Rory Sutherland's Blog

Rory Sutherland

I was reading An Intimate History of Humanity the other day. And was struck by a marvellous sentence along the lines that "nothing distorts human thinking more than the search for a scapegoat."

This got me thinking. For it seems to me that there is one unfailing rule that pertains the world over: if you really want to mess up a country - or a region - all you need do is give that country someone else on whom to lay all blame for any misfortune that befalls them.

Or, put another way, the world really divides into three types of people: those who believe the glass is half full, those who believe it's half empty, and those who believe that the only reason there is any liquid in the glass at all is because the Americans have pissed in it.

(You can add a little variety by attributing some of the piss to the Israelis and the British as well).

Inter-war Germany, check. The Balkans, check. The Middle-East, check. pre-1990 Ireland, check. Africa, check. The failure of South Africa to criticize Zimbabwe, check. Contemporary Scotland, check. The failure to slow AIDS in Africa, check. All of them cases where someone else got to shoulder the blame.

It is never difficult to propogate this notion, either. Any regime will eagerly connive with you in the pretence that national misfortunes can be laid at the door of some external power, as it handily explains away their own failings, while maintaining the solidarity of the populus against the perceived threat.

Generally the BBC will do a good deal of your work for you too, as it steadfastly maintains the pretence that white Anglo-Saxon Christians are responsible for all the world's ills: with indulgences for your failings being allocated in proportion to the degree to which you practice anti-Americanism, socialism, non-Judeo-Christian religions or general brownness.  

Now I should make clear here that I am passing no judgment on whether the blame is justified or not. Merely that the act of scapegoating is catastrophic for any country. Countries such as India seem to benefit from a fairly sane approach to their colonial past (not banning cricket or tearing up the railways); Mandela's great achievement was surely to avoid some of the wasted energy of recrimination.

So here's my suggestion for the Sorrell foundation. Large posters in all the benighted areas of the world simply reading "You're crap and it's all your fault."

In bomb craters in Sadr City you'd run posters reading "If you were Lutherans, this would be an IKEA". And in Palestine the simple message "If you'd spent as much time working as you did wandering through the streets shouting, you could buy Israel by now."

In truth I think the copy and media buying needs a bit of work. But the core strategy is already there.