Should The Studio C Sketch Don T Save The Whales

One of the greatest obstacles in the way of progressing and solving problems is placing the blame of those problems in all the wrong places. This phenomenon can occur on a variety of scales, from individual people and their personal problems to the issues that face entire societies. This obstacle is satirically displayed in the Studio C sketch Don’t Save The Whales, which shows members of a rally scapegoating and blaming everything wrong with their community on whales. Displaying how irrational and destructive unfairly placing the blame for problems is, the sketch also demonstrates how real problems go unsolved, new problems are created, and bandwagoning only makes everything worse. When people or communities pin the blame of their problems on others, they do not get any better themselves. Like blaming the whales in the sketch,
scapegoating only helps remove any feeling of shame or need for improvement from people. Despite knowing full well that they actually did call their wife fat, push their boss down the stairs, and even burn down their house for insurance money, the characters of the sketch could completely disillusion themselves by saying that it was the whales that made it happen. This perfectly parodies the harmful tendency for people to convince themselves the real reason for their personal problems that resulted from their own mistakes was something beyond their control. Beliefs like it was just the economy that resulted in someone's financial ruin, or that a society's declining economic state could be blamed on a certain group of people or politician are the very lies satirized by this sketch.
When there are serious problems with an individual or society, the last thing we need to do is add onto those problems.
However that is exactly what happens when blame is put in the wrong place. While the sketch does not elaborate to much on the environmental consequences of a mass whale genocide, we can be sure that many harmful things will happen to the world without solving any of the problems attributed to them. The very fact that a rally assembles with weapons, almost leading to the death of the whale advocate by harpoon shows that tensions can rise when opposing groups disagree about something as serious as the source of society's problems. While this conflict is comedic when it's acted on a sketch comedy show, disagreements over who is to blame for deteriorating societies is enough to tear them apart, creating dangerous social, cultural and political divides. Even on a personal scale, relationships between people don’t thrive when one person is always putting down and blaming the other. Relationships require mutual understanding and sympathy, which is not encouraged by blaming and scapegoating the difficulties on each
other.
Perhaps the most dangerous tendency of blaming others is its habit to spread. As some people bin the blame on a scapegoat, it's easy for other people to join in removing the blame of their problems onto the scapegoat. This powerful bandwagoning effect is evident in the sketch as a member of the rally discovers that the rally was about whales instead of the country wales, yet has no problem joining the other rally members with blaming problems on the whales. Yet they are merely satirizing the scary possibilities of members of a society justifying their scapegoating by banding together. Mob mentality opens the way for rationalizations, decisions and beliefs that can seem almost not human when everyone in a group agrees with each other on serious controversial issues. This is dangerous whether it happens within a small group people, or majority groups of entire societies. Not solving any problems and creating more are bad enough results of scapegoating and placing blame in the wrong places, but bandwagoning is dangerous because of how it can dramatically increase the first two dangers.
Studio C’s sketch is a powerful satire of the dangers of scapegoating society’s problems away from the real sources. As ridiculous and exaggerated as the sketch is, that only better serves to parody how far people go to remove themselves from the equation and not face the reality of the real source of their issues. Understanding the dangers of scapegoating is important for resolving problems for everything from individuals, localized communities, to large scale societies like countries and even across the entire world. By ignoring the actual causes, leaving the real problems unsolved, causing new issues and creating bandwagoning, everything only gets worse for everyone.