> Plenty of antisocial (or worse) behaviour has been promulgated by those indisputably at the top of the social food chain.
This isn't a counterpoint to "fix the world," because those "at the top of the social food chain" are, of course, partners in an oppressor/oppressed dynamic that prevents both parties from realize their full human potential.
"As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized," Freire says. In a sense, both parties are mutilated by the dynamic.
So "the top of the social food chain" is not a clean sample of a fixed world.
> This isn't a counterpoint to "fix the world," because those "at the top of the social food chain" are, of course, partners in an oppressor/oppressed dynamic that prevents both parties from realize their full human potential.
You described the human condition. This is “the world” we all live in today. Isolating the people at the top as somehow not part of “the world” doesn’t work.
If you consider the winners to also be "dehumanised" by their ongoing winning in cultural and financial terms, as this Freire apparently did, then sure. But they themselves -- the ongoing winners -- certainly did not, that being the reason for their actions in the first place.
The other relevant opinion would be that of the "losers" -- the people oppressed by the winners. Did they feel that the winners were oppressing themselves? I'm certain they did not!
I think Freire is either deluded, or deliberately conflating the notion of what a powerful party views as good for itself with some higher, ethically tinged notion of how we all ought to behave.
This isn't a counterpoint to "fix the world," because those "at the top of the social food chain" are, of course, partners in an oppressor/oppressed dynamic that prevents both parties from realize their full human potential.
"As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized," Freire says. In a sense, both parties are mutilated by the dynamic.
So "the top of the social food chain" is not a clean sample of a fixed world.
Sorry if I am talking past your point.