The Art of the Blame Game – How Two Entities Master the Tug of War

 

In the grand coliseum of life, the blame game is often and sadly enough, the most cherished sport.

Sometimes it is not even two people. It can be just be the two sides in our own head- the devil and the angel.

Sure, the devil looks great: Damn Lucifer is ripped and witty. (Well, you will forget how great he looks when he told you there is no need for a morning pill because he was in total control. Four weeks later, surprise surprise when you are peeing on that little stick in the morning and seeing those red lines appear!).

No muggle can succeed without a knack for tossing responsibility across the aisle, like a hand grenade lobbed to explode just precisely beneath the next-in-line’s ass. The good news is that he will not make a damn noise when he farts, ever again.

Today, I bring you the tale of two titans in line for the next village head – Bob and Tom– both hell-bent on preserving their pristine reputations while branding each other as the architect of chaos: the modern Thanos (for the Avengers fan) or Moros (for the Greek mythology nerd!).

As the deadline approaches, the blame between Bob and Tom intensifies. It’s almost Shakespearean; if Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” were rewritten as “To be at fault or to blame someone else.”

In Bob’s corner, we hear defences so convoluted they’d make a bootlicker blush. According to Bob, he was but a helpless bystander, caught in a whirlwind of Tom’s previous missteps, albeit 5 or 10 years down the line. Tom, on the other hand, assures you that Bob’s “helplessness” was in fact “calculated sabotage,” a stealthy plot to let Tom’s initiatives falter so that Bob could swoop in later with his “better solutions.”

“There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.” – Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

Bob and Tom would no doubt appreciate Russell’s wisdom. When they’re not blaming each other, they’re busy rewriting history to craft their legacies. After all, why merely avoid blame when you can proclaim yourself the unsung hero of every success and the helpless victim of every failure? In each interview, both turn to well-worn talking points like an actor revisiting a beloved role, laying the groundwork for a memoir that will tell their side of the story.

Meanwhile, you, find yourself cast as extras in this tragicomic and melodramatic tale like ‘Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi’, squinting to make sense of it all. (For the post-2000s generation, it was one of the most popular TV serials during its time, which unfortunately deprived teenagers like me of TV time because your parents would be bingeing on it!).

So, you listen, not quite sure whether to laugh or cry, as blame bounces back and forth like an endless rally in a game you never agreed to play. Damn it, all you wanted was a sip of that great coffee and a toast.

This is just another Saturday for most of us but for some it is a chance to reaffirm the ancient adage that nothing builds popularity like pushing accountability over the fence. As Wilde suggested, perhaps it’s not about getting out of the gutter of blame but rather about finding a way to gaze confidently toward the stars and, ideally, make sure your opponent looks down first.

Though in the end, for the layman, what does it amount to?

You have 2 options most of the time:
Get hit by rock-hard shit that can send you to the emergency room with a brain concussion/intracranial bleed or get hit by a chocolate spread consistency one- the smell will linger on for some days and all it will lead to will be a proper distaste of anything ‘chocolatey’.

Well, shit is shit. Ain’t a simpler way to verbalise it. So you choose your own misery at the end.

“The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.” –The House of the Dead.

Well, in the utopian global village that the Earth is, most of us acknowledge our ‘prisoner status’.
You name your prison- the World Wide Web, rat race, the need for perfection, narcissism, or your brain.
It’s almost as if we all developed the Stockholm syndrome- we just decided to bond with our captor.

Well, escaping from prison is like cancelling a gym membership, they’ve made it as difficult as possible for a reason. So, maybe it’s time to be the next Michael Scofield and find a way out… even if it’s wading through deep shit in a sewer to the lake!