An Interesting Quote, Blame

I was listening to the series Crash Course World History on Youtube today. There was an episode where John Green says a very interesting quote: "To blame one group is to exonerate all the others and by extension ourselves" (Green, 10:18-10:22). John said this in relation to the history of Slavery. From the Ancient Greeks to the Romans, all the way to the Caliphates slavery has been a system at work. While John was only talking about the transformation of slavery until it eventually became the Atlantic Slave trade this quote is much more powerful than that alone.

To explain acts that seem morally pungent people often look for the reason or logic behind them. They often come in with the idea that the hurt party deserves justice for the crimes against them. This is an altruistic reason that can be the case in situations, but it is not always the case. Justice for the hurt party is not the only reason people are inspired to look into the root of evils.

Many times, humanity does not do an investigation to find the culprit, but instead to prove that they are not the culprit. This investigation of a problem is done in a way to "exonerate" a group. A very human response to seeing or learning of a terrible thing is to make sure that oneself is not to blame for it. This is true not only for the worst injustices but even for small, won't matter once the day is over events. For myself, I have done this. I have done it in situations related to high school teen drama. This is certainly not always the case, and thousands of people every day take risks to help someone else with little thought of the repercussions for themselves, but it does happen.

So much we do is to protect ourselves, and that puts a cloud on examinations into things we see as bad. It is often hard to put something that is done by ourselves or is part of our culture as the cause for something bad. This causes many ideas, people, or groups to be left out of the possible suspects in human malevolence. It is impossible to be unbiased unless the person looking into the moral issue is willing to accept whatever consequences the at blame party deserves in their mind.

With this, the idea that blame is a zero-sum idea must also be put on hold. Someone or something can be at fault, but not be the only fault, with all the blame being most often on not one single thing. The idea that one person or thing should take the blame only protects all those who participated in the evil. Blame is something that's hard in every way except to give. It is easy to blame someone and walk away, but to truly battle with all the injustices in the world one must be ready for the possibility of themselves being the culprit.