It's funny. Right now I'm not even talking about my personal experiences, but my hands are shaking and I'm finding it hard to type. My body is telling me that what I'm about to talk about is a pretty big deal. It's easy to see how this kind of biofeedback would encourage someone to stop. #scapegoat

http://invisiblymisdiagnosed.com/2026/01/04/4-family-scapegoat-syndrome-with-video/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=jetpack_social

"#Schrödinger's #Scapegoat

Schrödinger devised his famous thought experiment to show that our descriptions of reality become incoherent when applying quantum physics.

In Schrödinger's thought experiment, after the box is opened, there is some probability that the cat might be alive or dead.

What is striking about contemporary #antisemitism is that the incoherence is not an accident. It is preserved. The #Jew is allowed to be white and non-white, dominant and marginal, insider and alien, because the contradiction is useful.

The cat was a thought experiment. The Jew in the accusation is real. And unlike quantum mechanics, where observation collapses the wave function (superposition of states) into a single state, antisemitism keeps both states alive. The Jew remains simultaneously too white and not white enough, too powerful and too rootless."

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-881885

4 signs you might be the #family #scapegoat — and how it ties into all your #relationships

https://www.businessinsider.com/family-scapegoat-signs-effects-2024-1

It's funny. Right now I'm not even talking about my personal experiences, but my hands are shaking and I'm finding it hard to type. My body is telling me that what I'm about to talk about is a pretty big deal. It's easy to see how this kind of biofeedback would encourage someone to stop. #scapegoat

http://invisiblymisdiagnosed.com/2025/12/24/4-family-scapegoat-syndrome-with-video-revisited/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=jetpack_social

A personal account of homelessness, scapegoating, & zero-sum games:

Earlier this year, at 49 years old, I found myself homeless and in emergency/temporary accommodation through my local council. That wasn’t a situation I ever dreamed I’d be in. I don’t fit any of the dismal clichéd tropes of alcoholic, or drug user, or teenage runaway. How could I not manage to pull enough threads of my (previously successful) life together to prevent everything unravelling to such an extent?

What this situation illuminated to me was that homelessness can be caused by a series of difficult, unforeseen, and sometimes plain fucked-up events that an individual could probably handle if it were just one or two or even three concurrent challenges, but, to employ a surfing metaphor, sometimes it can feel as if you just attempted to ride a pretty big wave and after a glorious moment when you thought you’d got your life sorted, you get that sudden lurch in the stomach as you pitch over the board and spectacularly wipeout. It’s a stormy day and so wave after wave after wave come crashing down and you’re only just up gasping for air before the next big wave hits, tumbling you under, slamming you into the depths. You might struggle to the surface for a few moments: find a friendly sofa to crash on for a few days; have a family member let you use their address for mail (under duress); or manage to secure emergency housing; but often the horror of so many disorienting events happening simultaneously is enough to ensure that you won’t be getting back on your board anytime soon. To be honest your leash has probably snapped and you’re watching that board, your life-raft, being smashed to pieces on some rocks you’re now desperately trying to avoid.

I agree with the thinking that many of the issue of homelessness are brought about by a person being engulfed in a toxic environment that they refuse (either consciously or subconsciously) to integrate into. Our awareness of the human condition does continue to evolve, and there is a growing understanding that people’s addictions, difficulties, and inabilities to pioneer through life are not solely due to ‘a lack of character’ or ‘strength’ but that the toxicity of the family and community surrounding an individual can significantly damage a person’s chances of creating a successful life, and by successful I mean being able to thrive, not just survive the daily grind. The issue here is that often the family and wider community refuse to admit that their actions are toxic. They don’t want to be told that they’re part of the problem, and they definitely do not want to have to change their toxic, competitive behaviours that have worked so well for them up until that point.

Anyone who’s studied The Prisoners’ Dilemma paradox in Game Theory (a thought experiment devised that offers competing participants the opportunity to choose either a cooperative strategy or a more ‘dog-eat-dog’ approach to winning) will tell you that the cooperative, mutually beneficial, emotionally intelligent strategy always wins, with those taking a selfish, retaliatory position consistently finding themselves at the bottom of the league. What I can’t fathom is why people continue to destroy each other in their fabricated zero-sum games when all the research points to the fact that a person can be both motivated by self-interest and still accept that cooperation is the most viable option for an individual’s success; it’s literally win-win. I suppose the research can’t account for the perverse nature of some people’s character, even as it highlights the extent to which capitalism has destroyed the very fabric of our togetherness.

As Friedrich Engels explains in The Conditions of The Working Class in England:
“Competition is the completest expression of the battle of all against all which rules in modern civil society. But this competition of the workers among themselves is the worst side of the present state of things in its effect upon the worker, the sharpest weapon against the proletariat in the hands of the bourgeoisie.”

The capitalist ideal that it’s ‘everyone for themselves’ encourages us to view all people as competition who must be at best ignored, or at worst destroyed, and this cancer now spreads throughout families and communities as much as the workplace. It’s also the narcissist’s most effective tool for maintaining control of a community’s thoughts and perceptions of any given situation or victim.

It’s sad to acknowledge that we’ve all internalised this competitiveness to the extent that the very community a homeless person should reach out to for help are often the exact same people who created the miserable environment that precipitated that person’s misfortunes in the first place.

The experts might tell us that when an individual begins to set strong personal boundaries, those who benefited from their previous lack of self-worth will vanish from their life, but what about the people who actively seek to destroy their target due to a fear of being unmasked? What about the fellow creatives, family, and ex who know that if you begin to live a healthy life outside of their toxic paradigm you’ll expose their dysfunction, and so they ramp up the vicious smear campaigns encouraging everyone you come into contact with to compete with you for even the most insignificant comforts or advantages? Soon everyone around the victim joins the frenzy, becoming a plague of locusts stripping everything away until that person is left with absolutely nothing.

Even though I now have a place to live and a job, I often experience a deep despair that I’ll never escape this Kafkaesque nightmare and I still struggle to make it to the end of each day with my self-worth in tact. This is because although I might have managed to haul myself up one or two more rungs of the ladder, I’m no way near clear of this mess.

Thinking again of Engles, there’s no returning to the times before industrialisation horrifically transmuted us into capitalist-fight-or-die machines, and we don’t need to rewind to some Romanticised version of peasantry, but couldn't we just pause long enough to remember the organic heart of our humanity?

I don’t know what the answer is when it comes to dealing with scapegoating abuse. I’m still clawing myself away from the vicious lies while trying my best not to lose my heart to despair. People rarely bother to fact-check gossip. Perhaps the only thing survivors can do for each other is keep sharing our experiences so that others will know that they’re not alone. Watching the TedTalk on scapegoating abuse in my previous post is what inspired me to publish these words, I hope someone else in this position also passes on the baton.

#scapegoat #engels #capitalism #homeless #gametheory #zerosumgame

"clearing your name is very hard to do when you're the [family/community] scapegoat because the word has gone out over the years about you, and it's gone beyond the family [or community], you don't know who's talking about you and it's hard to get yourself back."

This woman's story is my story, although I'm still living in the aftermath of a vicious and vile smear campaign that caused me to lose everything.

#scapegoat #family #dysfunction #tedtalk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIlUJRabkNg

Rachel Leingang: ‘Somalis are the #scapegoat’: fear rises as #tRump targets #Minneapolis community. Residents have had to adjust how they’re living – staying home, carrying passports – since tRump launched his attack.

#Somalis
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/11/somali-minneapolis-fear-trump-ice-deportation

"HUD Sec Turner:🚨"We need to cont to deport illegals that're taking houses from the Am ppl"

"WH: has been hammering this msg as they flail on #affordability;🚨nothing at all is our fault, while literally evrth is the fault of undoc #immigrants *group whose#s we keep claiming are higher *need a bigger #scapegoat."

Build more homes?

"Great idea! Will be a lot harder to do if you end up🚨deporting a very sizeable pr of the ppl who work in const."
-A R-Melnick
#Housing #Lies #Deportations #USPol