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The Blame Game: “It’s Not My Fault!”
Poe and The Black Cat
If you’ve never read Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Black Cat,” I highly recommend it.
Although this story is not as well known as “The Tell Tale Heart” or “The Pit and the Pendulum,” it shows that Poe knew the dark heart of mankind intimately. He demonstrates how man is capable of great evil just as easily as he is capable of great good. This unsavory truth is something that most of us would prefer not to acknowledge.
Whether at work or in your personal life when you do something wrong, especially if it hurts others, do you admit you did it and take the blame for your actions? If you are like most people, you probably don’t or you’ll admit you did it while blaming someone or something else for making you do it.
It comes naturally for us to shift blame because we find it very hard to admit we did things that we know are very wrong. It’s hard enough just to admit to ourselves that what we did was evil. Instead of a straight confession, we quickly cry out that someone or something else made us do it.
We avoid confessing that we intentionally did anything bad; instead, we may say we did it, but it wasn’t our fault because we want others to think well of us and we hope to avoid punishment. We want people to understand why we did what we did…
