Why We Love to Outsource Our Guilt

Not long ago, I had a fight with someone close to me. The usual kind. I was right, she was wrong — or maybe it was the other way around. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. What matters is something else, something that only becomes visible once the dust settles.

In moments like that, we judge the other person. Ourselves, almost never. We don’t weigh two perspectives — we simply declare ours valid and theirs worthless.

And this is exactly where the question I find far more interesting than who was right begins:

Why do most of us, the moment we cause something, so eagerly look for someone else to blame?

The problem isn’t the blame. The problem is us.

This may sound a bit contradictory: the problem isn’t really whether someone else is at fault or responsible. Often they are. But the problem is that we don’t want to be guilty.

And this isn’t a character flaw. It’s an inheritance. It comes from that older, more primitive part of the brain whose job was to keep us safe — and admitting responsibility was (at least in the past) dangerous.

Whoever took the blame inside the tribe risked exile, punishment, loss of status. A reflex that once protected us now fires in the wrong direction.

So when we look for blame in others, most of us aren’t actually interested in who’s really guilty. We’re interested in one thing only: that it isn’t us. But even more than guilty, no one wants to come off as — stupid.

Back in that argument of mine, the core of it was precisely this: don’t look incompetent. To explain that I hadn’t done it on purpose, that a certain chain of circumstances led there. Ego defense, dressed up as an argument.

An excuse is always a sign of insecurity

And now the part that’s most uncomfortable to admit. Looking for blame in others, making excuses, shifting responsibility — none of it is ever a sign of strength. It is always, always, a strong indicator of one’s own inner insecurity.

The fear of being seen as incompetent, foolish, or strange is one of the hardest fears to soothe. And because we can’t soothe it, we redirect it — outward, onto the other person, onto circumstances. Someone who is at peace with their own worth doesn’t need to be right at any cost. They can face guilt, because it doesn’t threaten them.

We also throw away something valuable in the process. Every time we shift focus from our own mistake to what someone else should have done, we trade an opportunity to grow for the barren satisfaction of judging. We trade growth for a sense of justice — which, it turns out, is a terrible deal.

The shadow of doubt as an advantage, not a flaw

Here is the distinction I was actually trying to catch. When I claim I’m right — what makes me any better than the others who claim the same thing?

A shadow of doubt always travels with me. In the moments when I am right, I don’t want to rest on my laurels like in the ‘I’m the man, I’m right and the other one is an idiot’ mode.

Instead, I am interested in what I could have done differently. What I could have done better in that situation — so that we’d both walk away with our skin intact, so we wouldn’t explode and end up doing things we’d both regret.

It sounds paradoxical, but the very fact that we’re not convinced we’re infallible is what makes us more reliable.

But why? Because doubt keeps the door open.

Not wide open. Not in the sense that everything is equally possible, that every opinion is worth the same, or that we should never decide anything. That would be just another kind of stupidity.

I mean a small door. A crack. Just enough for one new fact to enter. Just enough for one sentence from the other person to land differently. Just enough for the possibility that I am missing something.

And we almost always are.

This is what certainty does not allow.

Certainty is stable. That is why we love it so much. It has no open questions, no dangers, no uncomfortable movement. It lets us stop thinking and still feel strong.

But that strength is often fake. Certainty only feels like strength because change feels like danger.

To admit that I might be wrong means I might have to move. I might have to change the story. I might have to give up the version of myself in which I behaved perfectly, understood everything, and saw the whole picture.

And we hate that. So we call certainty confidence. And we call doubt weakness.

But uncertainty is not weakness. Very often, it is just the natural result of seeing more.

The more you understand, the harder it becomes to speak like a fanatic. You start seeing how many details are missing. How many things you do not know. How many apparent certainties are only certainties because the frame is too small.

That is why the loudest person in the room is not always the one who knows the most. Often, it is the one who has not yet seen enough to doubt himself.

The one who doubts becomes quieter. Not because he has nothing to say. But because he realizes how much can still be wrong in what he is about to say.

And this is exactly the part people misunderstand. Doubt does not make us unreliable. It makes us more correctable. And being correctable is much more valuable than being certain.

Because if I am convinced I am one hundred percent right, then nothing can enter anymore. No better argument. No missing detail. No pain I caused. No part of the other person’s story.

Everything that does not fit my certainty becomes noise.

That is where people become dangerous.

Not only in politics, religion, or ideology. In ordinary life too. In relationships. In arguments. In families. In all those small situations where we are absolutely convinced that we are the reasonable one and the other person is the problem.

A small shadow of doubt prevents that. It does not make me passive. It does not make me weak. It only reminds me that even when I am right, I am probably not completely right.

And that little difference matters. Because if I am not completely right, then there is still something to learn.

Certainty — believing you’re right — closes a door. The decision to try to understand the other person anyway — genuinely, with no hidden agenda — keeps it open.

And what actually makes us better isn’t being right. It’s the willingness to go looking for the other’s perspective and details we might have missed.

The only thing you can change is you

From this follows something that sounds almost like a Stoic mantra but is, in fact, a very practical tool.

The only thing you can change is yourself. Not how others cope with their own imperfection. And not whether someone is capable of tolerating being wrong.

This is usually where the vicious circle jams. She says: You have to deal with what I say, because I have every right to express my thoughts. Fair enough — but then the same holds for me: she has to deal with whatever I said or did beforehand. So who should stop? Who should start?

The answer is uncomfortable because it’s so simple: it doesn’t matter.

We both did something right, we both did something wrong. The only thing I can truly change is to cut the thread somewhere — the thread of drilling into why someone else didn’t say or do something — and to ask myself instead: OK, where did I screw up?

Only from there do I hold a tool in my hands. On myself, I can run something as simple as the Five Whys — drilling into my own causes and motives until I reach the place inside me where the reasons for my behavior actually sit. It works on myself. On the other person it doesn’t, because there I have no access — and, more importantly, no influence.

A small illustration

Recently, during a renovation, I clipped the top edge of a doorway — chipped the wall — while trying to remove the door. The first thought, of course: Ah, that’s because some idiot built the frame too low.

I didn’t go down that road. I simply explained why it happened — the edge really was only a few centimeters above the door, and because I hadn’t noticed it, I caught it with the door and chipped it off.

In doing so, I didn’t want to look foolish, but I didn’t want to go looking for someone else to blame either.

The difference is small but essential. Explaining why something happened is not the same as finding who is at fault. The first is understanding. The second is defense.

In closing

Seeking out and owning your own mistakes is always a better path to growth than dodging responsibility and offloading it onto others. On one condition, of course: that you actually want to grow in the long run.

Every time you judge others through your own ego, two things happen. First, you reveal your own failure to understand something — in fact, you won’t even get the chance to understand it. And second — perhaps worse still — you solve nothing.

Is it time already to start changing things?

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This post was previously published on medium.com.