The Rat's Eye Business Rule #4: Friends can call you on your “bullshit” because they know something useful and they care about you. Everyone else is an acquaintance or just a face in the crowd.
These days, it feels like we’re all being pushed into polar positions. One of those poles is “friend or not-friend(ly)” and that, I guess, is nothing new. In my memory, I think I remember people with different views and politics remaining friendly, if not friends. Today, that seems so long ago and so impossible that it’s entirely possible I’m deluding myself. I have certainly had many Republican friends over the years, but now that being Republican means being a member of the Trump Cult, not so much. My tolerance for that kind of gullibility, racism, sexism, corruption, and treason is near-zero. As someone much wiser than me explained recently, my “bandwidth” for a lot of things has been reduced dramatically by both Trump and his Republican enablers and the cult drones.
One of the qualities I’ve always valued in my friends (of which I only have, and want, a very few) is the ability and willingness to call “bullshit” in both directions. We all get off-track multiple times in our lives and run the risk of crashing and burning or heading down a trail that we’ll either have to backtrack out of or we’ll dead-end into and be stuck. If you get more than a couple of chapters into You Are Not So Smart, you’ll have to face the ugly truth about yourself and, if you are even a little bit introspective, you should hope for a few friends in your life who will gently help you recalibrate. Or, sometimes, not so gently if what you really need is a kick in the ass.
Probably a qualifier for friendship must be a decent match in corrective styles and reasonable expectations. You can’t hear “you’re full of shit” from just anyone. That takes a background of credibility, honesty, competence, and at least a little affection before criticism amounts to anything more than mindless contradiction. If you can’t take hearing criticism from an acquaintance or you don’t feel comfortable giving it back to them, it could be that your styles are so different that you can’t get that close; and you may not ever. So, it’s very likely that, if you use this requirement for a “friend” you might discover you don’t have many friends. Maybe lots of acquaintances, but damned few friends. Don’t be discouraged, most people don’t have any actual friends.
Another important quality a friend should have is “usefulness.” Useful people are the only rational candidates for a practical friendship. My wife has a long history of acquiring housewives for “friends” and discovering how perfectly useless they are when she actually needs a friend for practically anything more complicated than a borrowed cup of sugar. There is no performance measure for either a housewife or a househusband. The only requirement for that job is finding someone dumb enough to carry your lazy ass while you do all of the family adult tasks. Housewife and househusband are just a couple of politically-correct words for “unskilled and unemployable.” My wife found this out the hard way several times, but like the majority of women she is intimidate by women with marketable skills. So, her friendships are lightweight and too often based on being the wives of my friends.
I don’t have a single friend who isn’t smarter than me, more skilled than me, more interesting and well-spoken than me, and who doesn’t have an assortment of skills I will never master or even comprehend. Why would I be otherwise? What would be the point in putting any effort into the relationship with a dumb, untalented, foolish person? What would anyone get from that, other than a misplaced sense of superiority? The world is full of stupid and ignorant people and if that is not a disqualifier for you, you have 99.999…% of the planet to befriend. Of course, if you actually ever need something useful from those relationships good luck with that.
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