A Brief Consideration of the Nature of Friendship

The Germanic word friend has ultimately been traced to a proto-Indo-European word meaning “loved one,” the same word that would give rise to the name of the Germanic goddess Fri, the wife or loved one of Odin, from whose name the word freedom would be derived. Frith, too, is a word cognate to both freedom and friend, meaning something to the effect of “mutual defense.”

When considering that the source of friend was that of a loved one, including one’s wife, and that this came also to mean “free,” as in “free from bondage,” and “mutual protection,” we might consider that a friend is a beloved individual—if of the same sex, perhaps more related to the sense of agape than of eros—, who, by extension, should be close in one’s life, made free from coercion and, as consequence, defended against harm.

For many people, a friend is “someone who genuinely cares about you, supports you, and shares a mutual bond of trust, respect, and companionship.” This touches on some of the ideas presented above, but perhaps without the same umph. What seems to be lacking is not the being beloved or bound up in one’s life, as that may be assumed by “genuinely cares about you” and “companionship,” but the “made free from coercion and, as consequence, defended against harm” part. To some extent, this might be considered a part of “supports you, and shares a mutual bond of trust, respect,” but this phrasing does not necessitate that one’s freedoms will be defended against harm by others. I believe that to be an essential element of friendship.

To defend someone, you must love them and trust that they are right. As such, they must be conscientious and rational. To defend someone is to be willing to take a risk that one may oneself be harmed from the same belligerence. This sort of risk requires that the defended be worth defending, that they are someone who does not ask this upon themselves, but who has been wronged. And this must be understood by those who defend. This is a lot to ask of someone in general. It’s a lot to ask of someone who does not understand how freedoms are interconnected, how their own freedoms are dependent upon the existence of those of their loved ones.

People I have called friend in the past have been believers in, or are tolerant of, government, and, by necessary extension, believe that I should not be free. They would not agree that they do not think I should be free, and would contort words and express sentiments otherwise, suggesting that somehow government protects my freedom or somehow does not contradict it, but this is an inevitable consequence of their belief in government. If you believe in government, the entity that takes away my freedoms, you believe I should not be free. No matter the distortions, this remains always a natural fact. And this natural fact comes up against the fact of what a friend really is.

Consequentially, the only people who are capable of becoming true friends are anarchists, as anarchists are the only individuals who do not believe in government, and so who can affirm the freedom of others. This is not to suggest that all anarchists are friends, even if they should be, but is to suggest that anarchists alone have the potential to become friends. Of course, I must be stringent here about definitions. By anarchist, I exclusively mean “mutualist,” as I do not accept any deviation from the original cause for anarchy as varieties of anarchism, but as quasi-, pseudo-, neo-, or false anarchism, or as crypto-statism, which I associate more with the Illuminati and synarchy.

Living in a statist society, surrounded by pawns, means living without friends. There may be pleasant acquaintances, companions, cohorts, comrades, buddies, and so-on, but there are no friends because nothing that resembles frith on any meaningful or significant level. Acquaintances, no matter how sentimentally attached, are not willing to risk their lives or even to conspire to protect the freedoms of those they call “friend.” Between acquaintances, there can be no honor. Integrity is demanded by true friendship.

Perhaps those who engage in conspiratorial crime have the closest experiences to friendship anymore...