You’re a kid, sitting on the floor, watching cartoons on a Saturday morning. The heroes on screen are running away from the bad guys. You see the heroes turn the wrong corner and fall into the villain’s trap and you scream “No, you idiot! Not that way!”
You see a horrible thing happen to a victim as a result of the crime someone else committed against them. Your thoughts instantly jump to how the victim could have responded differently, or avoided the problem. Oh, no, you’re not saying it was their fault! You know it wasn’t not their fault. Of course it wasn’t their fault. But your mind still leaves the obvious point — how wrong the transgressor’s action was — and wanders toward what the victim could have done differently.
Why do we blame the good guys when bad things happen?
Why do we skip past the evil monsters that can’t be reasoned with and blame the people we can relate to?
Why do we victim blame?
For at least a short instance, when we see tragedies on the news — even though we know better.
In this article, I argue that it’s because our brain’s rationalization of horrible events that occur is not an acknowledgement of the horror that occurred. It’s a negotiation.
It occurs, not from a moral frame of mind, but from a practical one.
And so, we think, not about the horrible, unchangeable reality of what happened, but instead about the hypothetical trade-offs that could have taken place to avoid the horrible event we don’t want to face.
Why do we focus on the victims when we should be blaming the monsters who broke them?
Because we can’t negotiate with monsters.
We understand instinctively that the bad guys wouldn’t have acted differently if we could turn back time and have another shot at things. So, the “what if” that our minds are desperately seeking out doesn’t exist when it comes to the villain’s actions.
Only the victim, or the decent people — the humans — around them, would have any incentive to change what happened if they had the chance. So our minds, craving to avoid the unacceptable reality by thinking of ways it could have been avoided or ways to prevent it happening again in the future, hone in on the only person we can negotiate with; the only person who would actually listen to our pleas: the victim.
We victim blame because, when we encounter horrible happenings, we are not acutally assigning moral blame. We are, instead, negotiating with all the beings who were involved — willingly or unwillingly — in a situation, trying to imagine a reality where horrors can be conveniently avoided, if only we are smart enough to make the right choices.
