Love Quote by Germaine Greer

Greer takes a comforting liberal slogan and snaps the wiring: “brotherhood” sounds altruistic, but she argues it’s often just self-love with better PR. The charge of “narcissistic” is surgical. It doesn’t mean compassion is fake; it means the moral energy behind universalism can be disappointingly provincial. If I can only love you on the condition that you are recognizably like me, then my empathy is really a demand for mirroring. Difference becomes a problem to be solved, not a reality to be honored.

The line “the same the whole world over” is doing the heavy lifting. Greer is targeting a specific style of cosmopolitan sentimentality that treats humanity as a single, interchangeable unit, flattening culture, history, and power into a feel-good sameness. That flattening isn’t neutral. It’s the psychological companion to political projects that “include” others by requiring assimilation: be legible in my terms, speak my language of rights and desires, and then I can welcome you into the human club.

Context matters: Greer’s feminism has long been combative toward institutional pieties, including those that present themselves as progressive while quietly reproducing hierarchy. Read this in the late-20th-century debates over second-wave feminism, postcolonial critique, and multiculturalism: it’s a warning that “we’re all the same” can be a soft weapon. It can erase the very inequalities that make solidarity necessary, and it can turn moral universalism into a disguised centering of the self.