HEROES AND SCAPEGOATS

We give too much credit to individual heroes when teams and organizations do things right and place too much blame on individual scapegoats when things go wrong.  This tendency to over-attribute success and failure to individuals can be overcome, but to do so requires focusing on locating and dealing with systemic causes of performance issues. Heroes and scapegoats are constantly held up as examples but that doesn’t seem to change the performance status of the group or team!

A scapegoat is a person or category of people, typically with little power, whom people unfairly blame for their own troubles. A hero is important, his presence electrifies the team, but without the team he is useless. Mahendra Singh Dhoni is perhaps the greatest finisher of a cricket game in crunch situations, but if the other ten players do not contribute their bit even Dhoni is of no impact and we have witnessed this on more than one occasion.

We often feel the relentless drive to elevate a person to godlike status. We search and search until finding a suitable target, then bow down before this supposedly stronger presence, showering him or her with praise and adoration. It can feel really good to be the object of hero worship but understanding the psychology behind the phenomenon makes it much less appealing. Many a good performers, whether sports persons or film stars, have failed to handle their newly found stardom with aplomb and fallen by the way. Left on their own, undisturbed by the burden of expectation, they may have performed better and longer! Every time a cricketer in India gives a good all round performance he is hailed as the next Kapil Dev! Needless to say, none till date have succeeded in filling those big shoes. Hero worship often kills the hero but we continue with our favourite pastime of discovering newer heroes and heroines and nipping bright talents in the bud.

Everyone has heroes; someone that they can look up to or someone similar to what they aspire to be. There’s nothing bad about having heroes. In fact, it's rather helpful in getting through life when you do have heroes. It just becomes a problem when having that hero consumes everything in your life and that person gets put up onto a pedestal that they didn’t even ask for. Hero worship can completely consume and possibly destroy someone’s life if they aren't careful.

When someone is consumed by hero worshiping, it can completely alter that person’s life. They can become blind to any faults that their hero might have and can lack individuality because they’re trying so hard to be like their hero. Adding a celebrity to the mix just makes it more complicated, especially when you worship the ground that they walk on and threaten people who don't view them the same way that you do. This is something which we routinely see in politics as polarized viewpoints clash openly as the heroes who symbolize them.

Hero worship is not really about the hero. The same people who worship you one day will discard you the next, moving on to a new entity that does a better job filling the role. If you had not been the chosen one someone else would have been. This idea applies whether we are thinking in the metaphysical context of deities, the social context of fame, or the intimate context of personal relationships.

The reason to resist the temptation to accept the God like role is that the freedom of thought and behavior becomes extremely limited. It stops being okay to make any mistakes or to admit ignorance. If you buy in to what is said and thought about you, then conflict will arise between who you really are as a human being and the unrealistic image you are trying to fulfill. You will attempt to cover up or minimize all your shortcomings and foibles until finally being exposed for the fraud you are, at which point the person or people who have put you up on the pedestal can toss you aside with a clean conscience, feeling defrauded, even though they were the ones who unfairly put you up there in the first place for their own psychological needs. If the sequence of events do not sound familiar to you then just think of ‘the king of good times’!

The people placing a hero on a pedestal are parasites. For whatever reason they feel incapable of doing the hard work of self-actualization themselves, so they take the shortcut of basking in the glow of the hero’s presence instead. They latch on to him/her, and unconsciously believe that this is enough, that they will be able to find fulfillment by being a small part of what the hero or the heroine excels in. They worship the hero, and all they ask in return is that he/she be perfect at all times, living up to the impossible standard they have set for him/her without fail.

There is however another end of this spectrum. Just as a hero is the excuse and the perceived reason of all our happiness, a scapegoat is responsible for all that has gone wrong in our life. The act of scapegoating includes blaming, minimizing accomplishments, put-downs, criticisms, exploitations of the scapegoat’s greatest fears, manipulation and neglect. This strangely, like hero worshipping has a historical perspective. The Bible describes the Old Testament practice of “placing” the sins on a goat and then sending the goat away. The goat bears the sins of the people . . . . and then, disappears.

Scapegoating is seen everywhere – in families, in classes and in offices. Dysfunctional/Abusive families who practice scapegoating will choose one child to blame for all of life’s problems. This child (or teen or adult child) typically is more sensitive and vulnerable. He or she may be unable to abide by the abuse that characterizes the family and home life and the family recognizes this. Parents who scapegoat their child do so, purposefully, out of fear that this child will blab. Scapegoating is usually due to having one parent with a personality disorder, although an entire family can “bond” by scapegoating one member of a family.

The scapegoated child believes that he or she is the reason that things are miserable in the family atmosphere. Obviously, it is a form of abuse that over-laps with other forms of abuse. The family scapegoat grows into a very insecure adult who struggles with intimate relationships. The victim does not normally ask for anything he/she needs; she assumes her needs are not important yet, ironically, everyone else’s are. He/She mutes his/her own desires and dreams, believing that he/she does not need to be loved, taken care of or encouraged . . . . believing that he/she does not deserve this. He/She is a “doer”, desperately attempting to win some love but panics at the idea of abandonment.

A class of children or adolescents too can have an identifiable scapegoat; the poor guy held responsible for all that goes wrong. Offices and work places too have them. They are useful to blame for follies which are not their own but a dysfunctional bunch feels absolved by pointing fingers at them. There are two ways of correcting a thing which has gone wrong – the difficult one would be “there is a problem, let’s fix it” and the easier one being “we have got a problem, someone is screwing up, let’s find him and beat him up”. The easier option, looking for a scapegoat, unfortunately does not bring about improvement. Building and sustaining great systems is infinitely more important than hiring and nurturing great individuals. Heroes are useful and important, but never more than the system and the institution.

And it is not unusual to find a hero turn into a scapegoat if he/she fails to keep up to the promises others expected of him/her even though he/she never actually made them!