What is your favorite scapegoat?
The scapegoat is the one who pays for the faults of others: the expression originates from the ritual sacrifice of a goat (kid or billy goat) to atone for the sins of the people of Israel, as narrated in the book of Leviticus. A solemn barrabasada (in this case, the expression comes from the villain of Christianity, Barabbas). Today we continue to practice goat sacrifices, but metaphorical sacrifices, bloodless, of a mouth or a tweet. They work quite well as a mechanism for us to vent.
In times of turmoil, more or less everyone looks for someone to blame for our ingrained ills. The political class (also called the caste), in general, are the first to be targeted. Immigration, also as a whole, occupies the second step of the podium, neck and neck with the first. In any gathering of friends, acquaintances or strangers, to utter some witty joke against one or the other costs nothing. They are the whipping boys. With them, politicians and immigrants, anything goes at first.
In third place, on their own merits, are the Spaniards, who as a scapegoat have never abandoned us – always in podium positions – nor do they seem likely to abandon us: fiscal deficit, rancid and ultramontane right-wing, left-wing with Jacobin tendencies, over-politicized justice, persecution of the Catalan language... We must recognize that they have worked hard at it for centuries, although, naturally, when we reward them, we commit, again, a sin of generalization and also, incidentally, we shake off our own weaknesses and miseries. In this third case, there is also reciprocity: we (Catalans, also in generic terms) are very often, and since time immemorial, the scapegoat par excellence of Madrilenian political and social life. Quid pro quo, so to speak.
Beyond these famous and malleable cases, scapegoats are quite useful (and not to be discarded). They are extremely resilient, they hardly ever expire. Having them readily available reassures us, even though they often prevent us from seeking real solutions to concrete problems or from engaging in minimal, and uncomfortable, self-critical introspection.
Bureaucracy, a relative of politics and, it must be said, with a sufficiently solid factual basis, is another very common one: it is a scapegoat used by farmers, teachers, architects, and tutti quanti: the long-suffering anonymous citizens, that is, everyone. Red tape (now including the digital divide) affects everyone from the first to the last in line. Of course, we want a rights-guaranteeing administration (that assures us of our rights in every sense), but one that doesn't take our time or give us work. A complicated balance, because if we lighten the controls, then we open the door to the other great scapegoat. Yes, you've guessed it: the corrupt and corruptors. Corruption! Which in effect is also an old traveling companion; it would even deserve a place on the main podium, for example with a synthesis as perfect and common as this: "It's the politicians' fault, they are all corrupt." Bam!
Let it be known that I am not denying the existence of opportunistic politicians, bureaucracy, stale Spanish nationalism, or the difficulty of integrating immigration. I only note that the gaze we project tends to make a pasty hyperbole upon which we project all our demons and phantoms. It's about identifying a simple enemy to unload our anger, fears, obsessions, and especially our powerlessness to change things onto. When a society is blocked, when no one sees a way out, when pessimism has created a collective psychological hole of gigantic dimensions, it is when scapegoats acquire maximum prominence, which is not always merely rhetorical. Their bastard children are ultra-populism, xenophobia, anti-politics, or unnuanced criticism of public affairs, all so fashionable today.
To calm ourselves in situations of tension, to get out of the way of bogged-down crises, there are still more scapegoats in the marketplace of mainstream ideas. For example tourists, as if we weren't all so potentially and actually. Or, in the ideological arena, the much-worn goodness, as if naive, poor goodness were a more fearsome enemy than habitual cynical wickedness. In short, what is the scapegoat to which you find it hardest to resist?