No thank you for being no friend

The high cost of friendless politics, diplomacy, and economics

Today I want to tell you why Thursday is the best day of the week. It’s not every day that you get to put Hump Day behind you and also have Friday to look forward to. And once it’s Friday, you have the weekend, and then it’s Monday again—dang it. Thursday is the only day where you have both the thrill of the work week sliding to an end, and also the anticipation of how that box of Friday donuts will disappear from the break room counter. Then again, many people still work from home, so the “water cooler” vibe is kind of dead. And some of my readers are undoubtedly retired, which is another way of saying “every day is Saturday.” But I still like Thursday, and let’s move on. What are you looking at, Pepe? I said, move on.

Image: Grok

Let’s talk about friends, the most personal relationships. In the U.S., friendship has declined. There are all kinds of reasons for this, not in small part a drifting into social media bubbles, the lack of public meeting spaces, the gig economy, and of course, COVID-19. Americans identify more with our work than our hobbies. It’s no longer a hobby—it’s a “side hustle” designed to make you a few extra bucks. The people you hang with outside of work are just as likely to be customers, suppliers, or collaborators, as they are to be just friends. And sitting around with your online-only friend groups is not the same as cracking a beer and hitting some golf balls with your longtime buddies.

This matters in many ways. A recent Harvard Kennedy School article on the decline of friendship waves a warning flag for future generations.

As Derek Thompson writes, “a socially underdeveloped childhood leads to socially stunted adulthood.” In short, we’re building a generation of people who do not know, and may not have the ability, to tolerate the messy work of forming friendships. Research also suggests that digital interactions lead to weaker connections and lower senses of mental well-being. A recent study of nearly 13,000 adults over the age of 50 found that those who engaged in face-to-face interactions at least once a week experienced better physical and mental well-being, whereas communication through calls or texts did not have the same effect. Neuroscience helps us make sense of these findings. Research shows that hearing a familiar voice reduces cortisol and boosts oxytocin—hormones tied to stress relief and bonding—while text-based communication and video calls fail to trigger the same response​. Without these biological cues, digital interactions can feel strangely empty, reinforcing isolation rather than alleviating it.

Making friends is difficult, because it involves opening up your authentic self, a vulnerability, including the freedom to disagree but still remain close, to someone not in your family or workplace—a choice versus a relationship built on circumstance like birth or employment. People who have few close friends, or none at all, have a tendency to view every relationship as transactional, in the sense of it being beneficial to them, or a drain. Bonding is important, through shared activities, built trust, and common history. Also, maintaining friendships gives us perspective and qualities like mercy, compassion, and care. Without friendship, meaning is found, but not in places that improve the social cohesion of our relationships, and that, in macro, harms our society.

Now let’s imagine a society based on transactional relationships, where the drive is to maintain the greatest number of people who are willing to do more for you than you do for them. This is a society where everyone is unsatisfied just being around people for the value of companionship; there must be some inherent, economic or social value to every interaction, or relationships are simply discarded, or the camber of the interaction is manipulated until the proper value is extracted. These are not really, truly symbiotic relationships. It’s more like mutually parasitic interactions until the next, plumper, host arrives.

I suppose I just described Hollywood, or Nashville, where many “friendships” are merely rungs on the many ladders to fame and fortune, and the “casting couch” can be the quickest way for a young woman to friend her way to the top. When I think of this, I’m reminded of the Eagles song “New Kid in Town.” That lyric: “You’re walking away / And they’re talking behind you / They will never forget you / Till somebody new comes along” encapsulates the whole fake-friend ecosystem of professional music, writing, art, and entertainment.

When the result is for public consumption, I suppose this, as a capitalist economic system of distribution for talent, is fairly efficient. Bad music, whether achieved by hook or crook, is not going to sell, and those friendships will dissolve like snow falling on a hot-rod’s hood. Good music is found through the constant search and mixing, making friendships. Some of those friendships are genuine, and the artists really click and like each other. But that’s a side benefit in the ecosystem, not the core of it, which is pure patronage.

But in politics and governance, a system run by friendless people, who grew up friendless, and never maintained close relationships, is not simply an economically efficient arrangement for distribution of talent and power. It’s actually toxic, isn’t it? I mean, all politics at some level comes down to pure patronage. Candidates have to get elected, and that doesn’t simply happen by them announcing their wonderful policies and sharing their profound thoughts.

Leaders have to decide the “right thing” to do in policy, diplomacy, and justice. If every relationship is merely an opportunity to get more than you give, the entire basis of those elements of service fall to pieces. America finds itself in the midst of a—I hate the word—crisis of friendship. A perfect storm where the toxic mix of friendless upbringing, shameless promotion, the entertainment and celebrity engine, and brazen self-interest have combined into a leadership paradigm that only values getting, and decries giving for the reason of simply helping others.

Friendship has a real benefit, a dividend, that’s payable in real terms. Friends help each other in need. They show up when nobody else is willing to help. They keep commitments and suffer personal loss in order to build up their friend. But when there is no friendship, these values disappear, and all relationships are divided into “win,” “lose,” and “NPC” (as in “non-player character”).

Looking at our national situation, in all the issues facing America, we’re in trouble because we have ignored friendship. Europeans may not look on Americans as polite, or refined in the sense of cultural pedigree, but they have always, since WWII, looked on us as friends. The real kind of friend that you can disagree with but still remain close. The Japanese people have emulated American culture, in their own unique way, for so long that it’s unthinkable for them to see the U.S. as anything but a friend. Our relationship with South Korea is similar. Israelis, as they are wont to be, remain skeptics of all relationships, but yes, Jews around the world have always viewed America as a haven, and a place of friendship.

The politics now at work in the White House, and in legislatures like the one in Austin, Texas, or Sacramento, California, have adopted the friendless model of governance. Get what you can from everyone and give back less than you get is the motto.

In Ukraine, there are no good answers. The best answer would have been for President Joe Biden to have hit Russia hard in the first weeks of the war when Russia was repulsed from its initial invasion. But Biden’s policy was not to risk expansion of wars, so we missed that opportunity. Now, ending the war may be the wrong thing to do in the sense of remaining friends with Europeans. Russia is and has been nobody’s friend for a hundred years. But America is choosing the expedient, not the compassionate. We would sacrifice 200,000 Ukrainians to Russian rule, and consign 60,000 Ukrainian children to indoctrination and eventual conscription to fight their own countrymen. That’s grotesque and disgusting, and no amount of “winning” can wipe away the moral stain of it.

China is nobody’s friend either, under the communist boot. It’s one thing to pursue “Realpolitik” in relationships, but quite another to abandon reason in dealing with TikTok, flouting our own law, but maintain a punishing mercantilist policy with a nation that is willing to sacrifice its own citizens to prop up its rulers’ power. That model might work in America for a short time, but it is bound to fail here, and on its way to failure, to damage many fine institutions that were formed on real friendship.

I understand many of the reasons people voted to elect Donald Trump as president. The Clintons have not been much better in their handling of friendships. It’s telling that Chelsea Clinton and the Trump kids have been fast friends for many years. They both understand the dynamic of having parents who held friendship in low regard. Many politicians took that view, but most presidents maintained at least a few close, lifelong friends. To my knowledge, the man in the White House right now never had even one. Imagine that: a life without a friend, where even wives and kids are merely relationships to be manipulated or used for self benefit.

If character is destiny, friendship is the sea on which it sails. Sailing toward a friendless policy, trashing law, mercy, compassion, and the many dividends of friendship, in favor of some fleeting transactional braggadocio, is more than simply poor judgment or bad policy. It’s a destiny bereft of meaning, true value, and humanity.

We are now beginning to see the high cost we’re going to pay when the bill comes due.

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