Faith & Spirit Quote by Germaine Greer

Greer flips the gym-bro gospel on its head: strength, she suggests, isn’t a trophy sport. “Developing the muscles of the soul” borrows the language of training only to reject its most macho assumptions. No “competitive spirit,” no “killer instinct” - the usual cultural excuses for cruelty dressed up as excellence. In Greer’s hands, self-cultivation becomes non-rivalrous: the point isn’t to beat someone else, it’s to outlast your own evasions.

The subtext is unmistakably political. As an activist shaped by second-wave feminism, Greer is skeptical of any model of selfhood that smuggles domination in as virtue. The quote reads like a warning against the ways patriarchal, capitalist performance culture colonizes even inner life: if your “spiritual” growth looks like conquest, you’re still playing the same game, just with incense.

Yet Greer doesn’t romanticize softness. The line about “pain barriers” and the “spiritual athlete” acknowledges that noncompetitive doesn’t mean comfortable. Growth still involves impact, rupture, the moment you stop bargaining with your own fear. “Crash through” is an aggressive verb aimed inward, not outward; the opponent is denial, habit, complacency.

Context matters: Greer came of age in a period when liberation politics had to argue, relentlessly, that private life is a public battleground. This metaphor insists the inner realm is not an escape hatch from struggle. It’s where struggle gets retrained: away from annihilating others, toward enduring the hard parts of becoming free.