Last weekend I was driving a friend home down Portage Avenue and we encountered an unexpected traffic jam. Four lanes had been reduced to one because a crew was working on the overpass.

Even though it was Saturday afternoon and neither of us were in any sort of rush, and even though I was consciously trying to take the delay in stride, I couldn’t help but comment that they’ve been working on that bridge “for 8,000 years now” and that contractors seem to take as long as possible to finish things.

Having worked in the construction industry, I know this isn’t true. Contactors get paid for the completion of the job, not the time spent on it, and the city does everything they can to minimize traffic disruption, which is why this was happening on Saturday and not Monday.

Still, something in me wants there to be a guilty party. If there’s nobody to blame, I have to recognize that I live in an unsympathetic reality in which bridges have to be fixed, other cars use the road, and pain and inconvenience cannot always be argued with. My intuitive preference is to believe that even the smallest difficulties in my life are unnecessary and the fault of bad actors.

This is a very human impulse, I think — to assign culprits to things that go wrong. When the economy is sluggish, it’s always due to bad policies and the bad people who make them, rather than hideously complex market interactions that even economists don’t understand. When the local football team has a disappointing season, it’s the failure of the coach, or the quarterback, or the management, or a lack of fan support, rather than all those things at once and none in particular — or simply because of the mathematical reality that a team has to lose every time another team wins.

If you watch man-on-the-street interviews about world issues, you might notice an interesting contradiction: people often struggle to define the problem with much clarity, but they can always tell you exactly who’s at fault. Hillary Clinton. White supremacists. The mainstream media. Joe Rogan. Behind every bad thing is a bad person that needs to be stopped.

I’m not arguing that there are no bad actors, only that the human mind is quick to attribute anything it doesn’t like to some foul group of people and their faulty morals. For example, nobody thinks poverty is a good thing. If you ask people why poverty exists, you’ll usually get a quick answer attributing it to bad people. The government isn’t doing enough to combat it. Greedy speculators inflate housing prices. Some people don’t take responsibility for their own lives. People would rather buy a Frappuccino than give to the needy. Capitalist oppressors set up the system to serve themselves only. Reagan and Thatcher killed the middle class.

Unless you’re strongly identified with a particular political camp, you might recognize some or all of these claims make some sense, which suggests that the problem is a collision of many complex factors and interests, rather than the work of a sole guilty party and its inarguable badness.

The least articulate form of the bad actor explanation might be the one we hear most often: that human beings are terrible and society is terrible. As much as that might explain any problem you can think of, it’s a ridiculous conclusion to make, if you consider that our species is obsessed with right and wrong and discerning one from the other.

Three Reasons Everything is Someone’s Fault

So why is it so tempting to attribute everything bad to bad actors? I’m not sure it has much to do with solving the problem, or discovering the truth behind it. My guess is that it helps us process our painful emotions about the problem, in at least three ways:

First, if you can convince yourself that a given problem is caused by bad people, then it means someone else is responsible for it. You may have a stake in it, and want to say something about it, but you aren’t a causal factor (such as the traffic in the traffic jam, or the resident driving up housing prices).

Second, it allows us to believe bad things shouldn’t happen, at least not to ourselves. The thought, “this shouldn’t be happening” implies that something outside of natural processes caused the problem, which leaves little explanation but that someone is doing something they shouldn’t be doing. If there’s a bad actor behind it, you don’t have to consider certain dark existential possibilities: that life is made of tradeoffs, suffering is unavoidable, problems are rarely simple and self-contained, and there is no “right” path we should all be on.

Third, it makes solutions seem relatively straightforward: stop the bad people, or get rid of them.

As far as I can tell, interpreting problems as the crimes of clear perpetrators is the only way we attempt to justify real hatred for people. We need that sense of simplicity – the bad thing comes from the bad people — to hate a person or group without reservation, and history is full of examples.

Again, it’s not that there’s no such thing as fault, or that solutions never require holding a particular party to account. Only that there’s something about the human mind that wants a given problem to be someone’s fault, simply because it would be easier if it were.

Watching the mind make bad guys

Monitoring this tendency in yourself can be revealing – to witness how the mind generates suspects and verdicts within seconds, and how emotionally-driven the process is. It becomes clearer that villainizing is mostly a coping mechanism, rather than a sensible way of understanding or addressing problems.

In my experience, a little curiosity on this front makes political topics less maddening to think and talk about. Mostly though, I notice myself craving clear perpetrators for the kind of tiny, personal offenses that happen a hundred times a day.

The other day I tried to observe my indignation towards others during a regular trip to the gym, and identified so many villains in such a short time that I stopped counting. I’ll describe only my first encounter.

As soon as I arrived, I waited behind a lady asking the clerk a spectacularly long-winded question about memberships, while I just wanted to scan my card and go in. First I felt mild ill will towards the lady – obviously, questions must be asked, but why take so long to ask them? Once I noticed I was making a perpetrator of her (rather than trying to solve my problem) it seemed a bit silly to condemn her on the basis of her question’s word count, so my scrutiny slipped over the clerk. She should know how to handle this exact situation! It must come up all the time.

Upon examination, this objection also felt like a weak one – it’s understandably difficult to have two customers who both need you at the same time, especially when one of them is as impatient as I apparently am.

Just as I was considering who else’s fault this could be – whoever schedules staff lunch breaks, maybe — the lady turned and said, “Oh, please go ahead!” with a genuine smile, and I assured her it was no problem at all.

And I meant it, because suddenly there was nothing I needed a villain for.

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Photos by A. Taktarov, S. Blake, M. Vitolic, J. Dylag, P. Du Preez, and R. Sarsfield