Dr. Ashwani Kumar
ashwani.e17761@cumail.in
Every society must find ways to explain failure. When effort does not translate into success, individuals and communities search for meanings that can make uncertainty bearable. In this process, blame emerges not merely as a moral reaction but as a defence mechanism. Often dismissed as a sign of weakness or irresponsibility, blame is in fact deeply embedded in the structure of social life. It functions both as a source of resilience and as a trigger of conflict, revealing how societies negotiate responsibility, hope, and disappointment.
Modern societies strongly emphasise individual responsibility. People are encouraged to believe that success and failure are direct outcomes of personal effort, discipline, and talent. This belief reflects the ideology of meritocracy, which promises that hard work will inevitably lead to reward. Yet lived experience constantly contradicts this narrative. Economic inequalities, structural barriers, unpredictable events, and sheer chance frequently shape outcomes in ways that individual effort cannot control. When such contradictions become overwhelming, individuals often turn to what may be called a “blame bin”: a symbolic space where failure is deposited so that life can continue without psychological collapse.
Blame, in this sense, is not always destructive. It can serve a stabilising unit. By attributing failure to destiny, circumstances, timing, or impersonal forces, individuals protect themselves from debilitating self-condemnation. This form of blame does not deny responsibility altogether; rather, it prevents failure from becoming a permanent judgment on personal worth. It allows people to endure disappointment without surrendering hope and to attempt again rather than withdraw from life. Here, blame becomes an instrument of survival, preserving emotional balance in a world where outcomes are uncertain and promises are often inflated.
Traditional Indian village life offers a vivid illustration of this dynamic. Agricultural failure, illness, or economic hardship were commonly explained through ideas such as kismat (destiny), divine will, or seasonal imbalance. From a modern rationalist perspective, such explanations may appear irrational or fatalistic. Yet they performed an important social function. By externalising failure, individuals avoided crippling guilt and despair. They did not abandon effort; crops were sown again, rituals performed, and life resumed with renewed determination. In this context, blame did not undermine social cohesion. Instead, it absorbed uncertainty and enabled communities to endure repeated adversity without losing collective stability.
However, blame does not always remain impersonal. A more destructive form emerges when blame is personalised and directed at specific individuals or groups. In this shift, failure ceases to be an abstract condition and becomes a moral accusation. The same village societies that once attributed misfortune to destiny have also, at times, attributed it to black magic, malicious intent, or conspiracies. In such cases, suspicion falls upon neighbours, widows, marginalised individuals, or social outsiders. The blame bin is no longer symbolic; it becomes embodied in another person. What once served as a coping mechanism now generates exclusion, violence, and enduring social divisions.
This transformation reveals the dual nature of blame. When blame remains abstract and impersonal, it can preserve dignity and sustain the will to continue. When it becomes rigid, personalised, and moralised, it converts disappointment into hostility and produces conflict. Modern societies, despite their claims of rationality, continue to oscillate between these tendencies. Individuals are encouraged to internalise failure completely, often leading to burnout, anxiety, and despair, while public discourse increasingly directs frustration toward migrants, minorities, and imagined internal enemies. In both cases, deeper structural causes of failure-economic inequality, political decisions, and institutional breakdowns-remain largely unexamined.
The persistence of blame in contemporary life is not accidental. It reflects a deeper social necessity. Societies cannot function if failure is experienced as absolute meaninglessness or unbearable injustice. Blame provides narratives that make failure intelligible, even when those narratives are imperfect or distorted. Yet the way blame is organised matters profoundly. When societies encourage individuals to bear the entire burden of failure, they produce fragile subjects overwhelmed by self-doubt. When societies normalise scapegoating, they produce fractured communities haunted by suspicion and resentment.
Understanding blame as a social phenomenon rather than merely a moral flaw allows for a more humane conception of responsibility.
Responsibility does not mean immediate self-condemnation, nor does it justify the persecution of others. It begins with the capacity to endure failure without psychological collapse or social hostility. Only after such stabilisation can genuine reflection and accountability emerge. The question, therefore, is not whether blame should exist, but how it should be structured. In a world marked by uncertainty, inequality, and inflated promises, blame is unavoidable. The challenge lies in shaping it in ways that sustain resilience rather than resentment, and hope rather than hostility. How societies organise blame may ultimately determine whether failure becomes a source of renewal or a pathway to rupture.
(The author is Assistant Professor at UILS Chandigarh University, Punjab)
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