Scapegoating

A very much respected professor gives one of her most sought after courses twice a year at one of the FatLand universities. It is called "The Origins, Chronology and Reinvention of Scapegoating." In it, she explores the entire construction and creation of scapegoating particular groups or people. According to her, scapegoating is as old as speech itself. There were always in groups and out groups in the oldest cave clans, based on cave rights and hunting and attachment customs (attachment was the equivalent of marriage).

But when people started to settle down into farming communities, the nature of scapegoating changed. Instead of focusing on one group, or simply the opponents/adversaries of those who held a particular territory and/or cave, it began to divide people or even communities into hierarchies on the basis of the strength of their connection to a powerful leader. Those who were closest to the leader determined the order of favor of the groups in the communities.

She traces the history of scapegoating up to contemporary times, in which, she states, scapegoating is done by those of all groups and classes who wish to acquire status within their own group by imitating the leader and thus gaining status within their own group by gaining the approval of the leader for their actions. Thus, she says, fat people are scapegoated by those who may or may not actually hate them, but who know they will gain status by doing so. (And this certainly works out as true, even when the "status" is economic, considering the appeals of diet-selling concerns.) In this time, she states, the scapegoaters will often find support for their expressions of hatred from corporate and institutional concerns who are trying to target fat people for profit. This, she says, is what gives contemporary scapegoating of fat people such a deadly edge - the fact that it is both bolstered and even encouraged by both corporations and institutions.

Of course her lectures serve indirectly to support FatLand's claims of being by far the best places for both fat and not-fat people to live, since scapegoating is almost unknown in FatLand...