Oppressors disguise human-made conditions as natural facts to block revolt

Evidence

The oppressed has only one solution: to deny the harmony of that mankind from which an attempt is made to exclude him, to prove that he is a man and that he is free by revolting against the tyrants. In order to prevent this revolt, one of the ruses of oppression is to camouflage itself behind a natural situation since, after all, one can not revolt against nature. When a conservative wishes to show that the proletariat is not oppressed, he declares that the present distribution of wealth is a natural fact and that there is thus no means of rejecting it; and doubtless he has a good case for proving that, strictly speaking, he is not stealing from the worker the product of his labor, since the word theft supposes social conventions which in other respects authorizes this type of exploitation; but what the revolutionary means by this word is that the present regime is a human fact. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 86

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘ruse of oppression’ maps onto how the serious man and the sub-man justify their situations; also resonates with how economic inequality is naturalized in public discourse. — connects to: Oppressors project faults onto the oppressed to justify their own domination — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1758; Believing humans stand apart from earth enables classist oppression — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 1077; Oppressed people will rebel regardless of rulers’ divine claims — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 281
• SEED: Angle: how contemporary ‘naturalization’ rhetoric — markets, gene determinism, IQ discourse — functions as Beauvoir’s ruse of oppression.