"Pick a convenient villain, point, and pretend the job’s done. Scapegoating creates cohesion by creating an enemy. It’s a form of cultural immune response: when people don’t want to admit the sickness is inside the society itself. In Foucault's terms this fits neatly into his whole "defense of society" framework: power doesn’t just repress; it produces categories of threat and purity — enemies and protectors. When the social body feels anxious, it invents the “Other” that must be scapegoated. Blame is displaced from deeper systemic issues — political, economic, educational, moral — that predate the latest incarnation of the Other and our paranoia is sometimes a symptom of the Other reflecting our power structures a little too accurately as in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, "The Emperor's New Clothes".