[Zardoz]

Good blogger's blurb on how we've all turned into a whimpering pack of chickenshit cowards who insist that nothing is our fault. Everything bad that happens to us is all because of Dark Forces (Illuminati, NWO, Neocons, Zionists, Islamo-Fascists, Baby Boomers) out there conspiring against us. Add Peak Courage to the list of resources we're running out of:

Searching for scapegoats

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '.')..Still, it’s not part of the standard rhetoric of economic crisis to encourage people to contemplate their own folly, and so we’ve already started to see claims that the great mortgage bubble and bust was deliberately engineered. There’s a twist, though, because the usual rhetoric of the past – the notion that the motive behind all this deviousness is pure greed – has been shouldered aside by the claim that the boom and bust were engineered to turn Americans into the debt slaves of a totalitarian state under the polymorphous banner of the New World Order.

That’s a claim worth noticing, not least because every significant crisis of the last dozen years or so has been interpreted by many of the same people in exactly the same way. It’s worth noticing as well because, like so much of what now passes for left-wing thought, this claim was pioneered by the John Birch Society, for many decades the cutting edge of the American extreme right. The phrase “new world order” itself was coined by the Society’s founder Robert Welch in 1972, as part of a florid system of conspiracy theory that blamed US corporations and the Trilateral Commission for everything Welch thought was wrong with the world. The ease with which these ideas of the far right were imported lock, stock and barrel by the other end of the political spectrum after the implosion of the New Left at the end of the 1960s is one of the richer ironies of recent cultural history.

Yet there’s another point worth noticing here, and that’s the extent to which the rhetoric of conspiracy has become a convenient way to evade any suggestion of personal responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions...

...I’m no fan of the Bush administration – longtime readers of this blog know that I consider its energy and environmental policies disastrously misguided – but it seems to me that the effort to paint the leftover Reagan-era bureaucrats and politically naive right-wing intellectuals who run that administration as the modern liberal equivalent of Satan incarnate has less to do with their behavior than with the irruption of a frankly paranoid style of thinking into the American cultural mainstream.

[sjn]

They are us. All these "scapegoats" you will find looking in the mirror. People are behaving as people do, some may like to convince themselves that the individuals that represent our failings are somehow removed from us, but the truth is they are just acting in response to their environment as human beings.