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Welcome to Episode 141 of the Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama. And before we get into today's episode, this is one more reminder that the Family Systems Book Study starts next Tuesday, September 28 at 07:00 p.m.. Eastern Daylight Time. This is a free study in which you can go through my book. If you met my family, you'd understand a Family Systems primer, and this will be a way for you to learn how to become a non-anxious presence is led by Dr. Brian Ivory. This is the third session that he's done.

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I will be involved in sessions one and twelve. This is an opportunity to learn and grow as a non-anxious presence. There will be a link in the show notes to join again, it's free. And now without further Ado here is Episode 141, Society Wants a Scapegoat Do We Need One? I am recording this episode from a hotel room in Chicago. We spent the weekend here and one of the things I learned about was the legend of the Chicago Fire. Legend has it that on October 8, 1871, Catherine Kate O'Leary went to milk her cows about 8:30 PM because it was dark, she brought a Lantern with her and one of the cows kicked it over, starting the worst fire in Chicago history.

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The fire rage for three days, killed 300 people, destroyed about 3.3 sq Mi of the city and left over a hundred thousand residence homeless. Kate O'Leary became the scapegoat for the Great Chicago Fire. The idea of a scapegoat has its roots in ancient Near East history. In fact, in the Bible, escape goat is one of two goats and one of those goats is sacrificed. The other is elect be alive and is released into the wilderness, taking with it all the sins and the impurities of the community.

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You can look this concept up in Leviticus chapter 16, verse 21 and 22, where Aaron is instructed how to use a scapegoat for the sake of the Israelites. Now back to Kate O'Leary, she was ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing, but the myth persisted and she was never able to shake the stigma. According to the greatchicagofire.org, there was some evidence that the fire was set by a French terrorist organization, but they write "But Mrs. O' Leary offered a far better scapegoat while she herself may or may not have been at fault. What she represented was a more acceptable cause for the fire than the terrorist organization. Unlike them, she was a familiar and recognizable type who could readily be made to stand for careless building, sloppy conduct, and a shiftless immigrant underclass, blaming her adapted existing anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, and possibly anti-female sentiments to the terrible calamity at hand in a way that was oddly comforting. As a poor, clumsy Irish woman and not a smart enemy of the social order. She was a disempowered, comic stereotype, and the damage she caused massive as it was, could be reassuringly categorized as a result of accident, not conspiracy.

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From the outset, people were interested not in knowing the real Catherine OLeary but in turning her into repository of their presuppositions. She was in her early forties at the time of the fire, sober and hard working in some popular anecdotes and illustration, she was characterized as an aged crony and a drunkard. The Chicago Times while not naming her specifically nor accusing her of setting the fire, deliberately describe Mrs. O'leary as a welfare cheat who, when cut off, vowed revenge." And the question is, what does escape goating have to do with family systems?

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There are two principles at work here, according to family systems. The first is the idea of the emotional triangle. No one knew how the fire started and it spread was due to a variety of factors, including a period of dry weather and the fact that most of Chicago's buildings were made of wood with highly flammable tar or shingle roofs. But it was easier to have a simple answer and blame Kate O'Leary. This leads to the second principle at work, which is the refusal to take responsibility for self.

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Implicit in the idea of a triangle is that we want to blame somebody else for our own discomfort, for our own inability to take responsibility for for self. And what the example of Catherine O'Leary in the Chicago Fire exhibit for us is that people are looking for easy answers. They're looking for simplified answers, and they want to have somebody to blame. This type of triangle can take place for an entire society when they use a group of people or a common enemy to be the scapegoat.

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In America, the first scapegoats were the Native Americans and African slaves. They have remained scapegoats from much of our history, but having one scapegoat doesn't seem to be enough. Throughout our history, we have used immigrant Peoples as scapegoats to avoid taking responsibility for self as a society. Immigrant Peoples from the Irish to the Italian to the Chinese and Japanese to the Mexican, just to name a few, have been playing for economic problems and social ills in our society. This is on top of the base gate coat of Native American and African American people as well as women throughout our history.

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What scapegoating does is it allows society to avoid taking responsibility for its problems by blaming a scapegoat, blaming a class of people or a gender. It is easy then, to not take responsibility for the challenges that face us. And in so doing, what we do is we turn challenges into problems. In fact, there are some who suggest that we cannot be a successful society without having a scapegoat or a common enemy. This type of thinking says that much of the progress of the 20th century was driven by a common enemy typified by fascism in the first half of the 20th century in Germany, Italy, and Japan, and then in the second half of the 20th century, communism, as exemplified by the USSR, was the common enemy.

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There are some who suggest that the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1980s, the end of communism as a major power was a catalyst for the severe political divide in the US. Once communism fell, we had no one to blame but each other. We see the emergence of this divide in the net and our politics becoming even more polarized in the 1990s. This was briefly stemmed by the 911 attacks 20 years ago when terrorism became our common enemy. But even though terrorism is real, it became less pervasive over time, and we went back to blaming each other.

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So the question is, does America or any other nation or culture, for that matter need a scapegoat need a common enemy to thrive? In theory, we don't need a common enemy to thrive. If enough people in the country could self differentiate and lead by taking responsibility for self and not allowing their own anxiety to turn challenges into problems. I believe an entire nation could work together without scapegoating. However, in practice, this is probably not going to be the case. We know that most people struggle to self differentiate even a third of the time.

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This leads society vulnerable to leaders who will appeal to the most base of instincts in the least differentiated. Remember, this is process, not content. The emotional process is appealing to base instincts and furthering the political divide. The content can be on either side of the aisle, and we have seen this evidence where leaders on both sides of the aisle have done this and caused scapegoating in the other side. I believe the best that we can hope for is to be differentiated leaders. In our own context, it is entirely possible for organizations and congregations to work together when leadership is self differentiated so we can all focus on changing the world for the better.

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But our best chance of doing it is by leading organizations or congregations as a non-anxious presence. This is what non-anxious leaders do. So that is it for. Episode 141, a shorter one this time, but I wanted to focus on the idea that we have a hard time functioning without scape goats. Don't forget to connect with me at thenonanxiousleader.com and you can find the show notes here at the thenonanxiousleader.com/141 until next time.

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Thanks and goodbye.