The Scapegoat Theory of Everything

Why we keep searching for villains — and what it would take to build real agency through ownership

Crosspost of my IndyStar column

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I recently was so sick that I forgot there is such a thing as “not sick,” and started to resign myself to the idea that “I will always be sick.” It was a double whammy coming off of a brutal winter with multiple weeks-long stretches where the temperature didn’t even sniff above freezing. I was very surly about these developments.

Sickness and bad weather are particularly vexing because there is no one to blame. They happen to you, but they are not done to you by anyone. We handle bad things a lot better when we can blame someone for them, especially when we feel like we have no control over what’s happening.

Right now, blame is having a moment.

Two Theories of Everything¹

The tech reckoning is in full swing, part of what writer Derek Thompson (quoting an NYU professor) calls “the smartphone theory of everything”—the idea that a huge share of our current societal ills (loneliness, isolation, mental health challenges, declining attention, political polarization) can be traced back to the rise of smartphones and social media.

On the American right, a parallel theory has emerged: call it “the immigration theory of everything.” It was perhaps most vividly captured by a viral post from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s official account, showing an idyllic beach scene with the caption: “America after 100 million deportations.”²

The claim, in various forms, is that immigrants (legal and otherwise) are the driving force behind housing shortages, rising prices, degraded public goods, a stagnant job market, and just about everything else that feels off.

Demonizing people is worse than targeting corporations through legal means, but both “theories of everything” share a similar intellectual strategy: take a complicated, disorienting set of problems and locate a single, identifiable cause.

That move is comforting because naming a cause makes the problem feel understandable, which creates a feeling of control. Scapegoating, in other words, offers the illusion of agency.

A slow erosion of agency

The less control we feel over our lives, the more we look for something to hold responsible, and the 21st century has been one long, slow erosion of that sense of control.

9/11 punctured a deep, almost taken-for-granted belief that we were fundamentally in control of our own destiny and protected from the problems of the rest of the world.

Then came the Great Recession, which left a lingering sense that the most important systems in our lives are both opaque and untouchable; that we don’t really understand them, and even if we did, we couldn’t meaningfully influence them.

Enter the smartphone and social media era, at exactly the moment when our sense of agency is already fraying. On the surface, it offers unprecedented control. We can summon information, entertainment, and connection instantly. We can customize and curate nearly every aspect of our daily lives.

Unfortunately, we all know now that many of those choices are being controlled by systems constantly optimizing and learning how to better capture and direct our attention. It feels like agency, but it is something closer to its simulation.

One of the most talked-about breakthroughs in artificial intelligence right now is “agentic AI”—systems that can autonomously make decisions and carry out complex tasks on our behalf. We have spent decades eroding our own sense of agency, and are now racing to build machines to take on what remains of it.

It is no wonder, then, that this is an age of searching for simple explanations for complex problems, and for someone to blame.

The danger (and appeal) of a simple story

Scapegoats and simple stories offer a comforting mirage of control. If smartphones are the problem, we can regulate them. If immigrants are the problem, we can deport them. In reality, both are far more technically, legally, and politically complicated than that, but a simple story with a clear villain gives us the sense that we are not just passive observers of our own decline.

Technology has reshaped how we relate to each other and to ourselves. Immigration does affect housing markets, labor markets, and public services. These are real forces, and serious people should take them seriously.

But loneliness did not begin with the iPhone. Housing shortages are not just about population growth. Economic struggles are not reducible to immigration alone.

These problems are not monocausal. They are the product of overlapping systems and long-evolving trends that do not lend themselves to a single, clean explanation.

So what do we do with that?

Agency and Ownership

If scapegoating is, at its core, an attempt to reclaim agency, then the real alternative is not just better explanations. It is in cultivating a greater sense of ownership.

Things like more ownership over our work, like through employee owned companies. Or ownership over our communities, through land trusts and publicly held community assets. Or even more ownership over our democracy, by expanding the ways people can participate and influence outcomes, rather than filtering everything through a rigid two-party binary controlled largely by the same set of donors.

This idea is the emotional core of many seemingly disparate debates. Decisions about data centers, or whether local utilities should be acquired by distant private equity firms, aren’t just technical or economic questions. They are questions about ownership— and, ultimately, about agency: who controls our lives?

At a time when both political parties are historically unpopular, it is striking that no one seems to be offering a vision rooted in ownership. That might be because it is a harder story to tell, but it is also the only story we can write together.

Ownership carries with it something scapegoating never can: accountability. When you have a stake, problems are no longer just something being done to you. They are something you are, at least in part, responsible for shaping.

Scapegoating offers the illusion of control. Ownership is the real thing.

1. Some other theories of everything:

The billionaire theory of everything — the idea that extreme wealth concentration is the root cause of most of our problems.

The Critical Theory theory of everything — the idea that systems of power, often framed as white supremacy, explain nearly everything.

The school prayer theory of everything — somewhat memory-holed but held a lot of sway in its time, this is the idea that our problems began when prayer was removed from public schools.

The COVID theory of everything — the idea that much of what we’re experiencing now has its roots in the pandemic and its downstream effects. (the one I’m most sympathetic to)

The “too much government” theory of everything (healthcare edition) — the belief that if government simply got out of the way, markets would resolve scarcity and inefficiency in our healthcare system

The “not enough government” theory of everything (also healthcare) — the belief that more government involvement would fix those same problems.

The “America, f* you” theory of everything — the idea that the country is irredeemably flawed from the start, and that most of what we see today flows from that.

The “America, f* yeah” theory of everything — the idea that the country is fundamentally great, and that most of our problems are either overstated or caused by external forces.

2. I have complicated feelings about this post that I didn’t elaborate on in the column. On one hand, it is disgusting and racist and I certainly am among the 100M threatened. On the other hand, it is so obviously the type of rage-bait edgelording that characterizes most of of Trump II’s social media output. Anger and disgust is what they want to elicit and I’d rather not give them what they want.