt, where the delegator acknowledges a wrongdoing and projects the guilt onto an outsider. This occurs usually to create or restore a sense of purity of the self and to free the community of what they deem corrupted by immorality. In this interaction, there are three identifiable bodies that should be acknowledged: the scapegoat, the delegator, and the community (often an extension of the delegator). Remember that.
By now you probably trust that I’ll make sense of these half-threaded thoughts that I throw out into the essay ether and pray I’ll address them on the way out. But just to reassure you, I’ll get to why this is on my mind at the end.
The scapegoat is an important symbol because we see it every day. We see it in the way marginalized groups are blamed for the sense of inadequacy, fear, or really whatever the oppressor feels bad about that day. Think about common stereotypes, who are they really about? What is preserved through the allocation or moral inferiority?
Then you look to something called Scapegoat Theory, which is really just the idea that again, the oppressor reframes their experience to absolve them of their oppressive guilt/shame and to justify the violence they perpetuate. Think about sin then think about purity and bring it all back to feelings of shame.
In sum, the three subjects involved are the delegator (oppressor) who feels guilty for their role in the mistreatment of others or holds a particular amount of self-doubt or self-hatred. The delegator then projects those feelings onto the scapegoat (the oppressed) through the justification of their moral failing (which is by all accounts wrong) and therefore absolving the community (hegemonic class) of accountability for their sins (which now involves the unjust blame of the scapegoat).
So, this might be relevant when we ask ourselves why we fail to take accountability in our lives. I can suggest, quite bluntly, that it is usually the result of our discomfort surrounding the realizations that perhaps we just aren’t perfect all the time. Maybe this means we aren’t worthy of love, success etc. No one is exempt from this, we are all subject to the human condition. some have developed stronger toolboxes than others, and some have had tools but forgotten where they left them. Life is really just a series of forgetting and remembering.
Now my job isn’t to dive into the true depth of the scapegoat in the modern social landscape because frankly, we have already made a lot of broad generalizations and without proper attention, I risk missing the necessary nuance for that type of discussion. Instead, I want to look at the internal scapegoat, the one we create when we examine our individual lives.
So, hold on, let me pump the breaks and say I am no longer speaking about the very real and very lived experiences of oppression, prejudice, and cultural violence that occur on the macro level. That is just an example about how we, on a cultural level, perpetuate harm through the allocation of blame. This is how the symbol of the scapegoat exists on a broad scale.
This allocation of blame piece is what I really want us to hold onto when we look internally, because I believe this examination at the individual, has inevitable ripple effects into the social. So, look inward for a second.
I was thinking of this story I was taught as a kid called Three Billy Goats Gruff. To give you a general run down of this Norwegian folk story from the 40’s, it’s about three billy goats who want to cross a bridge guarded by a troll to get to the other side and literally eat the grass that is greener. Still not the point. The point is made apparent as each goat, starting with the smallest, tries to cross the bridge, and the goat- eating troll, knowing the largest awaits him, lets the smaller two cross. By the time the big guy goes to confront the troll, the troll recognizes that he is too small to conquer the largest. The third and final goat crosses safely, the troll goes hungry, and he’s rather bummed about it.
First and foremost, this is a story about greed, each goat pushing its way through danger to get what it wants, and the troll’s big appetite serving him poorly. Some suggest this story is about overcoming obstacles, and recognizing what needs to be overcome. Which had me thinking about the way we go about getting what we want, and how our fears can make us insatiable. This meant looking again to desire, and how we feel when we hit obstacles.
To tie in that vastly irrelevant story (besides the goat thing), we see that there is, through greed, an inclination to not only pass off on the opportunities that present themselves, but to then blame the final goat and his grandiose size when at the root, it is our inability to eat it that poses the greater problem. It is what it is, but we hardly see it that way. We are upset by our circumstances, and it has to be the fault of something or someone.
I was beginning to reflect on this story, along with the symbol of the scapegoat and recognize the scapegoats I’ve built in my life. What are the barriers I’ve told myself exist but don’t? What have I blamed for my own pain, worries, fears, or sense of inadequacy that simply did not deserve it?
There is always something—and the grass will always seem greener. It will hardly have anything to do with how much we’ve watered it, or at least it will seem that way for a while. “If only x was different”, “if that changed everything would be better” and “none of it is in my control”. Sound familiar? It is funny because most of us also struggle to identify the things that we genuinely can’t control, but I digress.
In these circumstances, under the guise of accurate analysis, we look to our lives, and we make an enemy of it. We become angry and we say “f-you life how dare you become a barrier to what I want!”. Remember the scapegoat, what does this mean for you?
Well, when we push the blame of our suffering onto the experiences that are genuinely uninterested in perpetuating our suffering, then we’ve relieved ourselves of our sense of self-hatred or insecurity and we’ve preserved the sense that we are in fact good deserving people who are simply victims to the circumstances that surround us. But what if we can be good deserving people who happen to experience misfortune and get in our own way sometimes?
It is nearly impossible to tackle this life if it is an enemy to us. We cannot even imagine where to start when we have perceived ourselves in a corner, where we’ve decided we are victims to our circumstances, and we really play no hand in the discomforts that pervade our realities. It’s bullshit, and it’s self-harm. We all participate in sabotage in one way or another.
Talcott Parsons introduced a similar idea in the 50’s of the “Sick Role” one that in many ways justifies an individual’s exemption from obligations that would otherwise be there. This is the idea that a sick person is not responsible for their condition (which is true) but also that their hands are tied, preventing one from making improvements to their situation.
Of course, one does not voluntarily take this role on, nor can someone necessarily control the framework that their minds build all the time. In short, it strips the person of their agency by cutting them off from opportunities to mobilize through actionable and practical attempts to improve their lives. It’s the deterministic path of I am x and therefore y, that closes our doors to potential improvements.
Though Parsons received a lot of well-deserved criticism for the harshness of this concept, something is significant here. No one is asking the sick person to cure their ills or transcend the circumstances that are working against them. Instead, he is suggesting that we call to our own ills, whatever they may be, and we acknowledge them, see the barriers that are genuinely in place, and we work to make our lives more comfortable with the resources available to us. This is our job, no one else’s (though asking for help is always welcome). That first part is the key point.
This reminds me of a time when I had just lost my mom after my childhood best friend four months prior. I’ve mentioned this time before, because there was a lot of significant and radical change that was catalyzed by these losses, one of them being my internal scapegoating.
At the time, I was angry at the world, the universe, really any person I encountered. I had believed myself to be a victim to my life, to be misunderstood, to be incapable of overcoming anything that crossed my path. I wanted someone to fix things for me, to improve my life and when no one did, it was because no one understood, and no one cared. How much easier it was to believe that than to consider that I had built this idea on a misguided sense of grief that I knew I couldn’t change.
This idea has come up a lot in my life, when I feel like I have hit a low, it becomes hard to recognize that other people are also trying their best, and that they too have their own inner worlds to tackle. At that time, I had decided my life was the hardest of all, which I am sad to say now.
This victimization is crucial to identify for several reasons. First, it notes the preservation of the self, placing me as a moral right against the evil of the universe and my peers. Additionally, it absolved me of any of my sins, or really me just being an absolute terror to those I loved. Not fair, and I have long expressed my apologies to those who were willing to hear it.
Second, it meant I had no role to play, which meant no actionable steps were available to me. Remember what I said in earlier essays about passive regression—it aims to maintain the status quo. So, my scapegoat was really anything. It was my school not recognizing what I was going through, it was my roommate squabbles that escalated in part through my own inability to properly address passive aggressiveness. Rather than set my own boundaries, I left with a boom. It was my shitty bus commute, inconvenient parking arrangements and early wake up times. Anything, but it wasn’t any of this at all, now was it?
I want to quickly say I will never suggest that any suffering in our lives is automatically a scapegoat. A key feature of a scapegoat is innocence. So, if you are experiencing something and it is genuinely wronging you, I promise that is valid. It may be helpful to note that scapegoating can be easily sifted out by looking to the framework of our beliefs. By scapegoating, we are framing our suffering within our own powerlessness. We are rarely truly incapable of acting on self-preservation in a healthy way.
Additionally, this form of scapegoating leads to hierarchical thinking. We have already decided who is more deserving of the blame based on assumptions of the ‘goats’ worthiness to us. We have decided that they/it deserve the blame more than we do, and to confirm these suspicions, we lean into those assumptions.
It’s at that point that we begin playing tit for tat, and looking for confirmation that yes, our life is harder than theirs, or that this thing is bad and has no good qualities. Another key trait of scapegoating is black and white thinking. This is dangerous, and it fails to grant others compassion, which means we aren’t granting any to ourselves either. What a rigid way to let ourselves live. We all deserve more than that, don’t you think?
I always worry with topics like these that there are generalizations being pulled without looking to the nuance of these situations. Brains are messy, and our perceptions can be confusing and hard to navigate. So, it’s important that when you look to your life, you start with self-compassion. Accountability is nearly impossible until you tell yourself it’s okay to not be perfect, or right all the time, or to be struggling.
That is your jumping off point. Life is far easier when we distribute the realities of our suffering honestly, and we take credit for the role we play in our own self-destruction. Because we do, every day, and you are still deserving of love despite that.
This is a long-winded essay, and I hope we can take it with an innate kindness for ourselves. The only way out of suffering is through it, and the only way through it is with compassion.
xox,
Sami