Societies, human relations, social artifacts, etc. do not simply exist; they are created by human languages, practices, habits, and so on. However, most of us take the world as it is presented to us for granted: we rarely stop to question how it got to be the way it did, or what social and historical conditions made our particular world possible. When we take the world for granted in this way, it becomes almost “natural” to us, and as such we cannot see the social work that produced it. This process by which social things are taken for granted as natural is called “naturalization” or “mystification” The task of critical theory is to demystify the world: to look at the social conditions that make the apparently natural world possible. In addition, critical theorists reflect on how those conditions and the world they create serve the interests of some groups at the expense of others.

Perhaps the clearest example of mystification can be found in grocery store checkout lanes: most of us have seen pictures of extremely thin models—with literally unreal proportions—on the cover of magazines like Cosmopolitan or Vanity Fair. However, most of us also know by now that these photos have gone through an editing process, using Photoshop or a similar image editing program. In fact, we can access videos on YouTube showing precisely the sort of editing process such photos go through.