Hey what’s up Thinkers! Kathy Gibbens here…
Ok, let’s start off with a quick review of a Compliance Technique we covered earlier this season, the Door in the Face Technique. Ok, you wanna hit pause real quick and see if you can remember what this one is? So, Door in the Face happens when someone tries to get you to comply with a request by first making an almost too-big request that you’re most likely going to turn down, then they follow it up with a smaller request, the thing they really wanted to ask you to do in the first place, because they know you’re not likely to turn them down twice in a row.
Question to ask yourself when you’re faced with the Door In the Face Technique is this: “Do I really want to do or buy that or do I feel guilted into it?”
If you want to review or hear more about this fallacy, go back & check out Episode 132.
Alright, we are continuing on with the miniseries on Propaganda tactics and I thought I would just take a minute and tell you why I’m even doing this series. Here’s why, and I’ll use an example from movies. If you’ve ever seen a superhero movie, you know that every superhero movie has a villain. There’s always someone with nefarious motives and intent to lie & hurt others. Well, unfortunately, the real world has no shortage of villains, either. We just have to turn on the nightly news or read some of the daily headlines to see that this is true. And if you’ve ever studied any history at all, you know how it plays out. Villains are very real. And since they’re real, wisdom says we should learn how to recognize them! And we should learn how to recognize the tactics they use to carry out their evil plans! And we should be prepared so we don’t also fall prey to their tricks and wind up on the wrong side ourselves! Goodness knows we need to be people of DISCERNMENT these days! And one way to make ourselves impossible to fool is to recognize their tactics and develop critical thinking to know what’s wrong with the things they’re saying. It happened in WW2 with Hitler and led to the death of 11 million people, and it’s still happening today, resulting in an ever-increasing loss of freedom. We have to be able to recognize it when it happens! Ok, stepping off my soapbox now, lol, but guys this stuff is important!
The tactic we’re talking about today is scapegoating. Scapegoating happens when someone purposely places blame on a certain person or a certain group group for something they didn’t do, expressly for the purpose of giving others a place to heap their resentment and frustration about something. It’s a way of giving people someone to blame, even though the ones being blamed aren’t even guilty.
Interestingly, the concept of the scapegoat actually comes from the Bible. In the Old Testament, God used a goat as a sacrifice, as a way of removing sin from the camp of the Israelites. You can read about it in Leviticus 16:9-10. The sin of the people was symbolically put on the goat and then the goat was let go into the wilderness, and that’s where we get the term Scapegoat. It’s putting the blame on an undeserving, innocent person for the benefit of others.
So, here’s an example of what this sounds like: there's a group project in your class, and everyone has to work together to create a presentation. The project doesn't go very well, and your team gets a low grade. Instead of taking responsibility for his part in the project, one of your teammates, Chris, decides to blame all the problems on another teammate, Alex. Chris tells the teacher, "It's all Alex's fault! He didn't do anything, and that's why our project failed." In this situation, Chris is using the scapegoating tactic. He’s unfairly blaming Alex for everything that went wrong in the project, even if it wasn't entirely Alex's fault and he’s refusing to look at the role he and the other teammates played in the failure.
Another way I’ve seen this happen is when a team has a bad season and doesn’t win much, then they blame the coach for the bad season. Was it really all the coach’s fault or did all the players on the team hold some responsibility for the losing season?
Scapegoating can take place between individuals, between an individual and a group, between a group and an individual, and between groups.The problem behind the Scapegoat tactic is that it’s a lie. It’s saying someone did something they didn’t do and purposely spreading that lie and allowing other people to take out their anger & hatred on an innocent person. The other problem behind scapegoating is that it’s a wrong shifting of blame and it enables people to shirk their responsibility for the problem. They aren’t held accountable and they don’t mind seeing someone else take the blame that should be theirs. That’s messed up, y’all, and it shows a serious character flaw.
We see Scapegoating happen in almost every presidency. It goes something like this: A new president comes in and enacts all his new policies, which creates a negative effect for some group of people, like really high gas prices, which affects everyone. Well of course people aren’t happy about the high gas prices, so they start complaining about the President’s policies that caused the high gas prices. What does the president do? Blame the guy before him! Almost always, they’ll blame whoever was the president before them just so the American people won’t be mad at him. That’s scapegoating. Think about it…when’s the last time you heard a politician say, “Wow, I messed up, it’s my fault and I’m sorry.” Ha! I can’t think of a single time I’ve heard a politician take the blame and not place it on someone else!
Question to ask yourself: “Is it really their fault?” *repeat*
Remember: When you learn HOW to think, you will no longer fall prey to those who are trying to tell you what THEY want you to think and it all starts with asking one simple question: “Is that really true?”
