Principles of Scapegoating

The ancient Israelites were not the only people who practiced scapegoating. There was, in fact, another ancient people, known as the Bamaites, who learned the practice at the Israelite knee, as it were. The Bamaites then vanished mysteriously and utterly from history. However, the recent discovery of the Ancient Scrolls appears to shed light on the mystery of their disappearance.

Scapegoating, of course, is the practice of blaming someone else for your own faults. According to the Bible, the ancient Israelites ritually assigned all their sins to a goat, which they then abandoned in the desert to die. Thus, their sins were supposedly taken away, forgiven, or, in more modern parlance, made inoperative. The transferral of sins was symbolic; the death of the goat was not.

All of this made for good ritual, and the benefit of scapegoating was being able to blame someone else, while feeling righteous oneself. But the successful scapegoater will understand that, apart from the really dead goat, this is all symbolic.

About one desert over from the Israelites lived the Bamaites. No one knows how they caught wind of scapegoating. Perhaps they found some goat skeletons in the desert. In any case, it looked like really good stuff to them, since they had a heavily goat-dependent economy anyway, and they sent work-study students over to learn the ropes.

When the students returned home, the Bamaites instituted scapegoating, and everyone was happy for about a year. That was when they discovered that people kept on sinning, even after they had given all their sins to the goat and shooed it off into the desert to die. So the Bamaites became very angry at the goats and slaughtered them all, after which they disappeared from the narrative of history.

The Bamaites had failed to understand these basic principles of scapegoating:

1. Goats aren't really responsible for your sins. You are.

2. If you kill all your scapegoats, who are you going to blame next year?

3. If you kill all your goats, you won't have any more goat products.

4. If yours is a goat-based economy, see 3.