The Wizard of Oz has no magic. That is the whole secret, and everything else follows from it. In Wicked, the great and powerful ruler behind the emerald curtain is a con-man from our world—a carnival showman who drifted into Oz in a hot-air balloon with no powers, no lineage and no plan, and discovered that a frightened people will hand absolute authority to anyone who performs certainty convincingly enough. He built his throne out of spectacle: smoke, a booming voice, a giant mechanical head. But spectacle alone does not hold a country. To keep the crowd behind him, the Wizard needed something more durable than awe—he needed fear, and fear needs a target. So he manufactured one. First the Animals, the talking creatures of Oz, recast as a threat to be silenced and caged; then Elphaba, the one person who refused the lie, rebranded overnight as the "Wicked Witch". A leader with nothing to offer discovered the one thing he could always supply: someone for the people to blame. And he told himself, the whole time, that he was only giving them what they wanted.
// The theoryThe excuses that turn a coward into a tyrant
In 1957, the criminologists Gresham Sykes and David Matza asked a question that reframed how we understand wrongdoing. Most offenders, they observed, are not people with a deviant morality who reject society's rules; they share those rules, feel their pull, and would be ashamed to break them openly. So how do they act anyway? The answer was the techniques of neutralization: rationalizations, deployed before the act, that switch off guilt in advance and let a person drift across the line while still thinking of himself as decent. They named five. Denial of responsibility: I didn't really choose this; circumstances forced my hand. Denial of injury: no one is really hurt by what I did. Denial of the victim: they had it coming; they are not a wronged party but a deserving target. Condemnation of the condemners: those who judge me are hypocrites, worse than I am. And appeal to higher loyalties: I broke a rule, yes, but in the name of something greater—the group, the cause, the common good.
The Wizard runs all five at once. Denial of responsibility: he did not set out to be a tyrant—he was a nobody who fell into power and merely responded to what the moment demanded. Appeal to higher loyalties: everything he does, he does for the good of Oz, for unity, for order, for a frightened people who need to feel safe. Denial of the victim: the Animals and the witch are not innocents he crushed but enemies who brought it on themselves, threats a responsible ruler had no choice but to face. Denial of injury: he is genial, sentimental, no monster—he sheds no blood with his own hands, so surely no real harm is being done. And condemnation of the condemners: those who resist him, chief among them Elphaba, are the truly dangerous ones, the wicked, the destabilizers. Matza would later, in Delinquency and Drift (1964), call this state drift: not a leap into evil but a slow slide, greased by excuses, in which a man never quite decides to become what he becomes. The Wizard is drift wearing a crown.
The affable smile is the tell
What makes the Wizard genuinely unsettling—and what makes him a textbook case rather than a cartoon—is that he is not cruel. He is warm. He is charming, self-deprecating, almost apologetic; he calls himself a humbug with a rueful smile, as though candor about the small fraud absolved him of the large one. This is precisely the point Sykes and Matza were making. Neutralization is not the psychology of the sadist who enjoys harm; it is the psychology of the ordinary person who cannot bear to see himself as harmful, and so narrates his way around it. The Wizard needs the excuses because, at some level, he still shares the morality he is violating—he knows framing the innocent and persecuting the Animals is wrong, which is exactly why he must keep telling himself it isn't him, isn't harmful, isn't unprovoked, is for the greater good. The cheerful "sentimental old humbug" is not the opposite of the tyrant; he is the tyrant's necessary disguise, worn first and most successfully before his own eyes. Where a Palpatine (see his file) chooses domination and knows it, the Wizard specializes in not-quite-knowing—and the affable smile is how the not-knowing is maintained. In neutralization theory, the man who most insists he means no harm is often the one to watch.
// The subjectThe nobody who ruled by inventing enemies
Strip away the emerald curtain and what remains is a small man with a large fear: of being seen for what he is. The Wizard's tyranny is not built on strength but on the management of that fear, projected outward onto the whole of Oz. He cannot rule by delivering (he has no magic, no genuine power, nothing to give), so he rules by directing attention. Every manufactured enemy is a mirror turned away from him. As long as the citizens of Oz are frightened of the Animals, of the witch, of the threat-of-the-week, they are not asking the one dangerous question: what, exactly, can the great and powerful Oz actually do? Persecution, for him, is not ideology; it is misdirection—the oldest trick a showman knows, scaled up to the size of a nation. This is why he settles on Elphaba with such speed and such calm. She is green, she is gifted, she is visibly other, and above all she has seen behind the curtain and refused to keep the secret. Branding her the "Wicked Witch" solves two problems at once: it discredits the one witness who could expose him, and it hands the crowd a fresh face to hate. He does not do this in a rage. He does it, genially, as good governance—and tells himself, and very nearly believes, that a leader simply needs an enemy, and that giving the people theirs is a kind of service.
The Wizard of Oz
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// The flaw"Giving people what they want" explains the tyrant — it does not absolve him
Here is the crack, and it is the whole point. The techniques of neutralization explain, with real precision, how an ordinary, cowardly man like the Wizard talks himself into tyranny without ever feeling like a villain—but a rationalization is not a justification, and explaining the excuse is not endorsing it. This is the trap the theory itself warns against. "I only gave them what they wanted" has the shape of a defense, but examine it and it collapses: the people did not want the Animals caged or an innocent woman framed until the Wizard taught them to, manufacturing the very fear he then claimed to be merely answering. The appeal to a higher loyalty—the good of Oz—does not undo the concrete harm done to the Animals he persecuted and the scapegoat he created; it only renames it. That he shed no blood with his own hands does not mean no one was injured. That he found the witch convenient to hate does not make her guilty. Every one of his five excuses is a device for evading a responsibility that stays exactly where it was—with the man who chose the lie and kept choosing it. The humbug is not less culpable for being a coward rather than a fanatic. He is culpable in a quieter, more ordinary, and more common way: he had, at every turn, the option to stop lying, and at every turn he preferred the spectacle. Neutralization describes the machinery of that preference. It does not excuse a single turn of it.
Explaining the excuse is not accepting it
The Wizard matters because his is the most transferable villainy in the whole rogues' gallery—not the singular evil of a mastermind, but the everyday mechanism by which decent-seeming people drift into indecent acts and never lose the sense of their own decency. Neutralization is not exotic; it is how most wrongdoing is actually done, from the schoolyard cheat to the architect of a persecution. And that is precisely why the theory must be held with care. To explain that the Wizard rationalized his way into tyranny is to gain a genuine and useful understanding—of how enemies are manufactured, how fear is farmed, how a coward governs by misdirection. It is not to grant him the pardon his own excuses are reaching for. The whole value of naming the five techniques is that, once named, they stop working: the appeal to the greater good is revealed as a cover, the denial of the victim as a slander, the denial of responsibility as a refusal. A society that learns to hear "I only gave them what they wanted" as a confession rather than a defense has learned the one thing the humbug most needs it not to know—that the smile is the tell, that the excuse is the method, and that understanding the method is the first step to refusing it. That is how the excuse is disarmed.
Three key takeaways
- The Wizard of Oz, as portrayed in Wicked, embodies the techniques of neutralization (Sykes & Matza, 1957): a con-man with no real power who seizes Oz through spectacle and rules by manufacturing enemies—the Animals, then Elphaba branded the "Wicked Witch"— to give a frightened people someone to fear and blame.
- He runs all five neutralizations at once: denial of responsibility ("I didn't choose this"), appeal to higher loyalties (the good of Oz), denial of the victim ("they brought it on themselves"), denial of injury ("no one's really hurt") and condemnation of the condemners. The affable, genial humbug is not the opposite of the tyrant—he is the tyrant's disguise, worn first before his own eyes.
- The flaw: a rationalization is not a justification. "I only gave them what they wanted" does not undo the innocents he framed or the Animals he persecuted—he manufactured the fear he then claimed to be answering, and at every turn chose the lie. Explaining the excuse is not excusing the act; the humbug still chooses it.
Sources · further reading
- Sykes, G. M. & Matza, D. (1957). “Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency”. American Sociological Review, 22(6), 664–670.
- Matza, D. (1964). Delinquency and Drift. John Wiley & Sons.
- Maruna, S. & Copes, H. (2005). “What Have We Learned from Five Decades of Neutralization Research?”. Crime and Justice, 32, 221–320.
- Baum, L. F. (1900). The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. George M. Hill Company.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is El Mago de Oz?
El Mago de Oz (“el Mago”) is a villain from Wicked, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. He arrived in Oz with no magic and no army—only a hot-air balloon and a gift for spectacle—and made himself absolute ruler by manufacturing enemies for a frightened people to fear.
Why does The Wizard of Oz become a villain?
The Wizard of Oz and the techniques of neutralization (Sykes & Matza): how a cowardly humbug talks himself into tyranny. The man who invents enemies is not a monster with a plan—he is a con-man who silenced his own conscience one excuse at a time.
Which criminological theory explains El Mago de Oz?
El Mago de Oz's case is analysed through Neutralization. The techniques of neutralization (Gresham Sykes and David Matza, 1957) are the rationalizations offenders use to silence guilt and drift into wrongdoing: denial of responsibility, denial of injury, denial of the victim, condemnation of the condemners, and appeal to higher loyalties. The Wizard of Oz, as portrayed in Wicked, is a machine of neutralizations—a con-man from our world with no real power who seized Oz through fraud and showmanship, ruling by inventing enemies (the persecuted Animals, then Elphaba branded the "Wicked Witch") to give a scared people someone to blame. He tells himself he did not choose to be a tyrant, he "just gives people what they want"; the scapegoats "brought it on themselves"; a leader "needs" an enemy. And the flaw is decisive: a rationalization is not a justification —"I only gave them what they wanted" does not undo the innocents he framed or the Animals he persecuted—.
