Have you noticed how, sometimes, a little too often, scapegoating someone or some group of people is used as a political solution to a national identity crisis? It seems the hope is that finding an external ‘foe’ and offloading all ‘our’ problems on them as the purported cause of our woes should help bolster people’s self-confidence, leading to a sense of unity. The problem with this strategy is not just that no one can be deceived forever, but also that building one’s self-confidence on the foundation of scapegoating is yet another level of self-deception. It is like trying to build a house atop fluid sand and ignoring the fact that it will hurt even more when, in the not-too-far future, the shaky construction will collapse on one’s head.
“Scapegoating can never ultimately succeed as a solution to the crisis of national insecurity and fragmentation for it is always based, as Sartre reminds us, on ‘bad faith’. You cannot go on believing forever in your own lies. Self-deception is a shaky basis for self-confidence.”
Richard Kearney
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