The person who never apologizes isn’t always being strategic. Sometimes they genuinely don’t see the need. In their version of events, the argument was your fault, the falling-out was the other person’s fault, and the job that didn’t work out was clearly the company’s fault. Each story has the same structure: a protagonist who simply reacted to the unreasonable behavior of others. The cast rotates, but the protagonist never changes.
Julian de Medeiros is a philosopher and lecturer at the University of Kent, where he teaches political theory. He also posts videos on TikTok under the handle @julianphilosophy, where he has accumulated 1.4 million followers and over 68 million likes. In a video that caught significant attention online, he made a claim that sounds almost too tidy to be true, then backed it up with a century of philosophy and psychology.
His argument was simple: the habit of always needing someone else to blame is not just an irritating personality trait. It’s a marker of low intelligence. Not low IQ. Not poor education. Something deeper and more telling than either of those things: the inability to turn the lens on yourself, even briefly, even when it’s uncomfortable.
The Quote That Started It
In his video, de Medeiros referenced a famous quote by Ernest Bevin, a British union leader and politician active from the 1920s through the 1940s. Bevin, who rose from near-total poverty to become one of Britain’s most consequential labor organizers, was known for plain-spoken clarity. On this subject he was blunt: “Unintelligent people always look for a scapegoat.”
Bevin was born in 1881, never knew his father, lost his mother when he was eight, and left school in Devon to work as a laborer before eventually becoming a truck driver in Bristol. He had every external reason to point at the system and blame it for his circumstances. Instead, he organized, agitated, and built institutions. The quote isn’t the observation of someone who never had anything to complain about. It’s the observation of someone who understood exactly what chronic complaining costs you.
De Medeiros took that quote and applied it to the everyday version of this behavior, not the grand political scapegoat, but the person in your life who has somehow never once been responsible for anything that went wrong. “A sign that somebody is not very intelligent is that they always have to blame their problems on other people,” he said. “Like, it’s never something they’ve done, it’s always somebody else’s fault.”
What Psychology Actually Says About It
The connection between scapegoating behavior intelligence and something measurable isn’t just philosophy. Social psychologists have been documenting the relationship for decades.
For individuals, scapegoating functions as a psychological defense process, a form of denial that involves projecting responsibility and blame onto others, which allows the person doing it to eliminate negative feelings about themselves and feel a kind of relief. That last part matters. It feels good to have someone else to blame. It’s emotionally efficient in the short term. The problem is what it costs in the long term.
Scapegoat theory’s core principle holds that individuals displace blame for personal or societal failures onto others in order to maintain a positive self-image, often directing prejudice toward whoever gets targeted. Observational studies and social psychology research link scapegoating to reduced prefrontal cortex activity, the prefrontal cortex being the region associated with rational, deliberate thinking, suggesting that chronic blame-shifting reflects emotional rather than analytical processing. When the thinking brain goes offline, the blame reflex kicks in. Put more plainly: scapegoating isn’t a clever strategy. It’s what happens when someone stops thinking.
Psychology supports de Medeiros’s argument further: traits like self-awareness and introspection, the capacity for what he described as being “self-critical,” are genuine indicators of high intelligence. Self-awareness is recognized as the foundation of emotional intelligence, involving a deep understanding of one’s own emotions, strengths, weaknesses, values, and drives, an introspective process that allows people to recognize how their own emotions affect their behavior and decision-making.
The person who constantly externalizes blame isn’t doing this because they’re lazy. They’re doing it because they genuinely can’t see themselves from the outside. The internal observer, the part of the brain that says “wait, maybe I contributed to this,” is not functioning the way it does in people with high self-awareness.
The Narcissism Connection
Chronic scapegoating behavior doesn’t distribute evenly across personality types.
Narcissists learn early in life that any threat to their exaggerated but fragile level of self-esteem is intolerable. As a result, they fail to integrate a realistic picture of themselves that includes and acknowledges their less desirable traits. When something goes wrong, a failed relationship, a lost job, a friendship that collapsed, the narcissistic response is not reflection. It’s immediate redirection. Blind to their own responsibility for having harmed others, the narcissist adopts the role of victim, simultaneously claiming the sympathetic qualities of victimhood while projecting the role of wrongdoer onto the other person.
This is the scapegoating dynamic in its most concentrated form. But it isn’t exclusive to clinical narcissism. Plenty of people who would never qualify for any kind of diagnosis still operate with a version of this reflex. The colleague who always has an external explanation for every missed deadline. The friend who has been through seven falling-outs in three years and carries zero responsibility for any of them. The family member whose life is a consistent story of being wronged.
The Decision Lab describes scapegoating as what happens when groups or individuals under stress single out one person or subgroup to blame, not because they caused the problem, but because blaming them is simpler than confronting the real cause. It functions as a social and psychological pressure valve, showing up in family systems, office dynamics, and national politics alike.
What de Medeiros is pointing at is that the people most consistently drawn to this pressure valve are those least equipped to do the harder thing: sit with discomfort, examine their own role, and update their understanding of what happened.
The Growth Problem
Blaming others isn’t just socially corrosive or unpleasant to be around. It actively prevents you from getting smarter about your own life.
De Medeiros’ take may be somewhat reductive. Many people avoid introspection because they’ve been through trauma, and that doesn’t automatically make them unintelligent. Trauma does real things to the brain’s ability to self-reflect, and shame can produce avoidance that looks a lot like blame-shifting from the outside. The two things are different, even when they produce similar behaviors.
But for people who don’t have that explanation, the cost is steep. If you never accept that you contributed to a problem, you can never learn anything from it. The same conflict will recur with different people. The same patterns will repeat in different relationships. The scapegoat changes, a new coworker, a new partner, a different friend, but the story structure stays the same. And nothing changes because nothing is learned.
A 2025 peer-reviewed study published in Novelty Journals found that emotional intelligence enhances communication, teamwork, and problem-solving abilities, and that recognizing and understanding one’s emotions is directly linked to effective behavior regulation. The same research identifies self-awareness as the keystone skill from which other emotional competencies flow. These aren’t soft skills. They’re the skills that determine whether a person can actually learn from experience or keeps repeating the same mistakes in different settings.
The scapegoater, by definition, is someone who has cut off that feedback loop. They can’t grow in the areas where growth is most needed because the information that would prompt growth, “I contributed to this, I should do something differently,” never makes it through.
The Self-Serving Bias Underneath
People tend to criticize others on precisely the dimensions on which they themselves feel most threatened, a pattern consistent with the idea that individuals irrationally blame others for their own issues.
Blame, in other words, is often a distorted mirror. The thing someone attacks in you is frequently the thing they can’t face in themselves. The partner who accuses you of being emotionally unavailable while refusing to have a single difficult conversation. The manager who lectures the team about accountability while never once owning a mistake. The relative who describes everyone around them as toxic while somehow remaining in every dispute.
Dealing with a chronic blamer starts with recognizing that you can’t argue someone out of a deeply entrenched defense pattern. Direct confrontation about who’s “really” at fault tends to trigger more defensiveness, not less. What works better is naming the pattern without attacking the person, keeping the conversation on specific behaviors rather than character, and being clear about what you will and won’t accept.
That’s useful practical advice if you’re on the receiving end of this behavior. But it also illustrates the trap: the person doing the blaming is the one person in the room who genuinely can’t see what’s happening. Which is, in its own way, the definition of limited intelligence, not low IQ, but a specific, stubborn inability to process information about oneself.
What This Actually Means
De Medeiros’s observation cuts through because it says something that most people sense but don’t articulate: the need for a permanent enemy isn’t strength. It’s a sign that someone can’t hold the weight of their own complexity.
The most genuinely intelligent people you’ll encounter, not necessarily the most credentialed, but the most capable of actually growing, tend to have a particular quality about how they talk about the bad things that happened to them. They’ll describe what went wrong, and then, almost invariably, they’ll locate themselves in the story. Not to flagellate themselves. Not to perform humility. But because they’re genuinely curious about what they missed, what they could have done differently, what they might do better next time.
That instinct doesn’t come from being naively optimistic or endlessly forgiving of yourself. It comes from being secure enough to look at your own role without it destroying you. Scapegoating behavior is, at its root, evidence of that security missing, and the intelligence that would otherwise be available gets swallowed by the constant work of keeping the story clean.
Some of these patterns go back further than any individual relationship. They were learned early, in households where being wrong felt dangerous. Naming that isn’t an excuse. But it’s usually where any real understanding of the behavior has to start.
Disclaimer: This information is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and is for information only. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions about your medical condition and/or current medication. Do not disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking advice or treatment because of something you have read here.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.