Blame Is A Strategy: Why Blame Isn't Logical, It's Liturgical

You read the headlines. Or maybe you ignore all of them. I’m not here to tell you what they are. I wanted to make this note for myself, and then I realized I should share it too, because I can’t be the only one thinking about this right now.

“Blame” is fascinating word. It’s always involved in political strategies in one way or another. We all know what it feels like it means, but do you know what it actually means or where it comes from?

(I didn’t know, hence, this post)

Blame comes from the old French “blasmer” - which comes from the even-older Latin, “blasphemare,” meaning to blaspheme, or speak ill of the sacred.

Blame is a boundary word. It’s a word for calling something as out of bounds with a causal reason attached to it. If you are, in the Latin sense, speaking against the divine order and calling something unholy, you have crossed the line and gone from the sacred to the profane.

It’s a religious word. You can use it outside of religion, but - that context. I think it’s important to remember the religious context of blame right now.

When blame evolved from meaning just the violation of divine boundaries, and into a social technology for manufacturing consent and action, it didn’t lose the boundaries of belief vibes.

We’re seeing a lot of those belief boundaries in the strategic use of blame right now.

When someone places blame publicly, they’re not just identifying causation, they’re performing a kind of secular blasphemy, declaring something as outside of their acceptable order of beliefs.

Beliefs aren’t just about gods. Dogmatic stuff is everywhere. Blame is - and this feels so obvious to me right now after looking up the etymology - the religious DNA never left the word. That’s what I’m feeling now, maybe more than ever in my life. Every time we blame, we’re drawing some sacred/profane boundary, and we’re much more willing to do it much more casually.

Oh my gods.

So what do we do about it? Beyond asking, as my buddy Ben Hunt always says, “Why am I reading this now,” we have to train ourselves to look for the boundaries. We have to look for what line is being drawn in what sand, and in the case of blame, it’s less of a line and more of a circle. There’s an “in” and an “out” that way.

When you see, “Normal people don’t…” or “Real Americans wouldn’t…” or “A responsible company should…” - you know a sacred circle is being drawn. When it’s followed by, “But X did…” you know who or what is being cast outside of the boundary. You know who or what has been declared blasphemous to the established order.

When it continues to, “Therefore we must…” - the blasphemy has been turned into license for whatever action you wanted to take anyway.

“Action you wanted to take anyway” is the strategic point. It’s the political point. It’s causal weaponization of a belief in something pronounced sacred.

What I want to know, what I want to remember, what I want to share, is - blame doesn’t require proving the causal link between the boundary violation and a proposed solution. Blame only requires the emotional logic of restoration, which isn’t even a technical logic at all, because it’s feelings or vibes or whatever not-precisely-logical argument you can offer up.

That means any time someone declares something sacred is being violated, we have to be careful for any extreme measures offered up as reasonable in the wake of statement.

When it comes to blame, the causal chain isn’t logical, it’s liturgical.

Stay open minded out there. Have big, human, love-oriented beliefs. Keep everything else in the realm of ideas.

You’re seeing the deployment of blame, en masse, right now. This is The Great Ravine. The only way out is to start by asking “What’s the real sacred order being defended here, and what action was already waiting in the wings to be called forth?”

From there, you find your pack, you make sure your beliefs are oriented towards love, and you try to help the rest of humanity understand in any way you can.

You know what love is.

ps. Check out what Ben, me, and our crew have going on at Perscient. Stay tuned for Panoptica - we have an exciting update to make very (very) soon. We need to be able to have better conversations about all of this stuff, this is us doing our part.