The greatest challenge of any oppressor is to keep the oppressed from rising up against them. Sure, they can use fear and intimidation alone, but that leaves the constant risk of unexpectedly pushing the oppressed to a breaking point or having their oppression completely unraveled the moment that their power wavers. For this reason, the most stable and long-standing systems of oppression have convinced the oppressed that their oppressor's oppression is justified. During the time of feudalism, which came directly before the rise of capitalism, that justification was religion. Priests would tell their peasant congregations that the nobility were closer to God and therefore had a right to exploit them. Furthermore, they used the promise of heaven to keep people happy with their station. After all, what's 60 years of hard labor for someone else's benefit when you'll get an eternity of fun when it's over? Whether this promise was kept or not is another discussion, but either way, it was an insidious way of keeping the oppressed oppressed.
But as you can probably notice, this strategy has fallen into disuse. In its place, to best synergize with our current capitalist society, is the Hard Work Fallacy. Instead of relying on the decaying institution of religion to justify their oppression, oppressors have used the common ability of every person to pull up their bootstraps, put their nose to the grindstone, get their head in the game, blah, blah, blah, you get the idea. Essentially, since everyone is capable of working hard, and oppressors have supposedly reached their position by doing so, anyone is capable of becoming an oppressor in capitalist society (though I'd rather it not be necessary for me to become an oppressor in order to escape oppression)! The beautiful thing about the fallacy is that it not only convinces the oppressed that capitalist oppression is justified but also incentivizes them to defend it. Why do people nowhere near oppressor status fight against even the tiniest detriment upon their oppressor masters? Because they think that they're just a little bit of hard work away from joining their ranks, making support of anything anti-oppressor a bad move in the long term. But why exactly is hard work a fallacy? Because it doesn't match reality. If hard work truly led to wealth and power, CEOs must be hundreds if not thousands of times harder workers than their employees, an idea so preposterous that no one but the most passionate corporate cock suckers would believe it.
But the oppressors have realized the obvious invalidity of this argument, which is why they came up with the Smart Work Fallacy for anyone smart (more like not dumb) enough to get past it. The Smart Work Fallacy states that succeeding in capitalist society requires not just hard work, but intelligent application of it, and that this is the source of the oppressors' dominance over us. Similar to its sibling, it contains the same self-defense mechanism. The problem with this one is that the definition of “smart work” constantly changes based on our economy. You're an unskilled worker who wants a living wage? Should've gotten a degree. Can't find a job to pay off your loans? Should've entered a trade. Still not making enough? Should've invested. The entire market crashed? Should've gotten in before the bubble burst. Based on how it's evolved over just the last few years, working smart is just correctly picking the right way of making money based on the direction of the market (before making any significant financial commitments, of course). Essentially, smart work is simply guesswork. Even worse, due to the laws of supply and demand, it's impossible for most or even a significant portion of people to work smart, whatever that means at a given time. If jobs requiring degrees are lucrative because not many people are doing them, an influx of people logically getting into those fields will lower their lucrativity while raising it somewhere else. This may be economics 101, but it basically guarantees that the vast majority of people can never escape oppression.
To subscribe to the Hard or Smart Work Fallacies is to needlessly drown yourself in a detrimental fantasy. You end believing in something that is either flat-out wrong or is contradictory towards the argument it's supposed to support. Abandoning the religious justification of oppression required the Enlightenment itself to occur, but we're already capable of throwing off our current chains. We can stop the selfish and flawed rat race to escape our oppression by becoming oppressors if we simply remove the oppressive system itself.