January 06, 2005

Very young children are notorious for blaming their problems on others. What parent hasn't heard ad infinitum, ad nauseum the "explanation": "You/he/she/they made me do it"? Projecting blame on someone else is one of the first things kids do when they learn to talk.

The way many researchers see it, small children can think of things pretty much only in terms of good or bad. Understanding shades of grey is for when they get older. I suppose that's why in children's stories, say fairy tales, good and evil are portrayed in the whitest of whites and the blackest of blacks. The prince is always noble and charming and the witch always is ugly, cackles and has a wart on her nose.

In stories for adults, however, people aren't lumped into such clearly differentiated categories of good and evil. They're imperfect, a mixture of good and bad. It's the prince who often has the wart.

So, then, we have at least two levels of "good" and "evil": the childish, simplistic one in which there are is only good or evil, and the adult one is which there are shades of grey, and no one is purely good or purely evil.

Supposedly that first level is just for children. Unfortunately, that level often continues to exist in adults. And that is where the problems start--when adults apply childish concepts of good and evil to the adult world.

In that childish level of good and evil, there always exists blaming your problems on other people. It's always the same story: we are good, and because we are good, our problems must be caused by bad people.

If you want to see a modern example of the childish view, look no farther than George Bush and his supporters (say many of those at Free Republic), who truly believe the US was attacked on 9/11 because we are "good" and those who attacked us are "evil."

That belief just boggles my mind; it really does. It completely ignores the fact the US has supported dictators in the Mideast for the last 50 years, no matter what horrible things they did to their citizens. It ignores the US's unqualified support for Israel and its complete dismissal of Palestinian grievances. It ignores American troops in Saudi Arabia, on what Muslims consider sacred soil. It ignores the fact 9/11 was blowback, and in large part based on envy, resentment, and revenge. Not because of some nearly infantile explanation of our goodness being attacked by their evilness.

I understand the desire to cling to that childish level of good and evil. It's comforting. "We're the good guys...we haven't done anything wrong. So when we were attacked, it's because they had to be the bad guys." But guess what? The "bad guys" are saying the same thing about us that we're saying about them.

That clinging so many people do is comforting, yes, but it is also dangerous. It upholds a fragile self-esteem at the cost of clouding reality. Staying a kid will do that to you.

Kids can get away with blaming people for their problems, because they're kids and we expect them to act like that. Adults can't. When adults see everything as either good or bad, with nothing in-between, they too project all of their problems onto other people, whether or not those people are innocent or guilty. It's what children are supposed to do, not adults.

The term for this projection is "scapegoating," and as M. Scott Peck has pointed out, it is the cause of all the human evil in the world. Scapegoating is when people refuse to admit their imperfections and project them onto other people. Then they try to remove those people from the world, thereby getting rid of those imperfections. The Communists and Nazis tried this technique in the 20th century, at the cost of what is estimated to be over 100 million people.

Carl Jung had a mythic term for when people refuse to admit responsibility for their actions and instead project them onto other people: the Shadow. When people refuse to admit their imperfections--their Shadow--they will always project it onto others. It is another name for scapegoating.

When people deny their Shadow--be it envy or resentment or whatever--they are always going to project those traits on someone else and blame those people for their problems. I am reminded of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. In real life Rand was a pathologically envious woman because of her unattractiveness. In her novel, guess what was the main characteristic of her "looters" and "parasites"? Envy. Her envy, projected onto her characters, whom she then wished to annhiliate, thereby removing envy from the world.

What we've got today is two groups at war, each claiming they are good and their opponents are evil. Each denies responsibility for what it has done. The US denies responsibility for what it has done in the Islamic world, and the Islamic world denies responsibility that its 1400 years of genocide, destruction and theft is the worst the world has ever known.

Each denies its Shadow, and blames their problems on someone else. Because this is happening, each will be stuck at the same childish level, blaming its problems on others, and eternally in conflict. It is oh-so-comforting to hold that childish view of good and evil, but it will always lead to war. Such is forever the price of not growing up.

Lew Rockwell See Bob's archives there.

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