I have never met and do not know Pete Carroll, the longtime NFL coach of the Seattle Seahawks, but based on seeing him on the sidelines wearing either a grimace or a scowl on his face and giving off an overall aggrieved and unpleasant demeanor, I have developed a highly irrational and completely unfounded dislike for this man that extends to his team, the Seahawks.
The reward for me is entertainment value as I now have a negative rooting interest whenever I watch Carroll’s Seahawks play. I’m glad if they lose and, if their loss is a result of a bad coaching decision, then it’s an emotional jackpot for me.
I am reasonably sure that if I had any interaction with Pete Carroll other than watching him on TV, my carefully constructed and absurd dislike for him would be destroyed. He would then be flesh and blood to me, a three dimensional human with both virtues and flaws. Given Carroll’s success and long tenure as an NFL Coach, a job with incredibly high stakes and great pressure, he must have some outstanding characteristics as a leader.
In addition to entertainment, on a deeper level, I believe my dislike of Pete Carroll is a displacement, a release, of more challenging frustrations. I might read about a terrifying tragedy involving people I don’t know and about which I have no agency just as I have no agency in how the Seahawks perform. The recent story of a six year old in Virginia who shot a teacher comes to mind. I’d rather root against Pete Carroll than think about that horrible story.
This leads me to the ancient concept of the “scapegoat.” As recorded in the Torah, the ancient Israelites performed a Yom Kippur rite where they would choose by lot one of two goats as the “goat of Azazel,” who would be released into the wilderness (likely the desert) and carry away with it the sins of the community. This goat “escaped,” hence the term scapegoat. (The other goat was sacrificed so it was not a great day to be a goat.)
Azazel was either an evil place or, more likely, an evil spirit. A demon.
To heap all the sins of a community on a goat is the ultimate displacement of human angst over the failings of a community as well as angst over each individual’s failings whether they were sins actively committed or sins of failing to stop the sins of others. The use of a scapegoat, which undoubtedly predates the Israelite practice of a goat for Azazel, is one of the most prevalent and natural human tendencies. It is an attempt to deal with the awful pain of knowing both one’s own inevitable failings and the failings of the world we live in.
But sometimes there is no convenient scapegoat. Who do we blame when a six year old shoots their teacher? The parents, the child, gun laws, all of the above? It’s far easier on us when we can blame a single individual for a tragedy. “Society is to blame” is the emptiest and least satisfying of phrases, even when it is the best of all the other bad blaming alternatives.
So, we gravitate towards individual monsters whenever we can find them to explain tragedies or to explain what we see as wrong with the world. Sometimes the monster is conveniently available and plays the part in a perfectly evil way. Hitler may be the best example of this in modern history. Much easier to see Hitler as a sui generis individual, a uniquely evil man, unfathomable and unrepeatable than to consider a book like “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” that describes the extent of the eager cooperation necessary among the German population that was a condition precedent to carrying out the Holocaust.
Vladimir Putin is today’s monster. The carnage in Ukraine, we all believe, is a result of Putin’s decisions and actions. But, unquestionably, there will be histories of the war that will show Putin did not and could not have acted alone.
It’s not hard to think of a Hitler or a Putin as a monster. And there is a galvanizing cohesion when practically everyone in a particular society can agree who the responsible monster is. We can see this sometimes at the family level when a particular relative, usually one who has acted poorly and may have left the family fold, is held up by every other family member as an object of common scorn. This forms a basis, an ugly basis, but a basis still, of family unity.
American politics has been a source of convenient monsters, especially in times when there is not a threatening monster abroad. The surveys of just how poorly Republicans and Democrats think of one another is an obvious example of creating outsized monsters. The “derangement syndrome” against presidents of opposing parties that started with George Bush in modern times has continued unabated.
For all the gnashing of teeth about American political disunity, I’d rather see that derangement syndrome phenomenon than a Civil War over slavery or a Hitler or the threat of Communism and a Cold War whose mechanism to prevent nuclear Armageddon was Mutual Assured Destruction.
Finally, I predict Pete Carroll and his Seahawks will be defeated handily by the 49ers this weekend. And I will enjoy watching it.
Hard to like this one as a Seahawks and Pete Carroll fan (who actually doesn’t give a rip about football 95% of the time). I did not like Carroll at USC, but when he came to the Hawks I really came to appreciate his unrelentingly positive outlook and the enthusiasm he shares with his players. Funny, isn’t it, how one’s bad guy can become their good guy? I wonder what you’d say about those scapegoats we change our minds about?
Scapegoating, as you pointed out, is both an ancient and a systemic practice. Now as then, the permissiveness and acceptance of the community validates the practice. We as members of the human community, hold ourselves accountable for what each of us could have done. Easier to absolve ourselves of blame by heaping the responsibility on someone other person or group. We're all responsible for the 6 yr old deliberately shooting his teacher: from a social permissiveness of gun culture to the dissuasion of emotional self-regulation to an overall lack of empathy. The question I find myself asking in response to this lack of accountability in human culture is: why have we never decided that self-accountability is important enough to the function of society that we codify it in systemic practice? "Honesty is the best policy" is perhaps the closest we get in American culture, but as George Santos demonstrates, that is merely a suggestion that doesn't prevent him from taking a leadership role in our country's policy-making.