On the nature of friendship

What is it, why do we need it, and how does it end?

This is a post on the nature of friendship, which globohomo constantly seeks to subvert and destroy in their quest to turn everyone into atomized, blown out husks. What does friendship consist of and how is it nurtured or destroyed?

“Tell me your company, and I will tell you what you are.” - Miguel de Cervantes

I was thinking recently about the nature of friendship, what brings people together, the ties that bind them through time, and the events or personal developments that move them apart.

It is a curious thing. Who are you friends with and why? Do they just kind of happen, or was there intention put into building them?

There seem to be some commonalities between how friendships are formed and dissolve that I see:

1. Friendships which are formed in early life, in school, and in occupations that require trust and loyalty such as in the military. These friendships are formed based on commonalities, similar backgrounds, outlooks or personalities meshing. There are weaker ties formed by work and hobbies, and from parents becoming friends with the parents of other children;

2. Friendships become harder to form the older you get;

3. People gradually lose their friends as they age for one reason or another, but generally because staying in contact requires effort from one or both people and people get busy with life. Most of the older people I know only have maybe a couple of close friends left, even if they have a wider circle of acquaintances; and

4. It doesn’t help that globohomo is presiding over the complete atomization of society, turning everyone into asexual, amorphous widgets devoid of community ties. Even family members live across country from each other, maybe seeing each other a couple times a year if that.

What do we mean by friendship? Aristotle believed there are three types, which are as follows:

1. The friendship of utility. These friendships are based on what someone can do for you, or what you can do for another person. It might be that you put in a good word for someone, and they buy you a gift in return. This category is that of an acquaintance because you are not able to be fully open and honest with them;

2. The friendship of pleasure. These are friendships based on enjoyment of a shared activity or the pursuit of pleasures and emotions. This might be someone you go for drinks with, or share a particular hobby and is a common level of association among the young. This type of relationship can end quickly, dependent as it is on people’s ever-changing likes and dislikes; and

3. The friendship of virtue. These are the people you like for themselves, who typically influence you positively and push you to be a better person. “For perfect friendship you must get to know someone thoroughly,” Aristotle says, “and become intimate with them, which is a very difficult thing to do.” It involves offering and receiving honesty, acceptance, and selflessness. It is two equal parties coming together to forge a bond that provides mutual benefit, enjoyment, and appreciation. Cicero agrees with this perspective, viewing this love as being driven by one’s integrity: “For nothing inspires love, nothing conciliates affection, like virtue.” Cicero maintains that “Friendship springs from a natural impulse rather than a wish for help: from an inclination of the heart, combined with a certain instinctive feeling of love, rather than from a deliberate calculation of the material advantage it was likely to confer.” Aristotle thought that friendships of virtue were rare and that a person could have no more than maybe five in one’s life, meaning some close friends and even family members may be relegated to friendships of pleasure or even utility.

The friendship of virtue is a wonderful thing because it is a voluntary association which is not goal oriented. It is two people who take pleasure in each other’s company and there is an element of freedom associated with it. Real friends speak their minds uncensored to each other, or they are not friends but acquaintances. But I think the friendship of “virtue” is a misnomer; it is not “virtue” but rather one of compatible or shared moral codes. Our moral values create expectations of behavior from others and if one engage in activities the other abhors, it would be impossible to maintain the goodwill necessary for friendship.

Additionally, a friendship can only exist with mutually recognized goodwill, and this requirement holds friends to high moral standards of extending loyalty, honesty, integrity, compassion, and respect. Aristotle and Cicero believe perfect friendship is between those who are good, alike in virtue, and wish well for the sake of the other. Yet while these virtues are required for friendship, critically they need not extend to everyone; we can apply these morals to our friends but apply different and lesser standards to other people. Therefore it’s perfectly possible for bad or evil people to have strong friendships, so long as they treat their friends differently than they treat everyone else.

The scene where Vorenus saves Pullo in the unparalleled HBO series “Rome” is one of the best scenes in all of television history and demonstrates friendship based on compatible values and moral codes:

A friend of mine commented on the nature of brotherly bonds and how globohomo acts to subvert them:

You talk about globohomo atomizing people and destroying friendships, how on the one hand they make it hard to foster those virtuous friendships described and harder to connect with people. There’s an openness and selflessness and intimacy to friendship, it’s the kind of thing that we do in like a marriage, for example. Society is so hyper-sexualized that the kind of intimacy or sort of openness that is inherent in that kind of friendship of virtue becomes sort of twisted or perverted because people can’t tell the distinction between that and sexuality. Then virtuous friendship gets corrupted with a sensual or a lustful aspect in the society where it becomes a question of whether they can really be friends, and it’s exactly those kind of bonds of brotherhood that they’re trying to prevent.

This point reminded me of the stupid film 300, which was a kind of cartoonish hyper-masculine stylization that had an underlying homosexual eroticism that is bizarre on re-watch.

Gay and stupid.

Schopenhauer and Epictetus believe that friends are a burden and one should revel in solitude, but that doesn’t seem right to me.¹ Roman philosopher Cicero explains this emotional benefit of friendship in his treatise ​On Friendship.​ He argues that “misfortunes would be hard to bear if there were not someone to feel them even more acutely than yourself,” and so “friendship enhances prosperity, and relieves adversity of its burden by halving and sharing it”. A friend can lessen the burden of despair and can act as an emotional support system for those feeling isolated in times of need. A friend can also compensate for one’s deficiencies and accentuate one’s strengths. Cicero puts it this way: “In the face of a true friend a man sees as it were a second self. So that where his friend is he is; if his friend be rich, he is not poor, though he be weak, his friend's strength is his.” And there is an expression from Miguel de Cervantes, “Tell me your company, and I will tell you what you are.” Jim Rohn said, "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Or see Proverbs 13:20: “He who walks with wise men will be wise, But the companion of fools will suffer harm.” It also reminds me of John Donne’s great poem “No Man Is an Island”:

Now, there are risks to friendship. As people grow and mature, as we all do on our life paths, we may breach red lines of the the other person and those bonds of friendship may fray or be destroyed. Here’s Joshua Foa Dienstag on the fragility of friendship:

“Friendship is our best model of an arena that is meant to harbor randomness and chaos, while channeling it into a relatively stable association. If I knew at all times what to expect from my friends, their friendship would be valueless. We look to our friends to surprise us, even as we expect them to cope with our own surprises. And yet we have no guarantee that we can never overstep the bounds - we can destroy our friendships in a way that we can never break family ties. It can happen in a moment, in fact. But the transience of friendships is no mark against them, or at least, it does not deter us from pursuing them. Perhaps, indeed, their permanently endangered status is one of their attractions? And the possibility of friendship is also the possibility for a form of social association consistent with a pessimistic ethic.

Because friendship has no end, it is the least-bad setting for the act of exploration, the most likely tie to survive self-transformation. That a friendship could survive a change of every goal is unlikely, but at least possible.”

I like this quote, despite it being a bit utilitarian and transactional, because it touches on the fact that we are all on our own unique life path and we don’t know where our lives will take us, let alone other people’s. We try to exercise control over events and how we develop, but to a large extent it’s out of our hands and things happen to us and we react to them as best we can, not even in charge of our reaction. There is a mysterious element to it. As Ernst Junger said in The Details of Time, p. 59:

Every man has numerous friends and acquaintances with whom he gets on. Some of them have enough of a literary and historical background for him to talk with them. And yet, despite everything, a dialogue cannot always ensue. These things are hard to explain; it’s a question of music, of a certain harmony. Two intelligent people can meet, they can like each other; but nevertheless, a euphonious contact fails to emerge. The laws of a certain magnetism have to come into play. There are even extreme cases in which too much liking induces a blockage. Stendhal explained it very well in On Love: even when the crystallization does not take place, two people can still readily like each other very much.²

Personally, I’ve lost most of my close circle of friends over the past four years. These losses include:

1. Three friends who I had ideological differences with (one gave the deadly untested mRNA COVID vaccine to his children despite my pleas for him not to, another volunteered to give the public the death jabs, a third argued with me incessantly about politics from a corporatist globohomo perspective and we devolved into name calling). As a result I lost respect for these people and they gradually faded away. This is all reflective of the personal becoming the political over the past number of years, when historically in America one could separate them (but from a wider historical perspective this was an anomaly, brought about by unprecedented American prosperity and no external threats);

2. Two deaths, one to stroke and one to suicide (the latter resulting from schizophrenia);

3. One to diverging life paths where I came over time to disagree with his life choices, even though I tried to offer feedback and insight.

One can lean on one’s remaining friends or see acquaintances to try to make up the gap, but generally the loss of friends creates a void that is not easily filled. Friendship can’t be forced; it is something that grows organically or not at all. Such is life.

It looks like I’m not the only one experiencing this, although I’m somewhere between 2022 and 2023 on the chart. From Theodore Atkinson’s note.

For what it’s worth, Cicero recommends that when one breaks off a friendship, one should do it by creating distance and not by a grand fight, to take the high road:

Again, there is such a disaster, so to speak, as having to break off friendship. And sometimes it is one we cannot avoid….In such cases friendships should be allowed to die out gradually by an intermission of intercourse. They should, as I have been told that Cato used to say, rather be unstitched than torn in twain; unless, indeed, the injurious conduct be of so violent and outrageous a nature as to make an instant breach and separation the only possible course consistent with honour and rectitude. Again, if a change in character and aim takes place, as often happens, or if party politics produces an alienation of feeling (I am now speaking, as I said a short time ago, of ordinary friendships, not of those of the wise), we shall have to be on our guard against appearing to embark upon active enmity while we only mean to resign a friendship. For there can be nothing more discreditable than to be at open war with a man with whom you have been intimate….

Our first object, then, should be to prevent a breach; our second, to secure that, if it does occur, our friendship should seem to have died a natural rather than a violent death. Next, we should take care that friendship is not converted into active hostility, from which flow personal quarrels, abusive language, and angry recriminations. These last, however, provided that they do not pass all reasonable limits of forbearance, we ought to put up with, and, in compliment to an old friendship, allow the party that inflicts the injury, not the one that submits to it, to be in the wrong. Generally speaking, there is but one way of securing and providing oneself against faults and inconveniences of this sort—not to be too hasty in bestowing our affection, and not to bestow it at all on unworthy objects.

I hope you found this discourse on the nature of friendship helpful so that we can perhaps approach the ones we have or the ones we cultivate with greater intentionality and appreciation.

Thanks for reading.

1. In his argument against society, Schopenhauer in Arthur Schopenhauer’s Essays on Suffering and the Wisdom of Life points out that interpersonal discord is one of the “countless and unavoidable” burdens and disadvantages arising from “having to do with others” and a cost or bad of society. He argues that it is better to be alone, instead of being in a social relationship, because “no man can be in perfect accord with anyone but himself—not even with a friend or the partner of his life; differences of individuality and temperament are always bringing in some degree of discord, though it may be a very slight one”. He further argues against society, asserting that it is only when a man “is alone that he is really free,” because “all society necessarily involves, as the first condition of its existence, mutual accommodation and restraint upon the part of its members”. Epictetus in ​A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus shares Schopenhauer’s sentiments towards seclusion, asserting that if a man wants to be happy he should be alone, because love tethers people to the fate of others which is outside of one’s control, and discord will be unavoidable due to differences of individuality and temperament.

2. Or see Junger’s war journals, 1941-1945, August 28, 1942 entry: “We can seek another person with the intention of being particularly cordial or particularly intimate that day, yet there is no protection against annoyance. The tuning of the strings to produce a harmonious chord is not controlled by our will. This often happens to me with encounters I’ve been looking froward to - they seem chilly, and the proper harmony is not reestablished until days or weeks later.”