Oppressors see their own privilege as earned while blaming victims for their poverty

Evidence

The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have. For them, having more is an inalienable right, a right they acquired through their own “effort,” with their “courage to take risks.” 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. Precisely because they are “ungrateful” and “envious,” the oppressed are regarded as potential enemies who must be watched. — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 143

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s own frame: this is precisely the mechanism (blame the poor for being ‘lazy’) that the banking model and its ‘generosity’ serve. — connects to: Oppressors project faults onto the oppressed to justify their own domination — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1758; Privileged innocence is purchased at the cost of others’ suffering — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 167; Respectability politics blamed black victims for their own oppression — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 923