Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 50th Anniversary Edition

by Paulo Freire

It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the “rejects of life.”

Force is used not by those who have become weak under the preponderance of the strong, but by the strong who have emasculated them.

For the oppressors, however, it is always the oppressed

who are disaffected, who are “violent,” “barbaric,” “wicked,” or “fe-rocious” when they react to the violence of the oppressors.

in the re-sponse of the oppressed to the violence of their oppressors that a gesture of love may be found.

Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human.

It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors.

If the goal of the oppressed is to become fully human, they will not achieve their goal by merely reversing the terms of the contradiction, by simply changing poles.

An act is oppressive only when it prevents people from being more fully human.

Acts which prevent the restoration of the oppressive regime cannot be compared with those which create and maintain it, cannot be compared with those by which a few men and women deny the majority their right to be human.

the moment the new regime hardens into a dominating “bureaucracy”11 the humanist dimension of the struggle is lost and it is no longer possible to speak of liberation.

laborers, the former op-pressors do not feel liberated. On the contrary, they genuinely consider themselves to be oppressed.

Any restriction on this way of life, in the name of the rights of the community, appears to the former oppressors as a profound violation of their individual rights—although they had no respect for the millions who suffered and died of hunger, pain, sorrow, and despair.

For the oppressors, there exists only one right: their right to live in peace, over against the right, not always even recognized, but simply conceded, of the oppressed to survival.

Once a situation of violence and oppression has been established, it engenders an entire way of life and behavior for those caught up in it—oppressors and oppressed alike.

The oppressor consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. The earth, property, production, the creations of people, people themselves, time—everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal.

the oppressors de-velop the conviction that it is possible for them to transform everything into objects of their purchasing power; hence their strictly materialistic concept of existence.

what is worthwhile is to have more—always more—even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing.

Humanity is a “thing,” and they possess it as an exclusive right, as inherited property. To the oppressor consciousness, the humanization of the “others,” of the people, appears not as the pursuit of full humanity, but as subversion.

they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have.

If others do not have more, it is because they are incompetent and lazy, and worst of all is their unjustifiable ingratitude towards the “generous gestures” of the dominant class.

If the humanization of the oppressed signifies subversion, so also does their freedom; hence the necessity for constant control. And the more the oppressors control the op-pressed, the more they change them into apparently inanimate “things.”

Another way of formulating the same thought is to say that the aim of sadism is to transform a man into a thing, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and abso-lute control the living loses one essential quality of life—freedom.

Sadistic love is a perverted love—a love of death, not of life.

As the oppressor consciousness, in order to dominate, tries to deter the drive to search, the restlessness, and the creative power which characterize life, it kills life.

the oppressors are using science and technology as unquestionably powerful instruments for their purpose: the maintenance of the oppressive order through manipulation and repression.

the fact that certain members of the oppressor class join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation, thus moving from one pole of the contradiction to the other.

they almost always bring with them the marks of their origin: their prejudices and their deformations, which include a lack of confidence in the people’s ability to think, to want, and to know. Accordingly,

The generosity of the oppressors is nourished by an unjust order, which must be maintained in order to justify that generosity. Our converts, on the other hand, truly desire to trans-form the unjust order; but because of their background they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation.

A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust.

Those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly.

Conversion to the people requires a profound rebirth. Those who undergo it must take on a new form of existence; they can no longer remain as they were.

this fatalism is sometimes interpreted as a docility that is a trait of national character. Fatalism in the guise of docility is the fruit of an historical and sociological situation, not an essential characteristic of a people’s behavior.

Unde r the sway of magic and myth, the oppressed (especially the peasants, who are almost submerged in nature)15 see their suffering, the fruit of exploitation, as the will of God—as if God were the creator of this “organized disorder.”

the oppressed cannot perceive clearly the “order” which serves the interests of the oppressors whose image they have internalized.

The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people.

Because the oppressor exists within their oppressed comrades, when they attack those comrades they are indirectly at-tacking the oppressor as well.

the oppressed feel an irresistible attraction towards the oppressors and their way of life.

In their alienation, the oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressors, to imitate them, to follow them. This phenomenon is especially prevalent in the middle-class op-pressed, who yearn to be equal to the “eminent” men and women of the upper class.

Self-depreciation is another characteristic of the oppressed, which derives from their internalization of the opinion the oppressors hold of them.

The peasant feels inferior to the boss because the boss seems to be the only one who knows things and is able to run things.

They call themselves ignorant and say the “professor” is the one who has knowledge and to whom they should listen. The criteria of knowledge imposed upon them are the conventional ones.

Almost never do they realize that they, too, “know things” they have learned in their relations with the world and with other women and men.

it is only natural that they distrust themselves.

They often insist that there is no difference between them and the ani-mals; when they do admit a difference, it favors the animals. “They are freer than we are.”

It is striking, however, to observe how this self-depreciation changes with the first changes in the situation of oppression.

we were never drunkards or lazy. We were exploited!”

As long as their ambiguity persists, the oppressed are reluctant to resist, and totally lack confidence in themselves.

The magical force of the landowner’s power holds particular sway in the rural areas.

The oppressed must see examples of the vulnerability of the op-pressor so that a contrary conviction can begin to grow within them.