The human mind is an expert of whitewashing itself of all its flaws and presenting itself as a blameless genius, but in order to be this blameless genius, it has to project its own failures, faults, and mistakes outward — onto others. The ego is always playing the blaming game and is always in the search of a scapegoat, someone to bear the burden of its fault. The biblical story of Adam and Eve gave us a perfect example of the blaming game. After disobeying God, instead of facing the reality that they had failed God, both Adam and Eve became willing participants in the blaming game. When God confronted Adam about his sin; the first thing that came to his mind was to blame his wife, ” the woman you put here with me — she gave me some of the fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” And Eve in returned blamed the serpent, Saying ” the serpent deceived me and I ate.” By blaming his wife, Adam placed the burden of his own weakness upon her shoulders. Feeling both the weight of blame and failure upon her shoulders, Eve scapegoated and shifted her burden onto the infamous serpent. This is more than just some old biblical story, it’s ingrained in human nature to find our own faults within the lives and deeds of others. Self-honesty is one of mankind weakest qualities, yet it’s the light that guides us through our own self-deceptive blindness and brings us face to face with our own flaws. But sometimes it’s easier for us to accept the lie about our perfection than to face and fix the flaws of our imperfections. And as Jame Baldwin once said, ” You cannot fix what you cannot face.”
The ego of humanity had shattered the mirror of self-honesty, which caused us to be caught up in the cycle of reliving the same mistakes and scapegoating others for them. Religion is known for this, it tries to whitewash the soul of humanity by blaming the elusive and undetectable being that they called the devil for the evil of the world and for tempting us into doing wrongs. In reality, the devil did not possess us to do with any of the egregious and evil actions throughout the history of mankind, and we were not possessed by the devil while we were doing such acts. Every good and bad deed that has ever been done, came from our own human nature. But in order for us to continue touting that we were made in the image of God, we have to blame the serpent … the devil for deceiving us into doing these wrongful acts. And then there are the demagogic politicians that are always finding a group of people to blame for the unfulfillment of their utopian vision of society. They’ve blamed black people for the decadence of society, and the native Americans for being an obstacle that had stood in the path of their manifest destiny. And recently they’ve thrown the stigma of criminality upon the backs of Mexican immigrant workers while stirring up the public into believing that these immigrant workers are to be blamed for the lack of good jobs in society; not their failed economic policies. The blaming game is an admission that we’re not willing to analyze and rectify our failures and mistakes in life, and it also indicates that we’re not prepared to welcome success into our lives. Failures and mistakes are two of the greatest teachers the world had ever known, our ancestors had learned to re-engineer them into the blueprint for success. They’re the embryonic steps that we have to take before we can embrace the desirous success we seek in life. And even though a child’s first, second, and third attempts at walking had failed, it was these failing attempts that taught and prepared the child to walk and then eventually to run. Even the Wright brother’s attempts of flying the first plane had failed repeatedly before the first plane met the sky. But if we don’t fix the mistakes and failures we’ve made in life, success would only be a mental fantasy that we can only imagine within our minds.
VoiceOfAnOutlier 