Destroying individual uniqueness is the deepest horror, beyond legal or moral outrage

Evidence

The killing of man’s individuality, of the uniqueness shaped in equal parts by nature, will, and destiny, which has become so self-evident a premise for all human relations that even identical twins inspire a certain uneasiness, creates a horror that vastly overshadows the outrage of the juridical-political person and the despair of the moral person. It is this horror that gives rise to the nihilistic generalizations which maintain plausibly enough that essentially all men alike are beasts. Actually the experience of the concentration camps does show that human beings can be transformed into specimens of the human animal, and that man’s “nature” is only “human” insofar as it opens up to man the possibility of becoming something highly unnatural, that is, a man. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1020

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Arendt’s redefinition of human ‘nature’ as the capacity to become ‘unnatural’ — i.e., humanity as openness to self-transformation — is a genuinely paradigm-level point about what personhood means.
• XREF: The ‘specimens of the human animal’ redefinition connects to biopolitics/necropolitics vocabulary in later Islamophobia readings about how populations get reduced to biological categories. — connects to: Foisting uniqueness on everyone is itself a cruel status demand — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 298
• FICTION: The claim that individuality requires equal parts nature, will, and destiny could seed speculative fiction about engineered identical humans.