Friends are more than names in your Rolodex

Who would die for you?

I apologize to

LEAFBOX

for not reading his interview with

Rurik Skywalker

until yesterday.

Interview: Rurik Skywalker

I somehow missed it when it was published, and even when I did find it, I kept putting off reading it, knowing I would have an intense, time-consuming experience. Which it was. Which is a good thing.

No, great. I could Stack about that interview for days. Maybe I will. Although my first priority is to do my own thing here, I can’t help but also write about others when they’re on the same wavelength. A rare occurrence.

I’ve been bothered by the sorry state of friendship in the USSA for some time now. Rurik has independently come to similar conclusions, wording them and backing them up better than I could with his experience in the East:

Rurik: I hate the way Americans treat one another. And this, this culture, unfortunately, it's an Anglo thing as well. So you definitely get it with Brits and Australians. They don't understand the concept of friendship. They're like a very superficial people. and they're extremely lonely.

[…Y]ou talk to a lot of Americans and they're extremely lonely people they don't have friends they're looking for something but they're so messed up and they're so tainted and poisoned that they can't actually dig themselves out of their own hole.

[… T]here is no culture of friendship in the anglosphere the concept is completely different in the East. So you can actually acquire a real friend and i've talked about this with other Americans and each of the conversations has just really proved my points because I'll be like, listen, you people don't have friends. You don't understand how to maintain a male to male friendship. And they'll talk about how that's not true. I was on the soccer team or that's not true. I was in the frat. And, you know, this, this conveys the entire mentality, which is they have to be, they're actually talking about social organizations. They conflate social organizations with friendship or membership in some sort of society as friendship.

So they have no idea what like this peer to peer thing is where you could just, the concept just doesn't occur to them where you could like meet another man. And regardless of his social status and regardless of whether he's in the same club as you or whatever, you could just create this parallel relationship where you help each other out and you have each other's backs. Even though, you know, you're not part of some formal, you haven't signed a formal treaty or done a pledge or you don't have blackmail on each other. This concept is alien to the Anglo mind.

And that's why whenever they want to do politics they always want to do like this: Let's create an organization, you know, let's find, let's have member lists […]

And these people will create organization lists like, you know, they can't help themselves. And everything has to be formal. Everything has to be ritualized. Everyone has to have a hierarchy. You have to jump through hoops. You have to believe the right things.

You know, these are religious fanatics. It doesn't matter what religion they're pursuing, liberalism, Christianity, whatever. They're always doing it with this fanaticism.

And you just, if you try to actually make friends with an American, it's frankly impossible. You can have a drinking buddy in an American. You can have a business partner in an American, but you can't make a friend out of an American.

And if I can't have friends among these people, I don't want to be around them. I don't want to live in their society. I think it's fundamentally broken and should be completely reorganized if we've come to the point where they don't understand how this concept works.

LEAFBOX: […] Like I speak fluent Spanish and yeah, there's definitely a difference in feeling in terms of friendship between maybe someone from Argentina and myself and then the typical American friendships seem more superficial and transactional.

Rurik: They just can't. It's all business for them. It's a horrible mentality. They're all infected with it. They don't even know that they're all like this. And even if you wanted to treat an American as a friend, if you gave them the Slavic friend treatment, which is like, you really put your hand over their back and you know, you really you're basically treat them like a brother, like this is this person's now surrogate family. Right. They will not honor that. They will not reciprocate in kind. They can't. They just think you're a chump. They just think that you're foolish or you're overly sentimental. So they're stunted and deformed and depraved people.

What Rurik said (“You can have a business partner in an American”) came to mind just hours later last night when I saw how Charles Johnson used the word “friend” (emphasis mine):

Eric [Weinstein] professes not to know me but his boss Peter Thiel and I do know one another and we are friends. Peter is an investor in several of my companies.

If someone is like your brother - a true friend - would you say he and you “do know one another”?

A couple more examples of “friend” in Johnson’s writing (emphasis mine):

To the Israelis in the streets protesting their illegitimate gangster government today: You have no greater friend than me. Indeed some of my dear friends — Americans who became Israeli — are directly involved in those protests.

[…]

I want to thank my friend Nassim Taleb for directing me to what’s been going on in the influencer economy

I don’t know Johnson, much less Thiel, Taleb, or Johnson’s unnamed Israeli “friends”, so I can only guess that they aren’t friends in Rurik’s sense. Or mine.

Looking up Johnson in Wikipedia, I see that

Johnson has a long-standing relationship with Silicon Valley financier and Trump backer Peter Thiel, including collaboration on strategy against Gawker and work for the Trump campaign, as outlined in detail in the book The Contrarian.

Johnson both recruited and outed Thiel as a federal informant to Business Insider.

Should friends out each other? Should they remain friends after being outed?

Obviously my answers to those questions are no and no. I don’t want to be betrayed.

Not saying that I like federal informants and that they must never be outed. Wikipedia claims Johnson is a Fed too. I can’t easily verify that or the outing story because Wikipedia’s source for both claims is behind a paywall.

But that doesn’t matter. My point isn’t to judge Johnson or Thiel (though I can’t help myself!). It’s to use real, specific public examples to point out how loosely the word “friend” is used in English. Do Johnson and Thiel treat each other like brothers? (The Russian movie Brother which I’ve never seen comes to mind.) Would they die for each other?

I’d be shocked if Johnson would die for Taleb. Or his “dear friends - Americans who became Israeli”.

That reference to “dear friends” bugs me not because I think Israelis can’t be friends but because Johnson’s public persona is patriotic: e.g., he accuses Eric Weinstein of

being a traitor to the United States of America. This is not something I do idly. Nor is it something I do without a degree of fear. After all, if Eric is a belonging to a foreign power, he (or more likely his masters) might well decide to have me taken out.

If someone isn’t America-first, then yeah, I can see them having friends in the real sense from wherever. Country, shmountry - brotherhood can transcend passports.

But playing the patriot card with “traitor” rhetoric while also having “dear friends” who abandoned the country one loves for a country one opposes is … awkward.

I mean … if Bizarro me waved the Murrican flag and went on and on about the eeeevil ChiComs while also claiming I had “dear friends” who left my beloved States to become PRC citizens, wouldn’t that strike you as cogdis? Or at least as an odd use of “friend” according to Rurik’s definition?

It’s a normal use in America, though. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Johnson is relatively closer to his “dear friends” in Israel than many (most?) Americans are to their so-called “dear friends”.

We’ve all seen gigantic Facebook “friend” lists. I’ll confess - I’ve got one. And not one person on the list would die for me. Not that anyone should - an argument for another Stack.

Does the death part of my definition of “friend” disturb you? Strike you as extreme? Alien? Extremely alien? It’s not my invention.

In the second century AD, Lucian of Samosata had a Scythian character say,

Friendships are not formed with us, as with you, over the wine-cups, nor are they determined by conditions of age or neighborhood. We wait till we see a brave man, capable of valiant deeds, and to him we all turn our attention. Friendship with us is like courtship with you […] At length a friend is accepted, and the engagement is concluded with our most solemn oath: “to live together and if need be to die for one another.” That vow is faithfully kept: once let the friends draw blood from their fingers into a cup, dip the points of their swords therein, and drink of that draught together, and from that moment nothing can part them. (tr. by Fowler and Fowler, 1905)

The Scythians are long gone and mysterious, so I have no idea how romanticized Lucian’s account is.

But that doesn’t matter. I got that quotation from Christopher I. Beckwith’s Empires of the Silk Road which opens with “The Hero and His Friends”, in which he makes the case for Rurikite friendship as “the heart of every newborn Central Eurasian nation” (p. 14) going “back to the Proto-Indo-Europeans” (p. 12).

The Proto-Indo-European root for ‘to bind’ was mey, which was inherited by Proto-Indo-¹ and incorporated into mi-tra with the instrumental suffix -tra², becoming Sanskrit mitra ‘covenant, friend (i.e., one bound by a covenant)’, Avestan mithra ‘covenant’, and Persian mehr ‘friendship’. Scythian was an Iranic language and therefore probably had its own version of the m-binding/friendship word.

Sanskrit mitra ‘friend’ in the Siddham script, my favorite script for Sanskrit

That m-word is best known in the West as Mithra,

an ancient Iranian deity (yazata) of covenants, light, oaths, justice, the Sun, contracts, and friendship. In addition to being the divinity of contracts, Mithra is also a judicial figure, an all-seeing protector of Truth (Asha), and the guardian of cattle, the harvest, and the Waters.

A 1700-year-old relief of Mithra in what is now Taq-e Bostan, Iran. Photograph by dynamosquito. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Mithra was Westernized as Mithras³, the focus of Mithraism.

Best friends slay bulls. Relief of Mithras doing his thing from what is now Neuenheim near Heidenberg, scanned by Immanuel Giel from Karl Pfaff’s Heidelberg und Umgebung (Heidelberg and Its Environs, 1902). Imagine the ancient German men who thought of Mithras as their Freund⁴.

Very little is known about that pre-Christian religion of Rome, so let me speculate that Mithraism might have been ‘friendism’, a brotherhood of friends - syndexioi (“united by the handshake” according to Wikipedia). A brotherhood destroyed by Christianity. Thanks, Jesus.

Seventeen centuries later, thanks to Mammon’s Krass Kapitalism, brotherhood is nearly extinct in America. People have sex and business partners, coworkers, clients, and parasocial contacts - “friends” with quotation marks - but no real friends.

No druz’ya - the plural of Russian drug ‘friend’, pronounced “drook” and popularized in A Clockwork Orange as droog in Nadsat.⁵ The word is descended from the Proto-Indo-European root dʰrewgʰ- ‘to be loyal; to serve one’s tribe⁶’.

My Russian-language professor tried to make my class understand what drug meant. That it was not merely an automatic substitute for “friend” in American English. He opened my eyes to how meaningless “friend” had already become three decades ago. ‘Social’ media has only exacerbated its semantic bleeding.

If an English speaker tells me they have a “friend”, that tells me nothing beyond the fact that they’ve had contact, however brief, with someone. They might not even know that someone’s real name. Where is the dʰrewgʰ-, the loyalty of the ancient Indo-European, in their modern pseudo-druzhba (Russian for ‘friendship’)⁷?

The friendless are powerless against the Regime.⁸

Our only hope is to Make Friendship Great Again.⁹ MFGA!¹⁰

1. I use the term “Iranic” instead of “Iranian” to avoid confusion with the modern Iranian state. The Kurds, for instance, are an Iranic-speaking people, but only about one out of four Kurds lives in Iran. And there are other Iranic speakers who are entirely outside Iran: e.g., the Orthodox (!) Ossetians in Russia, Georgia, and South Ossetia and the Sarikolis of China (!). The modern Iranic world extends far beyond Iran.

The distinction between “Iranic” and “Iranian” is analogous to that between “Turkic” and “Turkish”. The Crimean Tatars once spoke a Turkic language which is not Turkish, the dominant language of the modern Turkish state.

(The Crimean Tatar language is “estimated to be on the brink of extinction, being taught in only around 15 schools in Crimea” - and I doubt students in those 15 schools use it off campus or even in most of their classes. All attempts to revive dying languages are doomed.)

2. The instrumental suffix -tra is also in Sanskrit mantra ‘what one thinks with’ (< man ‘to think’, cognate to mind and mental) and sūtra ‘thread’: i.e., ‘what one sews with’ (< sīv ‘to sew’).

3. Mithras combines Iranic mithra with the Latin and Greek masculine nominative singular ending -s in Julius, Socrates, etc.

4. The word Freund is of course anachronistic here. And maybe entirely inappropriate if none of the Mithraists there were local. If some Germans had been initiated into the Mysteries of Mithras, they might have thought of him as something like Proto-Germanic frijōndz. (The -z of frijōndz is part of the nominative singular ending and is ultimately cognate to the -s of Mithras.)

5. Word-final Cyrillic -g is pronounced [k] in Russian. The Nadsat spelling droog is a mix of transcription and transliteration: the Russian vowel is phonetically transcribed English-style as oo, but the final consonant is transliterated from Cyrillic -g without regard for pronunciation.

6. Ah, ‘tribe’, another dying concept among the White majority (not for long!) of the USSA. The LastWhite has no need for such a hoary old idea, not when he is CONvinced he is so ‘superior’ that his job can never be outsourced or done by H-1Bs. He beLIEves he is as irreplaceable as his idol Eeeeelon. He will be the last in-DUH-dividual standing in an Exciting Brown World. Suuuure. Are there any POCs on the planet who are that delusional?

7. Where’s the -g of drug ‘friend’ in druzhba ‘friendship’? In Proto-Balto-Slavic, the ancestor of the Baltic (e.g., Lithuaian, Latvian, and Old Prussian which isn’t a kind of German) as well as the Slavic languages, the word was dráug-ībāˀ with -g-. That -g- before -ī- became zh. (Cf. how Latin hard g came to be pronounced [zh] before i in French.) Then the following vowel disappeared.

8. Couldn’t resist having two nearly consecutive -less words. One could argue that a friendless person like me isn’t powerless because I can resist the Regime alone. And I do. I refuse to believe its lies or take its injections. That’s nice, but “no” isn’t enough to overthrow the Regime.

9. I think the odds of this happening are close to zero. But if you think I’m wrong, I’ve given you the key to prove me wrong. Make friends, make revolution. There is no salvation in isolation.

10. MFGA … “muff-guh” … ugh! How about MMGA - Make Mithra Great Again? But how many Americans even know who Mithra is?