Je n’accuse pas
Us and Scapegoats

1. Scapegoats Galore
We love scapegoats so much that you’d almost think there must be a scapegoat-seeking gene in all humans.

Whose fault is this mess called reality, who can we blame our problems on? Difficult questions but a thousand easy answers spring to mind (pick one… or several): women, homosexuals, religionists who don’t believe what I believe, people whose skin is not the same color as mine, people who have more money than I do, people who have less money than I do, etc.

In a world of creeping relativism, scapegoating is a bracing hit of unquestioned and total absolutism. I the scapegoater am right and you the scapegoatee are wrong. Period. No doubt about it.

Me good. You bad. Fuck off, or else.

The best scapegoats are those who are easily identifiable. Women. Children. Jews (at least male Jews). Skin scapegoats. The fat. Some homosexuals.

2. Recent Scapegoats
To the traditional list we’ve lately added a couple of revealing new choices.

Nicotine addicts (a.k.a. "smokers") have become genuine social pariahs. Once upon a time, good hosting meant that if I invite you to my house I will strive to make you feel comfortable and work hard at avoiding making you feel uncomfortable. That’s still true… except when the invitee is a smoker. Then good hosting goes out the window. Why? Because smokers are true pariahs, dangers not only to their own health but to the health of everybody around them. Even if I know you are a smoker, if I invite you to my house then, by God, you are NOT going to pollute and endanger me and my loved ones. You… you… you SMOKER are in fact so objectionable that I will work to see that laws are passed rendering you and you filthy, dangerous habit unwelcome not only in public places but in private places as well.

The only recent scapegoats more despicable than smokers are oil producers. No matter that the products and by-products of their work have provided the building blocks and energy for everything from the smallest transistor to the largest skyscraper. The oil producers are filthy, money-grubbing, earth-destroying greed-mongers who MUST BE STOPPED! Just look at me in my gas-saving Prius (but don’t pay attention to the hundreds of pounds of petroleum-derived products that make up the structure of my Prius)! Look at the solar panels on my roof, the gigantic wind machines outside my city (but don’t pay attention to the tons of petroleum-based products that go into the construction of those energy-saving devices). Oil is dirty. Oil is destroying the planet. Fie on you, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP! We all see through your pretty ad campaigns. Bad oil, bad oil!

3. What Price Scapegoats?
Politicians have always been easy favorites for scapegoating (as have of course religionists, but we’ll save them for another day). Partly because many of them rise to power by doing the scapegoating: "My opponent is (choose one) a commie pinko, a fake war hero, a philanderer, a little light in the loafers." If the country a politicians leads happens to be very rich and very powerful, then watch out: Satan America! Paper Tiger! Imperialist exploiter!

The problem is, once the scapegoating starts it’s hard to unravel the tangled web and distinguish the truth from the lies. How to separate the good that (choose one) America, oil companies, smokers have done from the evil?

Given the ways of the world, it’s easy to make a long, successful career out of going around shouting, "J’accuse! J’accuse!" So extreme are the wrongs evident in the world that often that’s the only way to arrive at some approximation of justice.

Too often and too easily the accusations snowball and become witch-hunts. Yes, your smoking annoys and may even harm me. Yes, the oil companies have dangerously overreached and overdrilled. Yes, militant, corporate America has lately been hurting both the planet and its people.

And charges must be brought. Fixes must be found. Attention must be paid.

What the smugly self-righteous scapegoaters always fail to see is the massive, smothering pollution of their own intolerance.

Science handily and helpfully counts the carcinogens in tobacco smoke. Science dutifully and importantly graphs the devastating effects of oil usage on the global environment. Economists carefully chart the growing inequality in the global distribution of wealth.

4. What, Me Guilty?
What science doesn’t give us is any data at all on the massive, deleterious psychic effects of self-righteous indignation, irrationally amplified intolerance, excessively punitive judgments, and rigid black-white mind-sets.

Why not? Simple. Because we have no science of consciousness. We today are as unaware of the effects of mind as people 2,000 years ago were unaware of the effects of electromagnetic radiation.

Today we think the civilized person need only look at the available evidence, come to "rational" conclusions, form firm beliefs, and act on them. Consign those whom you then condemn to the Outer Darkness and all will be well, or, if not quite well, at least a lot better.

And now we have six billion minds at work doing this. A lot. Often. All the time, in fact, every day. But naively, savagely, barbarously unaware of the fierce, painful, destructive storms of consciousness we unleash and feed with our blind and blindered, very primitive self-righteousness.

Yes, smoking has many bad effects. Yes, oil has many bad effects. But I say unto you the happily judgmental, you are doing far, far greater damage to the world than all the cigarettes and all the oil companies combined. And you are doing it right now, all the time, with your expedient determination to put the universe in a tiny box containing only you and your ilk while everybody and everything else stays outside.

Psychic storms rage on this planet that are our own making. We are all implicated. We don’t even know they exist, much less that we cause them with our single-minded, narrow-minded, vicious, self-righteous indignation.

Oh, we feel their effects, all right, in both our sleeping and our waking nightmares. But of course those nightmares are not my fault. Clearly, they’re your fault.

So. Smokers, ExxonMobil, the U.S. government: je n’accuse pas.