what if there’s no one to blame?

It is easier to blame someone’s personality and behavior for a situation/outcome than it is to consider the circumstances that influenced (or at a minimum contributed to) their actions.

Our brains are better trained to identify an individual’s motivation behind a behavior rather than the systemic constraints that might have contributed to it. This means we end up making up a lot of stories about why someone was personally motivated to do the things they did.

If you want to keep assigning blame, keep aiming to detect other people’s motivations for their behavior. But if you want to change a person’s actions, the first consideration has to be what system are they living in?