 G'day, I'm 840 here. Just listening to an audio article from Vox, the radical political power of friendship and how it can absolutely transform politics. Did you know there's something generative about Hanna Arendt's dinner parties? That's what we need of. That's what we need more of in this world. I'm sure Alon Musk would agree. We need more power that is generative. Isn't that swell? You look at Arendt's writing, you can clearly see that these cocktail parties were a key part to her understanding of how the forces that wanted to eradicate the humaneness of humanity, forces she understood all too well, could be defeated at their own game. That's pretty awesome, mate. We're gonna defeat the forces that want to eradicate the humaneness of humanity. I mean, wow. Such a brave, brave stand. Think, but it's something that we can all get behind, right? Let's fight against those forces that want to reduce the humaneness of our humanity. Do you agree? Can I get an arm, man? By the time Arendt was famous, she'd come to believe that the project of life wasn't to think about the world's problems in order to solve them, since no single fix could be found. Instead, the goal was to keep thinking. Wow, that's powerful. So we don't think to solve all of the world's problems because there's no one solution to all the world's problems, but we just keep thinking. Such stunning insight. Well, I've never found any benefit from Hannah Arendt's work. I think she's useless. And so with regard to the power of friendship, the more you have in common, the more powerful and easy your friendship. So friendship between family members tends to be more easy than friendship between friends, right? You usually have to work a lot more, maintaining a friendship with friends as opposed to family. Because you have more in common with family, you have more genetic and often environmental things in common than you do with just friends. So when you disagree with friends, all right, that causes instability in a relationship. Doesn't mean it's the end of the friendship, but it makes it less stable. Like most great writers, Hannah Arendt run about the same few topics over and over, refashioned and reconfigured to fit new circumstances. Maybe her most important recurring item. Okay, so just because you do that doesn't make you a great writer. Okay. Dia is a more Monday, the love of the world. For Arendt, a more Monday means you can't fool yourself about the world. Good ol' a more Monday. Close your eyes to the realities of history and injustice. And that's why. Instead, loving the world means working on two specific tasks. The first is doggedly insisting on seeing the world just as it is. Okay, I'm off of that. I'll subscribe to that. I'm down. It's disappointments and horrors and committing to it all the same. The second. I don't mean committing to it as opposed to committing to the next world. Is that the startling inside here? It's encountering people in the world and embracing their alterity or different. Are you ready to embrace other people's alterity or difference? That isn't what makes friendship. Friendship is largely about what you have in common. What you may have in common is simply a contrarian perspective or personality. But less you have in common, the less stable the friendship. That last piece, loving people for their difference, is essential to Arendt's thinking and her friendships, as well as her social gatherings. Oh yeah, I'm sure she just loves people for their difference. Somehow I suspect that most of her friends were Jewish. I suspect that most of the people at her social gatherings were Jewish. So all this high-minded talk about loving people for their difference, that count me as somewhat skeptical. Arendt sees friendship as a lie to politics, not as a substitute for politics, nor as a way of doing politics, but as a condition necessary for the survival of politics as she understood it, writes John Nixon in his book, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship. Friendship is what lies between the private world of the familial, tribal and religious affiliation, and the political world of institutional and association affiliation based not on family, tribe or religion, but on equality. Oh yeah, it's just coming together in equality, that's what really makes society work. Now, it's the family and the community and the tribe that mediates between the individual and institutions. Friendship can help, but it's primarily the family, relations, community and the tribe. The idea of friendship being necessary for politics is strange to ponder, but for Arendt, politics was not a totalizing identity marker. Oh, as opposed to who? Who are the great thinkers who claim that politics is a totalizing identity marker? In certain situations it is, right? When the enemy comes into view and threatens your very existence, your life, in life and death situations, yeah, then politics can become a total identity, a total power. Just importantly, she wasn't saying that friendship with people across the aisle is somehow going to save us, or that all politics have the same impact on humans. Instead, Arendt means something slightly different. That friendship with other people, including those you generally agree with, subverts power. Friendship, in which people... There's friendships subvert power, it can, but usually friendship is in aid of power, right? Normally you don't make friends to subvert power, but one common element of friendship is that it may combine some resources to get things done. See and recognize one another's differences. Affirm and challenge those differences. Affirm those differences? And challenge those differences? Really, is that what friendship tends to be about? In my experience, it's more about what you have in common. You get to the same school, belong to the same religion, you're part of the same tribe. You have interests in common, you live close to each other. You're in the same class, you're in the same profession, you have similar goals. It's what you have in common that tends to unite people, not the differences. Ultimately grow, pushes back against tyrannical forces that try to deny our individuality and dignity. That's Nixon. Oh, tyrannical forces that try to deny our individuality and dignity. Yeah, that's what friendship does. I didn't know. Thinking back over my 50 plus years of having friends, not much of the friendship that I've experienced has been invested in denying tyrannical forces that want to deny my dignity and difference. That's just not being a component of my friendships. I can't even think of where it's been a small component. I mean, this is all idealistic, high-falutin' stuff. Just don't think there's much of a connection here with reality. Through our friendships, we learn to relate to one another as free and equal agents. And crucially, to carry what we have learned from those friendships. Wait, wait. Is it about meeting as free and equal agents? Often, there'll be some disparity in power. So, I'm not sure about this. We have the exercise of freedom and the recognition of equal worth. Back into the world. Mundi recognizes that our problems will never be fixed. That there is no perfect theory or principle that will unlock the puzzle of existence and solve our problems. And are in rights. That's why politics exists. In politics, we come together, committed to the world, willing to raise our eyes and look at one another. So, I'm taking a break here from the Manly to Spitbridge Walk. Manly is seven miles from Sydney and a thousand miles from Cares. To debate and critically discuss the world, continually working our way toward what we would like it to become. Knowing the work will never be finished. So, walking with a friend towards what we'd like the war to become. That isn't being the major component of my friendships. Like, that's been an element of my friendships. But it's not being the big element. It's not being the glue. It's not being the main thing that we have in common. How about your friendships, right? Doing so requires us to see one another as individuals with equal dignity, but very different ways of being. Our idiosyncrasies make us who we are, and those unique traits and eccentricities empower us to care for one another. Oh, man, I try to talk this way with my mates. They would have tied me up and dragged me behind a ute for ten kilometers until I promised not to talk this way anymore. We see how someone is different from us. We choose to love that difference, thus expanding our love beyond ourselves. I don't know. This just doesn't correspond with my experience of friendship. Just loving that they're a Pittsburgh Steelers fan and the Steelers beat the Cowboys in two heartbreaking 1970s Super Bowls. This has not been my experience. It's not the differences that have been the things that I've primarily loved about my friends. So politics is where we focus on everything that happens between all the individuals who make up a society. It's where we repair the threads that bind us together. Really? Is that what politics is about? Repairing the threads that bind us together? I thought politics was about organizing in the common defense. I think politics was standing up and getting prepared for the enemy when the enemy comes into sight. Well, politics is about the distribution of resources. Is it really about celebrating our differences? Yet it's balanced with the knowledge that while people see the world differently for different reasons, we can't make up stories that paper over our reality. So liberalism, I think we're talking about liberalism here. Liberalism acknowledges that there's no agreement on final principles. And yet liberalism from the United States is concrucating all around the world to try to force final principles on people such as the Iraqis and the Afghans. Racial history, class oppression, gender discrimination, prejudices of all kinds. We have to own up to them all. Really? That's how we start to generate freedom. Really, we have to own up to classism and racism and sexism and that's how we generate freedom. I think how we generate freedom is that we get really strong as compared to our enemies. It requires us to think and talk with others and sometimes drink and eat with them too. How can one person in their specificity grasp the enormity of history and existence? We are dropped down into a broken world where humans hurt one another. To love the world, Lauren says, we need oases where we can retreat and be renewed. Oh man, I'm really getting a whole heck of a lot out of this Vox article.