Lack of economic and social power makes the world appear to be given

Evidence

The serious man must mask the movement by which he gives them to himself, like the mythomaniac who while reading a love-letter pretends to forget that she has sent it to herself. We have already pointed out that certain adults can live in the universe of the serious in all honesty, for example, those who are denied all instruments of escape, those who are enslaved or who are mystified. The less economic and social circumstances allow an individual to act upon the world, the more this world appears to him as given. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 45

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Resonates with a materialist/structural account of false consciousness; connects to Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed.