A Funny Scapegoat: Jimmy Carr

This week the UK media decided to make Jimmy Carr the next victim of public condemnation, and our Mr. Cameron, PM, took it upon himself to add fuel to the flames by commenting directly upon Mr. Carr's nefarious financial affairs:

I think some of these schemes – and I think particularly of the Jimmy Carr scheme – I have had time to read about and I just think this is completely wrong.

People work hard, they pay their taxes, they save up to go to one of his shows. They buy the tickets. He is taking the money from those tickets and he, as far as I can see, is putting all of that into some very dodgy tax avoiding schemes.

That is wrong. There is nothing wrong with people planning their tax affairs to invest in their pension and plan for their retirement – that sort of tax management is fine. But some of these schemes we have seen are quite frankly morally wrong.

The government is acting by looking at a general anti-avoidance law but we do need to make progress on this. It is not fair on hardworking people who do the right thing and pay their taxes to see these sorts of scams taking place.

As is often the case these days, I came across the breaking news of Jimmy's "morally repugnant behaviour" on Twitter. As is also often the case, I found myself embroiled in a heated argument about it with a fellow twitterer, @tsdlee. This charming young man, arrested by the power of my intellectual prowess, has since blocked me. He was convinced that Jimmy was "greedy" and "morally wrong". He asserted that Jimmy should not be avoiding tax, especially if he earns more than £3m a year. Also, if he was intent on avoiding tax, he should at least give some of his many millions to charity. At the time, I found myself thouroughly infuriated by the man's magnanimous moralising.

On reflection, I can of course see Lee's point, but at the time I found Lee to be "judgemental, sanctimonious, hypocritical, and presumptuous," to quote myself. On asking Lee how much he gave to charity, he was reticient. It was 'as much as he could when he could'. I presumed this was, well, not often.

I asked Lee if he knew how much Jimmy gave to charity, and Lee replied:

I'm pretty sure he doesn't give 44% of his income to charity. I've never heard him give anything to charity.

I directed Lee to the following, found after a cursory Google search 'Jimmy Carr charity'. Jimmy clearly does give to charity, and probably a lot more than Lee.

I was getting angry now, because I felt Lee was simply using Jimmy Carr as a way to perpetuate Lee's favourite story, that rich people are evil, greedy sods who don't give to charity. (A story I too like to proliferate, on occasion, I must admit). Lee did all this even though he knew almost nothing about Carr, who he was using to perpetuate his story. That's when, obviously in following the link I had given him, Lee replied:

Ah good. Glad he's donating to charity and is getting relief on the 1% tax he actually does pay. Smart man.

I lost it, and posted:

You're a twat. He's damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.

Lee, in my mind, had simply refused to change his story. Nothing was going to work. I was convinced this guy was the reason for all the ills of the world.

This personal exchange between Lee and I, and the event Jimmy found himself in, are not unrelated. Let me explain the connection I have in mind by going back to Jimmy for a moment:

Having found himself in the midst of a Cameron-induced twitterstorm, inflamed by the anonymous, yet somehow personal accusations of disgust flung in Carr's direction like detritus by a hoard of foaming tweeters, Mr. Carr had quickly offered up a public apology, removed himself from the noxious implications of this now infamous K2 scheme, and ducked his head below the media radar in the hope that, for the love of God, this tidal wave of public scorn would pass as quickly as it came. Lee, perhaps exasperated by my attempt to beat him down with my retorts, blocked me. Society had done to Jimmy what I had found myself doing to Lee.  In the midst of a system we all know to be based on greed and inequality, we had focused our attention on arbitrary individuals, and let loose.

Yes, that term is called scapegoating. Scapegoating is all too common in our society today. Like when the Tories say the UK economic crisis is the result of Labour 'leaving the country in a mess,' while Labour, with equal venom, say that the country's mess is a result of the Conservative's austerity agenda. Both are wrong, because, quite likely, both are right. They are wrong because they assume that whatever is the cause, someone else is to blame. What's certain, they believe, is that they are not responsible. After all, to even hint at taking responsibility in this society would lose a political party hundreds of thousands of votes. Taking responsibility as a politician is a sign of weakness, certainly political suicide. As a result, in this world, everyone's a victim, because everyone else is to blame.

The process of blame is no more apparent than when we scapegoat, but there is another element in scapegoating. We single out a target. It might be one political party, or one individual. They come to symbolise the problem that ails us. They become the cause of the sickness. Yes, they're the reason I'm in this mess. He's the reason me and my family are struggling. We overestimate the power one party or one person can have; a natural consequence of the culture of individualism in western society today. And so all our anger gets directed towards a solitary focal point, some poor bastard that never saw it coming. Like Jimmy Carr, or Lee, who suddenly find themselves overwhelmed by the irascible anger of people convinced that they are the reason the whole damn world has gone to pot.

So scapegoating is a natural consequence of the poison of extreme individualism mixing with the equally toxic venom of the blame culture we find ourselves living in today. It's as if we look around and see that all the fish in the pond are poisoned, but instead of trying to clean the pond, we single out an individual fish as the cause for the ills of all the rest. We then isolate this fish, ostractise it, and demand it somehow change, become well. If it doesn't it shall pay by being excluded, derided, rejected by the school. We don't notice that we, the accusers, and them, the accused, all swim and drink the same toxic water in equal quantities.

In sum, we direct our anger at individuals or groups, not contexts or systems. Maybe because it's easier, and feels more visceral. Maybe because we're so familiar with the context that it becomes invisible. We can see a single fish, with sickly scales and cloudy eyes. We can pick him out. We can't see the murky water. It's everywhere, far more unidentifiable.  

This is apparent in how we, inspired by Cameron, singled out Jimmy Carr. It's also apparent in how I singled out Lee. I didn't see Lee as one sick fish amongst many, all of us swimming in a poisoned pond. I saw him as a source of this poison. He wasn't swimming in judgemental waters, he was judgemental. He wasn't swimming in the poison of hate and resentment. He was being hateful and resentful. In doing this, I myself was falling prey to the poison's effects. 

In a sense Lee is of course a source of this poison: he transmits poisonous toxins via public forums into others, so that the pond becomes ever more saturated with toxic meaning. A vicious cycle becomes locked in, self-perpetuating: others agree, and retweet. A tidal wave of indignation ensues. I fell into that cycle and became a part of it too, scapegoating Lee just as much as Lee scapegoated Jimmy.

In another way, however, Lee isn't the source of this poison. Lee is actually being force-fed this toxic story about heroes and villains by the media and powerful people who have access to this story-telling machine, in this case Cameron, who sends his favourite stories out into the system as poison into our pond, to be learned by rote by the rest of us, like a song you hear so often you just can't get it out of your head. Just look around: Twitter-feeds and Facebook news-feeds are dominated by stories told by the powerful, through the mass media.  There are countless other stories not being told, because no-one powerful enough who has access to the media wants to tell them. You have to trawl twitter to find these alternative tales, these counter-cultural narratives.

The stories we are flooded with day by day are written by the powerful people in our society, people with their own, often political agendas. Lee, in a sense, had no choice but to get swept away by Cameron's tale. The same narrative was everywhere. On every online newspaper website. Every tweet with #JimmyCarr on it. He drank up this poison, poured out with such apparent non-chalance by newsgroups, Cameron, and tweeters, that, Yes! Jimmy was the villain we were looking for! 

There's a pay-off in all this too, a reward in scapegoating, and this is a feeling of belonging. Lee found  himself admitted into a large group of irate anonymous tweeters who were expressing similar views and feelings to him. For sure, I too felt a sense of pleasure when other tweeters seemed to agree with me against Lee, that Carr was not the problem but that the system in which he lived was to blame, a system that legalised, endorsed, and sold him the K2 scheme. I felt vilified, part of a larger group, when I saw they agreed with me. I felt right, not merely because I felt right in myself, but because others agreed with me. As such, I didn't just feel right, I felt righteous.
  
This is another poison that can motivate us to do terrible things: group think. The school of fish swims this way and that, so that we, mere individual fish, follow blindly, making sure we avoid becoming isolated, wishing to remain hidden in the crowd. It's interesting that scapegoating is the opposite to this desire to blend in, as it singles out and isolates an individual from the rest of us. So, even if the school is actually moving deeper into the most toxic parts of the pond, we'll follow, because we fear standing out. We don't even think about it. We merely follow. Even when we become more ill, we continue to follow. An example of such obedience, even when faced with having to perform evil acts, is no more evident than in Milgram's Experiment (obedience) and the Stanford Prison Experiment (group think).

In our case the poison is scapegoating, and it's poisonous because it violently singles out one man as if he's the cause of all our anger, when actually the problem is far bigger. To scapegoat only harms one man, potentially deeply, but it changes absolutely nothing. It's like witch-hunting because there's a plague killing your family. It's poisonous to us too, this scapegoating, because we think we're achieving something when we're not. We're simply wasting energy on the wrong thing. We get angry and stressed out at this scapegoat, yet remain totally ineffectual in the grand scheme of things. The system remains intact. And yet, we get swept away by the crowd again and again. We get irate along with the rest. The toxins seep into our system. We remain sick.  

So, what can we do about this? What's the alternative? What's the antidote?

Well, despite all our confidence that we were right, the problem is, we were all wrong: the tweeters who were against Jimmy, saying he was evil and greedy, and the tweeters who were defending Jimmy, saying he was merely doing what we would all do. Both sides we're wrong. But we weren't wrong because of what we were asserting. Our assertions were right. Jimmy was being greedy. But he was also only doing what we in the same position would do. Both sides were wrong because both sides were convinced the other side was wrong. Both sides were convinced that the other side was the poison. But this is patently wrong, because every one was right.

All must have prizes.

Part of the solution, then, is to stop isolating, or threatening to isolate individuals or groups, through scapegoating, and start looking at the system instead - ways we can all live together that don't involve poisoning the pond. For example, why does Jimmy get £1.5 million a year to tell jokes, when a nurse who saves lives and puts up with all manner of drunks and abuse on weekends, only gets £25,000? Is it because Jimmy is greedy and evil? No, Jimmy is taking what he's being offered, by society. Clearly, we as a society value entertainment more than we value carers; just look a footballers' salaries compared to mental health workers. Society, the pond, is sick with rotten values.

What Jimmy did was totally legal. What Jimmy did was very, very greedy. Jimmy, however, just like us, is swimming in this poisoned pond, our western society. This society is fuelled by the values of 'individualism,' 'capitalism,' and 'the need for more'. It values entertainment over care, popularity over character, growth over ecology, profit over ethical values. So, when his accountant suggested a way for him to save tax, Jimmy probably didn't look at the details. He just went along with it - it's legal right, so why not? Capitalism dictates that we have a right to make as much money as possible, as long as you remain within the law. Capitalism is not about thinking of others. Neither is individualism, where the only one person looking out for you, is you. So, you've got to take care of number one. It wasn't even that Jimmy "disregarded his responsibility to pay his fair share" - quite likely he didn't think about his responsibility at all. And why would he? Our society is not built on such values. Instead we have capitalism and competition - our society is based on capitalising on others, seeing them as commodities even, not helping them.

And as for responsibility, it is interesting to note how those who blame are equally guilty of neglecting their responsibility: Cameron and Lee walk on very shaky ground when it comes to the responsibilities they expected of Carr. Cameron's family was built on tax avoidance, for example. Lee only "gives when he can," which probably isn't often. Yet Cameron is morally repulsed, and Lee expects Carr to be charitable. And, again, wouldn't we all snap up the opportunity to pay only 1% tax on our income if given the chance, because more money in our pockets is, well, 'more'? And that's got to be good, hasn't it?

This is all very telling, because it suggests we are all poisoned, but that we only see the sickness in others.

So, perhaps we ought to reserve judgement of individuals and direct our attention towards changing the system. For example, the Robin Hood Tax scheme proposes putting a minor tax on financial transactions that could put billions into the public purse every year. 2020 Tax proposes simplifying the tax system so that tax avoidance becomes almost impossible. I'm not saying these proposals are perfect, I'm just saying they focus on changing the system, not scapegoating individuals, and that they may be a step in the right direction. It's interesting, though, that these two proposals remain significantly overlooked by a mass media which spends all its time scapegoating celebs, politicians and CEOs. Maybe because it's more entertaining for us to read the drama of a celeb being ripped to shreds. More entertaining than Richard Murphy, perhaps, who proposes other ways to reform, if not outright revolutionise, the UK tax system. Here is where real change can happen, not least of which through the narrowing of the gap between rich and poor. The question remains, though, if we as a society are ready to take things seriously? Or whether we are too intoxicated by the poison in the pond, so that we'd rather tear strips out celebs and CEOs than look at how we can change the system for the better, while all the time the pond continues to grow evermore saturated by the toxins that poison our bodies and cloud-up our minds.

Finally then, we need to stop singling out individuals. We need to see and change the bigger picture. Only then, with cleaner water and altered currents, will individuals begin to grow healthy and swim a different course. Only in this way can we hope to embrace the possibility of cleaning the poisoned pond.