Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 50th Anniversary Edition

by Paulo Freire

In the first case, the oppressor is “housed” within the people, and their resulting ambiguity makes them fearful of freedom. They resort (stimulated by the oppressor) to magical explanations or a false view of God, to whom they fatalistically transfer the responsibility for their oppressed state.40 It is extremely unlikely that these self-mistrustful, downtrodden, hopeless people will seek their own liberation—an act of rebellion which they may view as a disobedient violation of the will of God, as an unwarranted confrontation with destiny. (Hence, the oft-emphasized necessity of posing as problems the myths fed to the people by the oppressors.) In the second case, when the people have reached a relatively clear picture of oppression which leads them to localize the oppressor outside themselves, they take up the struggle to surmount the contradiction in which they are caught. At this moment they overcome the distance between “class necessity” and “class consciousness.”