Blame Game
Blame is a funny thing. It does absolutely nothing useful — just the opposite.
Some people confuse blame and responsibility. I assume that’s because they rarely encountered responsibility that wasn’t infused with blame potential. Although both blame and responsibility concern the same question — i.e., who did wrong or caused a problem— they bring completely different expectations along.
Assigning responsibilities (hopefully by agreement) brings an expectation that each person will take action to improve the situation and, hopefully, rectify any wrongs and solve problems created by those wrongs. Responsibilities are specific, conditional and limited. The ones who did wrong might not be able to do all we need to fix damage and solve problems. Others might need to act even though they did nothing wrong — even the wronged. You’re still responsible for your car if I crash into it, and you’re responsible for some of the actions needed to fix the damage even though I caused it.
So, responsibility is connected in sensible ways to everything involved: the wrong, the problems, and the people whether they did wrong or not. Responsibility sets the stage for constructive action by those who need to take action. So, responsibility focuses on getting good things done.
Blamers couldn’t care less about getting good things done. When we blame, we specifically do not want to understand what constructive action is needed, who was responsible for what happened, or who should do what. Blame is how we escape all that and put someone else on the hook to make it all better, so that we can ignore what it takes to fix it but still judge the results.
Just the opposite of understanding everyone’s respective responsibilities, blame throws all the fault for a wrong onto one or a few — sometimes even the innocent — and then saddles them with the duty to right the wrong, fix the damage, and solve the problems, or else suffer consequences — or even suffer consequences anyway. We blame so we can avoid our responsibility to figure out together who should do what. The blamed might need others to help them, but even if others refuse or fail to do what’s needed, the blamed get blamed for that, too.
In the U.S. we’re far less concerned with constructive action or reparation than we are with punishment. “Justice was served” if a criminal gets punished whether he made any reparation or not. If he makes full reparation, that alone isn’t “justice”. No, he has to “pay for his crime”. Not only do criminals get blamed, but they get no chance to redeem themselves by simply making amends. No, they must pay their debt of pain and suffering whether they pay the real costs of what they did or not.
When we blame, besides abandoning our own responsibility, we impose pain on others to make them feel pain with us. As blamers, the more pain we feel, the more pain we want to inflict on those who hurt us. Not only is this reactionary sadism irrelevant to rectifying wrongs or improving the situation, it actually impedes constructive action and solutions.
Blame is a person-to-person matter, an issue that distracts everyone from making things better, not a personS-to-problem matter where we figure out how to proceed together sensibly. Blame feels the same and works the same way no matter what the transgression was, because it’s a negative fixation on the person we’re blaming that excludes constructive concerns and wants the same thing no matter what they did. We can’t blame and be constructive at the same time. “Constructive blame” is an oxymoron. What’s more, blame confuses what will happen next rather than clarify it like assigning responsibilities would. Blame is vague, open-ended and so, in a practical sense, unlimited. Once the blamed are identified, there is often no end to it.
If a thug punches a pregnant women in the stomach for refusing to hand over her purse, we blame the thug for the robbery, the assault, and much or all of the damage caused by robbing and punching her. If the woman later miscarries, we blame the thug for that, too. If the woman dies due to complications of the miscarriage, we blame the thug for that, too, and he might be charged with manslaughter or murder. At some point people will curtail the blame they lay on a thug, because blaming unchecked eventually broaches the inhuman, where we’d lose the argument that we’re no better than the thug we’re blaming, so we stop. This isn’t because blame has inherent limitations, but because past a certain point we would feel we’d “gone too far” were we to heap on a little more. There’s never a lack of blame we could heap on if we wanted to.
So, the limits of blame have nothing to do with the thug, what he did, or the results of his actions. We alone decide whether to blame and we alone determine how much, how strong, and how long. The most vehement blamers often turn out to be people who only heard about wrongs they weren’t personally involved in.
When we merely witness or hear a story about wrongs done, the specific details that might pacify our blame if we’d experienced them — i.e., the things that actually happened to those who were directly involved — get left to our imaginations, and imaginations like to run wild in directions that we’re already leaning toward. Even after a blamed person does everything within his power to recognize and admit what he did, apologize, make amends and reparations, and show he’ll never do the like again, (or solve the problem some other way,) not just a few people will keep on blaming him. For some people, blame never ends. Grudges can last lifetimes, even many generations.
So, counter-intuitively, personal participation in a violation actually limits blame. Victims blame their abusers, of course, but not in the same open-ended, fierce, or even vicious ways that their advocates can. This is the lesson of restorative justice: Victims want retaliation only if they’re convinced their violators refuse to recognize and admit what they did, apologize, make amends and reparations, and show they’ll never do the like again. Often, victims would be happy to get nothing more than a sincere apology, especially when their violators are authority figures.
Most of us are not like the authorities, though, because most of us make our judgments for our own purposes based on our own experience, not as third parties judging the affairs of others on second-hand information. This change in perspective makes all the difference. When we fill proxy roles — for others, for an organization, for church or state — our brains work differently than they do when we’re acting on our own behalfs, as Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s experiments so disturbingly demonstrated and every visit to a governmental institution invariably shows. Most of us just aren’t all that interested in retaliation or punishment for a wrong we suffered ourselves — after all, retaliation and punishment cost us, too — but we definitely want wrongdoers to understand and how they affected us, empathize, and do their part to repair the damage. Most of us get interested in payback only after we despair being understood, especially if we think the wrongdoer is incorrigible. Vengeance, though, is never so ruthless as when we wreak it on behalf of others.
When we’re wronged, we feel it was done to us. The wrongdoer acted. We were passive recipients of offenses that hurt us. The wrongdoer should own what he did — but until he accepts ownership, somehow we feel the wrong still sits with us. To stop feeling victimized by that, we need to take action; but not just any action, because some kinds of action bind us to the wrongdoer.
That’s what blame does.
Blame is an emotional chain which we lock onto the wrongdoer that shackles us to him, and the irony is that he holds the key. Until he does what we want him to do, the shackle stays locked and we stay chained to him. We give him all the power this way.
But we don’t need to blame. We can free ourselves instead.
Bottom line, everyone affected by a wrong wants others to at least recognize its impacts on them and acknowledge that those impacts matter. That alone does nothing to fix the resulting situation or solve its problems, but it’s enough to eliminate blaming. Once we hear, “I’m sorry,” we realize that we are no longer threatened and, to some maybe ever so small degree, that we are recognized and appreciated. So, we start thinking sensibly again. Our attention shifts from fixating on the wrongdoer to minding what’s really going on: What happened, how and why it happened, who did what, and what each of us needs to do going forward. We shift from being defensive to being constructive.
So blame is how we focus on our wound, put it on display, and declare that it can’t be healed until the one who injured us pays. Instead of improving things, blame demotes the practical matter of fixing damage and solving problems by subordinating them to the personal matter of being recognized and valued — not by anyone or everyone, but specifically by the wrongdoer. This is the nature of offense. It sets up a strange and ironic conflict of interest. We expect the wrongdoer either to recognize and appreciate that he hurt us or pay for what he did or both. Why would he do either when it was his idea to hurt us and he wanted it enough to act on it? Whether he pays with recognition or pain, blame hinges resolution of the situation on the very one who wanted it (or wanted things that led to it) and created it in the first place —while doing nothing at all to resolve it apart from him. Blame can go so far that, in their fixation with those who wronged them, victimized people tend to neglect and offend family and friends who care about them and want to stand with them, isolating themselves from their allies and sequestering themselves with their enemy.
When we blame, not we but our wrongdoers will determine what happens next. In other words, after being forced to suffer once at their hands physically, sexually, financially, socially, or in some other way, blaming is how we lay ourselves at their feet emotionally, at the mercy of their will or even their whim. At that point, whether we’ll be OK or not is totally up to them.
Of course, this makes no sense — but blame isn’t a sensible matter. In refusing to recognize everyone’s respective roles, by pretending to saddle the blamed with not just their responsibilities but ours and everyone else’s, too, we turn ourselves into their slaves emotionally. And, to the extent that others know about the wrongdoing and it affects our reputation and status, we enslave ourselves socially, too. By blaming, we declare that those who wronged us have all the power and that we have none until they give some back.
Blame is an avoidance mechanism we use to escape our responsibilities and the vulnerability of owning them, since admitting that both we and our wrongdoers share some responsibility would make us fair targets for blame, too. So blame is by nature a kind of purposeful unfairness, a one-way street on which we impose rules on others that we exempt ourselves from, a kind of hypocrisy. Even worse, at least in the minds of many, sharing responsibility would imply that we are the wrongdoers’ peers. Blame always and only comes from a place of superiority — at least in that we claim the right to judge the other as blameworthy. Peerness with a wrongdoer is the last thing a blamer wants. So, to some extent, admitting any responsibility would mean that we are like the wrongdoer so some degree— exactly the opposite of what we’re after when in avoidance mode.
Blame is a major way we establish and protect supremacism, i.e., the rejection of peerness.
So, blame is rationally disconnected from the people responsible for doing wrong and the people responsible to fix its damage and solve its problems, because our purpose in blaming has nothing to do with being constructive or recognizing and appreciating the others involved, but is rather a preoccupation with ourselves and our own escape from responsibility and peerness by scapegoating others. The reasons we scapegoat are never related to the actual scapegoats we end up choosing to dump on— anyone will do.
The wrongdoer forced us into an experience we did not want and which he should not have inflicted on us. Otherwise, we wouldn’t know him from Ruby Begonia and, apart from knowing what he did to us, we don’t want to know him — we want him to know how he hurt us. Blame creates the distance we need to feel safe to approach him closely enough to dump our pain on him and make him feel it. Blame prevents us from getting together with everyone affected to make things better for all of us. Blame is how we make sure we do not get together. Then, from a safe distance, blame lets us pretend that our demand that others make things better for us is justified.
Like all conflict behavior, blame makes us codependent, which is why people get incensed when a wrongdoer won’t “accept the blame” — not because they suddenly realized some new horror about him or what he did, but merely because he refused their demand to engage in codependency. Blamers find this refusal just as outrageous no matter if the wrongdoer is a psychopath or if he’s actually a decent person who meant no harm, regrets what he did, has stellar solutions to the problems it caused, and is willing to make all necessary reparations and then some. To blamers, unless he first accepts the blame, all the rest is secondary.
In other words, before anything else, in exactly the same move every authoritarian or supremacist demands from anyone who fails to satisfy them, the wrongdoer must submit himself to the blamer.
Blamers won’t be satisfied until they get what they’re really after: submission.
Submission is often the only thing blamers are actually after. Only when the wrongdoer signals submission will blamers listen to his remorse, consider his solutions, or accept his reparations— maybe. Even then, sometimes they just keep blaming, regardless.
Blame really isn’t about sharing our pain with a wrongdoer, because sharing implies peerness. Blame involves inflicting pain that we control for the purpose of our own psychic relief, hinging the entire affair on the submission of the one who chose to violate us no matter how we harm him in the process of extracting it. So, in that way too, blame has nothing to do with the wrongdoer for any constructive purposes, but is rather just a turning the tables of control on him. Now the wrongdoer becomes the unwilling recipient of pain from us just like he inflicted pain on us. While denying we’re like him, we want him to feel what we felt in what amounts to an attempt to evoke involuntary empathy. The more we succeed in this oxymoronic effort, the more he becomes like us and we become like him in a bizarre kind of perverse communion. This is why blame shares important elements with sadism.
We don’t need to wait on wrongdoers for anything, particularly not our liberation, whether it’s freedom from them or from their abuse and its effects. Regardless what they do or don’t do, we can unilaterally choose not to blame, and the choice has nothing at all to do with them. We can freely choose to think sensibly about everyone involved, figure out what our own responsibilities are, and decide what constructive actions we should take to improve things going forward. We wait on no one for that. Even better if we can do it together with everyone affected, including the wrongdoer. That’s exactly what restorative justice does. This is how we can “forgive” while still holding people accountable. I put forgive in quotes because I suspect that when people talk of forgiving, they’re actually talking about letting go of blame.
Blame proves that we still feel victimized, even though the wrong happened in the past, sometimes even years or decades ago. In other words, although a wrongdoer once harmed us, we are the ones who keep victimizing ourselves, refusing to own our responsibilities but instead choosing codependency to the violator. He is not responsible for our ongoing, self-violating preference for codependency. That’s our wrong, not his. The fact that he did what he did in no way means we need to keep using the memory to torture ourselves, waiting for him or someone else to do things for us that may never happen and that we could readily do for ourselves.
Although it might not sound like it, that’s good news. Owning our self-violation is the first step in abandoning self-harm. We can’t throw away the club we’re beating ourselves up with as long as we keep pretending that someone else swings it. And we can’t find relief from harming ourselves as long as we keep pretending that the whole problem is what a wrongdoer did to us is and that we are powerless, still at his mercy through a memory that we choose to nurse and protect until he gives us reason to stop.
So, blame is senseless, sneaky pretense.
To blame is to lie.
