DEFINING SCAPEGOATING
Scapegoating is a hostile social - psychological discrediting routine by which people move blame and responsibility away from themselves and towards a target person or group.
It is also a practice by which angry feelings and feelings of hostility may be projected, via inappropriate accusation, towards others. The target feels wrongly persecuted and receives misplaced vilification, blame and criticism; he is likely to suffer rejection from those who the perpetrator seeks to influence.
Scapegoating has a wide range of focus: from "approved" enemies of very large groups of people down to the scapegoating of individuals by other individuals. Distortion is always a feature.
The Scapegoat Complex
We apply the term “scapegoat” to individuals and groups who are accused of causing misfortune.
Thus, they seem to relieve others, the scapegoaters, of their own responsibilities, and to strengthen the scapegoaters' sense of power and righteousness. In this current usage a search for the scapegoat relieves us also of our relationship to the transpersonal dimension of life. For in the present age we function with a perverted form of the archetype that ignores the gods; and we blame the scapegoat and the devil for life's evils.
We forget that originally the scapegoat was a human or animal victim chosen for sacrifice to the underworld god to heal the community. The scapegoat was a pharmakon or healing agent. …
Some will sell out their own mothers before admitting any wrongdoing.
Scapegoating also allows people to feel united when they join together to blame someone else. And when action is taken against the scapegoat, the dominant group can feel that they have accomplished something.
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