Why you can't keep blaming others for your problems

There is a pattern of behaviour that we are all guilty of, which can be summarised by the following: 'When we recognise that our lives are not working out for us, blame others'.

‘Others’ could be the boss, our parents, our friends, the government or other others. Whoever we choose in the moment in question, what is vital is that this choice conforms to a public attitude i.e. we will choose to blame someone who, it is considered, is socially acceptable to blame. For example, there are cultures where bosses are not blamed by employees for problems encountered at work (can you believe it?!). The reason this behaviour follows a public attitude is because it only serves to explain away our problems to others and doesn't need to be the truth as (because everyone would agree) no-one is then going to say, 'that's nonsense'.

The array of choices we have as to who to blame for our problems raises a question; if bosses for, instance, are (thought to be) people who make us fail, why aren't they universally blamed. Why are bosses respected in some cultures but despised in others? In some countries it is a cultural taboo to blame your parents but in other countries it isn't (there are countries where children even take their parents to court). How can this be? If it were true that parents are blameless in a particular society, this would produce uniquely self-assured people. But instead, it is evident that around the world we all have similar problems.

So! we are establishing that the people we blame are not the real cause of our problems; they are just the convenient scapegoat we, with our societies, use to explain why we have the problems that we do.

Taking this further, why is it that we don't place the blame where it really lies? Aside from times when someone is clearly at fault, having directly caused you/or someone else to fail in some way, there are times when our reasons for failure are more like excuses. For instance, you will likely have experienced someone you know talking about their problems, and the reasons they come up with for their problems seem weak to you or you've heard it all before or you simply can't help feeling they aren't doing enough themselves to resolve things.

Well then, if others are capable of assigning blame where it isn’t due (with often convoluted or illogical reasoning) then so must you. And yet our tendency is to easily see the flaws in others, but not in ourselves. Which is to say we lack the awareness to accurately see what is going on in our lives. Instead, all we sense is that we are stressed because our lives aren’t going the way we would like and because we can't find out why this is - we turn to society and who it deems to be the perfect scapegoat, to provide the wrongdoer. To summarise, this pattern of behaviour comes into effect when we can't find the reasons for our problems and need a way to explain it to ourselves and others to relieve our stress and confusion.

Shall we leave it here?

We’ve reached a tidy little conclusion and a convenient point where, as is often the case in life, we can say 'Oh yes I see, why that is...how interesting…' and then not ask anymore of ourselves and turn our attention to something else.

Why we prefer to turn our attention to something else is the same reason why we can't see who really is to blame for the problems in our lives.

So then – crunch point…who is to blame?!

Ourselves dummy!

The reason we scratch our heads, claiming that we don't know who is really to blame is because we don't want to know and the reason we don't want to recognise who it is, is because it is shameful or painful for us to acknowledge. Otherwise why hide from it?

We are content to lose ourselves whenever we get close to finding out the true origin of our stresses in avoidance of this shame/pain. This also explains our anger when friends or relatives point out the weak logic in our excuses for not solving our problems.

If you want to know why you have the problems that you do, you have to stop blaming others (even if everyone else is doing it). To solve your problems, start by asking yourself questions and then find honest answers to those questions.

Stop looking for scapegoats and start looking at your thinking, it will change your life.

Law of Thinking No. 24 - The Public Attitude Law

The consciousness generates its public attitudes to balance out its stresses between the bearer's (own, family and the surrounding culture(s)) shame events on the one hand, and its (shifting) understanding of what is socially acceptable on the other.