All human achievement depends on a repressed hatred of the mortal body

Evidence

The hatred and rage at the imperfect, unfit self can be the flip side of the quest for a perfected, controlled body, achieved through the right combination of workouts, diets, surgeries, and assorted wellness interventions. And it can grow more intense as we engage in another kind of body doubling: aging, that process of witnessing the changing of our face and form via such ravages as pregnancy, sleepless parenting, stress, pollution, and just being alive for enough revolutions around the sun. “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre,” Philip Roth, my problematic king of doppelgangers, observed. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 579 (#expands, via linked claim)

The aim of all these methods, in any case, is to manipulate the human body—with its infinite possibilities of suffering—in such a way as to make it destroy the human person as inexorably as do certain mental diseases of organic origin. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1017 (#expands, via linked claim)

These reproaches are not without some basis. But it is clear from the explicit criticisms that Montherlant addresses to woman-mother that what he hates in her is his own birth. He thinks he is God; he wants to be God: because he is male, because he is a “superior man,” because he is Montherlant. A god is not engendered; his body, if he has one, is a will molded in hard and disciplined muscles, not in flesh mutely inhabited by life and death; this flesh that he repudiates is perishable, contingent, and vulnerable and is his mother’s fault. “The only part of Achilles’ body that was vulnerable was the part his mother had held.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 454 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: State-sponsored violence channels a resentful hatred of living bodies; Self-hatred of the imperfect body drives the quest for bodily perfection — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 579; Physical suffering is instrumentalized to annihilate the human person through the body — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1017 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Self-hatred of the imperfect body drives the quest for bodily perfection #expands (0.82) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 579
• Physical suffering is instrumentalized to annihilate the human person through the body #expands (0.78) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1017
• Male hatred of women often masks a deeper hatred of maternal origin and embodiment #exemplifies (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 454
• Hostile society alienates the colonized subject from his own body #exemplifies (0.73)