Escape From Freedom in an Age of Scapegoating
In moments of upheaval, certainty becomes a drug. Scapegoating is the side effect.
We talk about politics, but what we’re really watching is people trying not to fall off the edge of their own fear. Fear of being wrong. Fear of losing the world they thought they understood. Fear of ambiguity, of complexity, of the dizzying work of deciding what is true without anyone handing down the answer.
And fear, left unattended, has consequences. Rather than one people bound by the Constitution, we’re watching the quiet unraveling of Article I, both as a legal argument and as a behavioral one. As Jonathan Martin notes, the House is now openly cheering for the president to win cases that expand executive power at Congress’s own expense. It’s an abdication so matter-of-fact that it barely registers as news. Congress has stopped being Congress.
And in the vacuum left behind, the fear only deepens.
You can feel it everywhere now: at kitchen tables, in church foyers, on Facebook threads that begin with concern and end in accusation, before the inevitable insults. People who are otherwise kind, generous, deeply invested in their communities become brittle the moment the world stops making sense. Their voices sharpen. Their convictions harden. Their enemies multiply. A conversation that starts with How did things get this bad? ends with I know who’s to blame.
It’s tempting to see this as ignorance or malice.
It’s neither.
It’s fear.
Fear of being wrong. Fear of losing the world they thought they understood. Fear of ambiguity, of complexity, of the dizzying work of deciding what is true without anyone handing down the answer.
In moments like these, freedom feels less like possibility and more like rigidity. And in inflexibility does strange things to people. We’ve seen it across generations and geographies: ambiguity becomes moral danger; pluralism becomes threat; multiculturalism demands “defense of the homeland.” New neighbors are perceived as adversarial rather than as future acquaintances. Scapegoating becomes a ritual of clarity because as you drive others off the cliff, the ground beneath your own feet somehow feels more sure.
Surely the deep divide must be political, yes?
What if it weren’t at all?
The deepest divide is where people define their own criteria of freedom, imagining themselves as purely autonomous individuals empowered solely by their own convictions.
For some, freedom means freedom from risk. That belief assumes:
Dominance is stability
Hierarchy is moral architecture
Certainty is a spiritual necessity
If the world feels chaotic, then order must be imposed from the top down, if necessary.
In this worldview, freedom is the right to impose the order that protects you from ambiguity. It’s a refuge from vertigo.
But there’s another definition of freedom—Camus’s definition—the one that feels almost alien in America today: Freedom is the willingness to accept risk.
The risk of being wrong.
The risk of being changed.
The risk of encountering others as real, not participants in some misunderstood “ideology.” Freedom is the courage to stand without the comfort of absolute truth. Freedom is the opportunity to do otherwise.
These two freedoms struggle to recognize each other. One eliminates risk; the other requires it.
One controls others; the other frames freedom as personal restraint.
This divide isn’t abstract. It lives in the people we love.
I once had a conservative Christian tell me they needed the threat of hell to behave morally. They meant it sincerely. What sounded like fear to me; it is safety to them. If goodness depends on punishment, then ambiguity feels like sin. If moral order hinges on cosmic surveillance, then freedom feels like danger. In that frame, the people who challenge your worldview become threats to your salvation. Scapegoating becomes self-defense.
And that same moral architecture, including fear of error, dependence on hierarchy, a craving for so-called common sense clarity, is exactly what Trump’s rhetoric activates. “Enemy within.” “Murderers and rapists.” “Poisoning the blood.” “Transgender for everyone.” It’s a secularized version of hellfire preaching: naming the wicked, defining the pure, placing moral safety in the hands of domination.
It tells frightened people that their goodness is impossible without enemies.
This talk rewires kindness into vigilance. Hate masquerading as love and fear to impose fidelity.
The tragedy is not that people hold the wrong values. It’s that their best values, care, loyalty, responsibility, are being cast as weak within an ideology that celebrates a social dominance view of strength.
Hierarchies are assumed as natural. Certainty begins to feel moral. People cling to worldviews that promise security, even as those worldviews estrange them from neighbors, children, and truth.
But here’s the thing Camus leaves us with: the part we often forget. We can choose otherwise.
Freedom is not the absence of structure.
Freedom is the willingness to face the world as it is: messy, plural, disorienting, and yet commit to decency. Freedom is the courage to make meaning without needing enemies and define autonomy by our own choices. Freedom is the humility to know that truth is larger than any one of us, because freedom begins with acknowledging the material frame we all inhabit. Even while our interpretive frameworks carve that frame in distinct ways, it remains true that we share this same world together.
Maybe this is the reminder we need: to make the decision to come back to one another even when certainty would be easier. All the rhetoric of enemies, purity, and domination tries to keep us from making that turn.
But here is the truth that survives it all: we become free the moment we turn back toward one another, not to control, not to command, but to take the risk of being human together, especially in our risk-taking that we may be wrong.