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Blame The Victims
We humans love to pretend it’s all the victim’s fault
One of the glories of the human intellect is its inability to cope with more than one simple concept at a time. As our brains evolved to cope with the relatively basic challenges of living on the African savannah and within the primordial forests of Eurasia, we are adapted to see the world in easy binary terms: good/bad, up/down, black/white, yes/no. Our emotions, which drive the entirety of our behaviors, are likewise adapted for existence within relatively small bands of hunter-gatherers in which the good guys were us and the bad guys were always everyone else.
Our modern complex inter-connected world, naturally, presents us with challenges we are entirely unable to handle. This is especially true when we imagine ourselves to be under threat. The magnificent triumphs of Brexit and Trump, for example, were enabled by the simple expedient of charlatans telling empty-headed people (always the majority of any population anywhere) that wicked foreigners are to blame for everything. The sad fact is that the vast majority of ordinary people will believe whatever they are told by purported authority figures provided the message is wrapped up in a simple soundbite that is easy for their miniscule intellects to encompass.
