The Psychology of Blame
How Strongmen Turn Explanation into Action
One of the Strongman’s greatest tells is blame. He doesn’t just tell you what’s wrong. He explains, in vivid detail, exactly who is responsible. He makes difficult, abstract issues simple and personal. He replaces uncertainty with a clear, visible target.
Other politicians speak in the language of systems. They talk about structural pressures, unintended consequences, and the limits of control. They warn against rushing to judgment. The Strongman names names, points fingers, and promises consequences. He shows you the monster, then casts himself as the dragon-slayer.
This pattern repeats across history for a simple reason: it works.
Not because it solves problems—scapegoating rarely does. Because it transforms confusion into clarity and frustration into purpose. It gives the defeated someone to blame and the demoralized a reason to act.
This is not a breakdown in political thinking. It’s a deliberate and highly effective mechanism used to gain power.
The Chain That Drives Strongman Politics
1. Explanation: Making a Complex World Simple
Humans have always lived at the mercy of forces they cannot understand. They have always reached for explanations to make the world feel less random and threatening. Disease, famine, and death were once attributed to spirits, curses, and unseen malevolent forces. We dealt with those ills by chanting prayers or burning witches.
Today, most people dismiss those explanations out of hand. We believe in facts and formulas, not ghouls and goblins. But for most of us, those facts remain just as opaque as misfortune once was to our ancestors. Only a few truly understand the mathematics behind an economic crash or the epidemiology of a lethal disease.
When we’re faced with a crisis, we seek clarity. We want to know what is happening and why. Those answers are not always readily available. Sometimes they are not available at all. Strongmen give us those answers. They define the problem and provide a solution. They bring us our witch and provide the kindling.
2. Blame: Identifying the Enemy
Science is not trusted, it is measured and verified by experimentation and research. But in moments of crisis, that distinction begins to blur. As fear rises, people look not just for explanations, but for certainty—and for someone to hold accountable.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, that shift became visible. As the death toll climbed, many people embraced the language of “trusting the science,” by which they meant trusting specific authorities and institutions. Doubt was no longer seen as disagreement, but as a threat.
In January 2022, during the COVID lockdowns, a Rasmussen poll found that:
59% favored confining vaccine resisters to their homes except for emergencies
55% supported fines for those who refused vaccination
48% supported penalties for publicly questioning vaccine efficacy
45% supported placing vaccine resisters in internment camps
29% supported removing children from unvaccinated parents
Fear was redirected. The threat was no longer just the virus, but the people seen as enabling it.
This is how blame takes shape. Anxiety looks for a target. Uncertainty demands responsibility. After a group is identified as the cause, punishment begins to feel not only justified, but necessary.
3. Action: Justifying Power and Control
Once blame takes hold, institutions move to enforce it. During the COVID-19 pandemic, government officials pressured social media companies to deplatform dissenting voices, including credentialed experts who challenged the prevailing approach.
What began as a public health response became a broader effort to define acceptable belief—and to marginalize those who stepped outside it.
You might think their actions were justified in the face of a crisis. You might think their response was a calculated attempt to gain power at the expense of our civil liberties. Neither answer is wrong, but neither is completely right.
World War I claimed an estimated 16 million lives. 1918’s “Spanish flu” epidemic killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide. Doctors and epidemiologists had reason to believe COVID would be as deadly or deadlier. They acted decisively and without the benefit of hindsight.
Leaders can’t wait for perfect information when lives are at stake. They act quickly, with incomplete data and uncertain outcomes. But that urgency comes at a cost. Decisions made under pressure are shaped as much by fear as by facts.
When knowledge is limited and anxiety is high, action does not just solve problems. It amplifies the assumptions behind them. The leader’s fears cascade outward, shaping the perceptions of a public that understands less and feels more.
As fear spreads, people begin to search not just for answers, but for someone to blame. The crowd hardens into something more unified, more certain, and more dangerous. It becomes a mob.
Scapegoating: The Shortcut to Emotional Clarity
Blame is the engine that fuels the Strongman. It is not enough for him to offer solutions—he must also provide enemies. His speeches must leave his audience feeling both protected and threatened.
The Strongman tells his followers that they face real problems, dangerous problems, lethal problems. Then he gives those problems a face. He names the enemy—and makes action feel inevitable.
Economic and political systems are complex and probabilistic. Expert explanations are technical and uncertain. Predictions are imperfect and revised frequently. Both the structures and the experts are incomprehensible to most of us.
By contrast, scapegoats are easily understood. You have bad people doing bad things. You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in Political Science to blame a crisis on the Jews, the Communists, the Fascists, the Illuminati, the Satanic Pedophiles. Scapegoating makes complex problems simple. Their answers may be dead wrong, but they’re satisfying.
The targets vary widely, but there’s always one certainty: the scapegoat is Not Like Us. He does not share our political views, our religious beliefs, our ethnicity, our culture. We cannot understand him, and that means we cannot trust him.
Carl Jung said that the Shadow is “the thing a person has no wish to be.” It is also the thing we fear that we are. It makes us call for tyranny to protect against tyranny. It makes us certain a man given power will become a monster because we know that power would make us monstrous. It drives us to fight against it, even as it grows within us.
The scapegoat frees us from our Shadow by becoming it. We no longer have to question our shortcomings and our less savory character traits. We simply project them onto somebody else. To paraphrase Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and are relieved that he isn’t us.”
Moral Clarity: Turning Politics Into Good vs Evil
We want to be good people—or at least to feel like good people. One of the easiest ways to get there is by comparing ourselves to bad people. We may have our flaws, but at least we’re better than them.
The Strongman begins with flattery. You are good. You are strong. You are the heirs to something noble. Then he introduces the villains. You are being held back by people who hate you. People who undermine you. People who don’t belong.
Put them back in their place and everything will improve. Your virtues are yours. Your failures are not. They belong to them.
The Strongman creates a world of heroes and villains. It is a story we already know. For generations, our culture has told us that the good guy wins in the end—whether in the form of the lone cowboy or the caped superhero. The details change, but the structure remains the same.
Convince people that they are the hero, and the rest follows. Victory is not just possible, it feels inevitable. And if the outcome is certain, then the struggle itself is proof of righteousness.
Moral certainty eliminates doubt. You no longer have to struggle with internal contradictions. You’re part of a Manichaean struggle between Good and Evil, and there’s no doubt as to which side you support.
You no longer have to consider your opponent’s motivations or look for common ground. You know they’re evil, and that’s why they do evil things. Accept that, and everything else becomes clear. Question that and your world becomes lonelier and more complicated.
Being good is a struggle. The Strongman makes it easy. All you have to do is believe. Loyalty becomes the highest virtue, and, ultimately, the one that justifies any vice.
The Emotional Payoff of Blame
Blame works because it feels good. There’s no more uncertainty, no more agonizing about why things are happening or who is responsible. The world becomes clear, certain, understandable, and morally settled.
Blame also gives you purpose. You no longer sit passively, hoping that things will change. You become an active agent. You know who you are, and you know who they are. You know what must be done. And you know why it is justified.
That certainty keeps the Strongman’s followers emotionally invested. The Cause is no longer a political belief—it’s a key pillar of your identity. To deny the Cause is to deny yourself. It is to admit that you were duped and, worse, that you are not who you thought you were.
Ongoing conflict further drives that engagement. Your enemy’s perfidy keeps you in a constant state of emergency. There’s no time for doubt when the devil is at your door. And there’s no time to ask difficult questions about the only person who has provided a possible solution.
Once you’ve accepted the accusations, the solutions follow logically. The Strongman who recognizes the problem becomes the only one who can fix it. Where other politicians offer slogans, he offers targets. And amidst a constant stream of villains, nobody has the time, or the inclination, to question their heroes.
Breaking the Cycle
We’ve seen how Strongmen use enemies to attract followers. The harder question is how to resist the pull.
The Strongman offers something seductive: simplicity. He gives us a world of heroes and villains, where everything is clear and nothing is uncertain. We no longer have to struggle with nuance or ambiguity.
But the real world is messy, complex, and often unclear. The Strongman doesn’t resolve that complexity. He replaces explanation with blame. He gives you a who, but he will never give you a why.
Systems are difficult to understand and often feel impenetrable. But they are the foundation of our reality. When we shift our focus from systems to individuals, we trade understanding for comfort. We reject medicine in favor of evil spirits. And when it comes to curing infections, exorcisms are less effective than antibiotics.
Understanding is harder than blame. But it is the only cure.