Scapegoat Quotes

“In a verbally abusive relationship, the partner learns to tolerate abuse without realizing it and to lose self-esteem without realizing it. She is blamed by the abuser and becomes the scapegoat. The partner is then the victim.”
― Patricia Evans, The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize It and How to Respond

“If I still need someone to calm my anger down,
then I surely need a scapegoat who enrages me.”
― Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza

“Recovering from family scapegoating requires recognizing that being the ‘identified patient’ is symptomatic of generations of systemic dysfunction within one’s family, fueled by unrecognized anxiety and even trauma. In a certain sense, members of a dysfunctional family are participating in a ‘consensual trance‘, i.e., a ‘survival trance’ supported by false narratives, toxic shame, anxiety, and egoic defense mechanisms, such as denial and projection.”
― Rebecca C. Mandeville, Rejected, Shamed, and Blamed: Understanding Family Scapegoating Abuse

“I was in denial of the glaring reality that my existence depended on my willingness to comply with the family policy of me earning the splinter of space they granted to me.”
― M. Wakefield, Narcissistic Family Dynamics: Collected Essays

“If it is your fault that your mother is miserable, it becomes a potentially fixable affront. Taking blame means that at least the hope of love is still there-all you have to do is deserve it.”
― Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life

“Another reason it's dangerous to acknowledge that you were unloved is that it implies the possibility that your mother may have been right-you are unlovable.”
― Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life

“I was a scapegoat. The media had to put responsibility on somebody, and I was chosen. They felt free to say that because someone was thin they were anorexic, which is ridiculous.”
― Kate Moss

“Individuals who do not want to know their own truth collude in denial with society as a whole, looking for a common "enemy" on whom to act out their repressed rage. But as the inhabitants of this shrinking planet near the end of the twentieth century, the danger inherent in self-deception is growing exponentially- and we can afford it less than ever. Fortunately, at the same time, we now have the tools we need to truly understand ourselves, as we were and as we are.”
― alice miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

“[Scapegoating] blames societal ills on the groups with the least power and the least say in how the country operates while allowing the larger framework and those who control and reap the dividends of these divisions to go unchecked.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“At some point in the life of every scapegoat, the clock will strike the midnight hour, the masks will come off, and the aggression of family will reveal itself.”
― M. Wakefield, Narcissistic Family Dynamics: Collected Essays

“Many daughters live out their lives avoiding or abiding or arguing with their mothers-burying the long-ago injury or insult or childhood deprivation under a blanket of forgetfulness-and not confronting it head-on. It's humiliating to remember the ways in which one demeaned oneself in order to prevent being in a mother's bad graces, the willingness to do anything in order to not be rejected, when rejection felt like death.”
― Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life

“If your mother lived your life as though it were her own-never allowing you a moment of stress or frustration, routinely sleeping in your bed when you had a bad dream, never setting limits or establishing boundaries, seldom or never letting you out of her sight, excusing and failing to provide consequences for your negative or hurtful behaviour, insisting on a daily chronicle of every detail of your life, all in the name of maternal love-then you never had to grow up and take responsibility for your actions. You remain a child.”
― Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life

“Such are the incalculable effects of that negative passion of indifference, that hysterical and speculative resurrection of the other.

Racism, for example. Logically, it should have declined with the advance of Enlightenment and democracy. Yet the more hybrid our cultures become, and the more the theoretical and genetic bases of racism crumble away, the stronger it grows. But this is because we are dealing here with a mental object, an artificial construct, based on an erosion of the singularity of cultures and entry into the fetishistic system of difference. So long as there is otherness, strangeness and the (possibly violent) dual relation -- as we see in anthropological accounts up to the eighteenth century and into the colonial phase -- there is no racism properly so-called. Once that `natural' relation is lost, we enter into a phobic relationship with an artificial other, idealized by hatred. And because it is an ideal other, this relationship is an exponential one: nothing can stop it, since the whole trend of our culture is towards a fanatically pursued differential construction, a perpetual extrapolation of the same from the other.
Autistic culture by dint of fake altruism.

All forms of sexist, racist, ethnic or cultural discrimination arise out of the same profound disaffection and out of a collective mourning, a mourning for a dead otherness, set against a background of general indifference -- a logical product of our marvellous planet-wide conviviality.

The same indifference can give rise to exactly opposite behaviour. Racism is desperately seeking the other in the form of an evil to be combated. The humanitarian seeks the other just as desperately in the form of victims to aid. Idealization plays for better or for worse. The scapegoat is no longer the person you hound, but the one whose lot you lament. But he is still a scapegoat. And it is still the same person.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime

“For the ancients, the scapegoat served as the healing agent for the larger whole. In modern times, the concept of the scapegoat has mutated from merely the bearer of misfortune to the person or group blamed for bringing misfortune.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Children who are scapegoated in families are in reality victims of abuse and neglect – Yet this is rarely recognized by those working in our Mental Health systems, Family Courts, or Educational systems. Because scapegoating processes can be subtle, many scapegoated adult survivors fail to realize that they have suffered from psycho-emotional abuse growing up, and even their therapist or counselor might miss the signs and symptoms associated with being in this most devastating dysfunctional family role.”
― Rebecca C. Mandeville, Rejected, Shamed, and Blamed: Understanding Family Scapegoating Abuse

“The scapegoat is not what he once was. No longer is he hounded; now he is pitied (the rights of man, dissidents, the 'beurs ', * etc.) . But he is the scapegoat nonetheless and it is still the same.

When there is a solution, it is no longer a real problem. When there is an answer, it is no longer a real question. For at that point, the problem is part of the solution and the answer is part of the question. And then nothing remains but solutions without problems and answers without questions. O, happy days when we had only questions without answers and problems without solutions!”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Before being upset with someone, do first some background checks on them, sometimes people wounded in other battles may find you a handy scapegoat.”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“A life as long as the Minotaur's - that half-man half-bull, and fully scapegoat - a life that long doubles back on itself from time to time. Caves in. The minuscule tectonics of being alive, among the wholly human, always unsettling. The world shifts continuously beneath his feet. The Minotaur came from misspent want, from the planked birth canal, came from blood-drenched stone walls, from yellow thread. Belayed by desire, the beast pulled himself along. Pulled himself through centuries, through zeitgeists and kitchens, through paradigms and junkyards. Pulls still. Home.”
― Steven Sherrill, The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time

“It wasn't true, the evidence was faked, but the odd thing is that, whether it s true or not, the consequences are the same: one large group of human beings
or another turned out to be triple-distilled sons-of-bitches, which proves that we all have it in us. Whether the Communists staged a diabolical lie or the Americans sowed plague in China, the one thing that matters is that, as a man, you're
in the gutter. Colonel Babcock. [...] Maybe the West is a civilization, but the Communists are an ugly truth about man. Don't accuse them of inhuman methods: everything about them is human. We're all one great, lovely zoological family, and we shouldn't forget it. That's how you came to be in the gutter Colonel and it's no use your taking refuge on an island and behaving like an ostrich — being English, I mean; the gutter is there, it's you, or rather in you; it flows in your veins.”
― Romain Gary, The Roots of Heaven

“I could see Mount Sodom beyond the distant shores, where the goat had been chosen as a sacrifice to redeem the wicked tribe.”
― M. Wakefield, Narcissistic Family Dynamics: Collected Essays

“Inspired by the Book of Leviticus, the artist saw the goat as an archetype for Jesus Christ, the "suffering servant of God," who carried our sins with his cross as an act of redemptive suffering. Thus, the Lamb of God is the Last Scapegoat.”
― M. Wakefield, Narcissistic Family Dynamics: Collected Essays

“I carried the image of 'The Scapegoat' with me and that ethereal moment when it seemed as if I had entered the bleak scenery stayed etched in the back of my mind for reasons I could not yet comprehend.”
― M. Wakefield, Narcissistic Family Dynamics: Collected Essays

“Life was simple and stable. That was my mantra of self-deception. It was how I stayed in denial of the complexity and dysfunction that had engulfed me.”
― M. Wakefield, Narcissistic Family Dynamics: Collected Essays

“To blame me in the past is a very future me thing to do. But what am I supposed to do, scapegoat someone else for my mistakes? Somebody needs to be held accountable, and it certainly won’t be the version of me in that moment.”
― Jarod Kintz, The Lewis and Clark of The Ozarks

“It wasn't true, the evidence was faked, but the odd thing is that, whether it s true or not, the consequences are the same: one large group of human beings or another turned out to be triple-distilled sons-of-bitches, which proves that we all have it in us. Whether the Communists staged a diabolical lie or the Americans sowed plague in China, the one thing that matters is that, as a man, you're in the gutter, Colonel Babcock.”
― Romain Gary, The Roots of Heaven

“Having scanned the faces of the spectators, Andre mounted the wagon, stood on the coffin, removed his hat, and lowered his shirt collar. "It will be but a momentary pang,' Dr. James Thacher heard him say. Seizing the noose, Andre brought it over his head, tied a knot under his left ear, and placed a handkerchief over his eyes. When asked for his last words, the British officer raised his handkerchief. 'I pray you to bear me witness that I meet my fate like a brave man.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart , Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married

“He who acts like sheep shall be a scapegoat.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“I was chosen as the scapegoat. For a long time, I was sure something was wrong with me. Why else would they choose me as the scapegoat? I now realize the truth. Scapegoats aren’t the bad family members. We are the dangerous family members. Dangerous means not conforming, speaking up, standing up and fighting back. The scapegoats must not be considered credible by anyone else. This is the family’s top priority. They will protect the family’s reputation by destroying the scapegoat who is trying to tell the truth. I was the scapegoat because I was the threat. That’s how it works.”
― Elisabeth Corey

“imagine a world, however, where coin tosses could not be repeated and there was no way of knowing weather a particular coin toss involved either a scrupulously fair coin, or one that was double-header, or double-tailed. this would represent a world that was more than just risky, it would be deeply uncertain. imagine that all decisions in this world were governed by this fundamentally uncertain coin tosses, on an entirely random basis. some people may do very well, where as others may fail very badly indeed. both the winners and the losers might then be tempted to form their own narratives to explain their successes and failures, the winners extolling their imaginary skills, the losers blaming the winners for their imaginary exploitation.”
― Stephen D. King, Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History

“We heal the past by living in the present and visioning the future we deserve.”
― Anthon St. Maarten