Scapegoat by Atmosphere came out in 1997 – and it couldn’t be more relevant.

​Everyone needs to calm down, take some accountability, and stop expecting the world to fold to their bidding. It is wild how “playing the victim” has claimed both the left and right, how Karens are given a platform, and how grammar Nazis hinder general discourse.

Keep in-fighting; keep complaining that you have lost control and it is x, y, or z’s fault. You are responsible for you, but as Atmosphere said, “It ain’t me motherfucker, it’s anyone but me.”

That Atmosphere lyric is essentially the anthem for humanity’s favorite pastime: the “blame game.” This State election continues to highlight its popularity. Blame the media, blame the left, the Greens, One Nation, corruption, or “Mali from Marketing” – it doesn’t matter who, as long as it isn’t the person in the mirror. But what’s annoying is this collective mindset isn’t new.

Take the 2008 financial crisis, where executives blamed “unforeseeable math” as if the numbers suddenly became sentient and decided to ruin the world on their own. It’s the same energy as modern city folk who demand green energy for the planet – as long as the wind turbines are built literally anywhere else but their own backyard. “Nuclear will save us!!!” But we can’t do it because an international meltdown and 1950s propaganda means SA is out of the question for a plant. Progress hides behind the veil of a blame game, and we are allowing it too. Remeber, we can blame the sentient math, the rightous view, or the outdated past, that way we don’t actually have to do the hard work of building the future.

​We see the scapegoat in political out-grouping, where both sides treat their own failures as the opposing party’s master plan, and even in the original “scapegoat” ritual, where ancient communities literally pinned their sins on a goat and chased it into the woods rather than, you know, just being better people.

​Thanks to the Trump template, corporations have perfected the art, “externalising” costs by dumping pollution into public rivers so they can keep the profits while we pay for the cleanup. Airlines don’t need to plan for hard times because they have a scapegoat – it’s the economy, the fuel crisis, social shifts. It’s a classic “it ain’t me” moment – taking the reward while making the rest of the world deal with the mess.

​Now, parties like One Nation are riding that wave, telling everyone that it’s someone else’s fault… and people are fucking eating it up. To borrow from H.L. Mencken: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed… by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

​We’re making it too easy to find and pin a scapegoat. And it starts with us – we did all this! Take accountability and, as a society, let’s fix it.