Decoding Scapegoats

Analyzing Blame as a Cultural Story System in 2025

In 2025, scapegoating has returned with new intensity across political and tech domains. This phenomenon, rooted in the ancient ritual of expelling communal sin through a symbolic figure, now plays out through all discourse. Whether directed at immigrants, artificial intelligence, or generational cohorts, the scapegoat functions as a vessel for collective frustration in a time of overlapping crises. The pattern has historical precedent. In the fourteenth century, Jewish communities were blamed for the spread of the Black Death, leading to massacres across Europe. These episodes of scapegoating emerged not from verified causes but from a need for social cohesion through exclusion. Today, similar logics are encoded in linguistic shorthand such as "Deep state," "Woke," and "Marxist," which function as rhetorical devices that transform diffuse unease into targeted condemnation. These terms flatten complexity, recasting reckoning as the deliberate schemes of conspiring elites. What distinguishes this moment from past instances is the extent to which scapegoating reveals an inability to confront complexity. Rather than seeking structural reform or collective imagination, societies often choose to personalize failure. This cultural impulse exposes a critical failure of insight and foresight practices that ought to equip institutions and individuals with the tools to anticipate and adapt to change. Instead, these practices often reproduce the same reactive logics they aim to transcend.

Artificial intelligence has become one of the most prominent scapegoats in the public imagination, routinely blamed for job displacement, rising misinformation, educational degradation and lack of rigor. A 2024 Pew Research study found that a majority of Americans believe AI will exacerbate inequality, a belief that has fueled defensive policymaking and cultural backlash. Tech entrepreneurs and software developers have become caricatures of unchecked ambition, standing in for broader anxieties about automation and economic precarity. Terms from the singularity to enshitification have entered the public lexicon, framing AI as an autonomous force with no human or institution behind it. As in the Luddite response to industrialization in the 1800s, public frustration is displaced onto tools not economic systems. In this context, AI becomes less a technology than a moral symbol, one that condenses widespread fears about loss of purpose.