People will blame themselves for powerlessness to protect a belief the world is sound

Evidence

Volunteers could have thought that they were powerless and been angry about that, but since they wanted to think that they live in a democracy where citizens like themselves have power to work on issues that are ”close to home,” they assumed that their powerlessness was their own fault. They could have tried to ”save face” and blame someone else for their powerlessness, but they preferred to think it was their own fault than to think that there was something deeply wrong with the world (contrast this with Goffman’s understanding of self-presentation: he emphasized the face-saving nature of interaction, saying that most people are loath to admit to incompetence; but volunteers were more interested in putting a face on the world than on themselves). — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 569

Categorization

• XREF: Inverts Goffman’s face-saving thesis from The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by diagnosing a reverse face-work: volunteers save the world’s face rather than their own. — connects to: Alienated people may deny their own oppressive reality as self-defense — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 499; Believing public talk is powerless makes volunteers feel powerless. — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 105
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely counterintuitive inversion of a canonical social theory with broad explanatory reach for political behavior.
• corroborated: 5 independent passages support this claim — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 569

Broader Connections

• Alienated people may deny their own oppressive reality as self-defense #corroborates (0.78) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 499