Your Friends Aren’t That Special

Let me start by stating that I have a great group of friends, both of the personal persuasion as well as my wider social network circles. They’re intelligent and caring, generally well-informed on the happenings of the world, they treat me and everyone I know with respect and empathy, and they definitely make the world a better place. I know they’d help me out if I needed it and I’d be willing to do the same for them. They’re good people. But the thing is, they aren’t that special.

I’m pretty sure that everyone out there has a group of friends that they consider to be upstanding people, better than the ordinary, and we’d all like to think it’s proof of our great taste in people, but if everyone is special then no one is. What this tells me, what my rational mind forces my ego to admit, is that people in general are pretty good. While my friends may not be a perfect representation of American demographics - they definitely tend to be white, middle-class, well-educated, outdoorsy, and liberal - they are representative of the type of people you’ll find at every strata of our society. My friends, and everyone else’s, are America.

This is important because how we treat our friends, how we think about them, the kind of reasoning we use to justify their bad behavior or explain away actions that are inconsistent with our philosophical beliefs, doesn’t get applied to everyone else. It should. If our friends aren’t special, if they are just a somewhat random cross-section of the population, even if any one group doesn’t cover the entire spectrum of diversity in America, then we should treat everyone the same way we treat our friends.

I’ve read a number of articles on the concept of in-group thinking when it comes to politics, but the usual narrative likes to break things out by demographics: working class white males, urban-rural divide, partisan parties. People don’t think that way. They think about people they know (their friends or larger social circle) and about people as a type (the ‘other’). Their friend on disability deserves it because he worked hard before bad luck befell him. Their friend who ran up credit card debt isn’t a bad guy at heart - he coaches the little league team, after all. The neighbor down the road who has three kids from three different men just has low self-esteem, but she’s fundamentally a decent person who needs food stamps to feed those lovely kids. On the other hand, welfare recipients are lazy; city dwellers are violent; politicians are liars. No slack is provided, no benefit of the doubt or a helping hand offered to those whom never physically cross their path.

This disconnect between how we treat our friends vs. the rest of society is at the heart of the how our personal beliefs play out in the political sphere. It’s the reason devout Christians can vote for policies that are an affront to everything the church teaches, the reason women vote for candidates who openly disparage women’s rights, the reason a minority member supports a party that discriminates against minorities. It’s the basis for every attempt to cut government programs that benefit people we don’t know, even if we have friends who we feel deserve those benefits.

If we all became a little friendlier, not in person but simply in the attitude we take towards the world at large, we’d choose differently. We’d see the good in people we don’t know, we’d respect their challenges and listen to their complaints. We’d recognize their errors as only one side of a whole person and offer second chances and new beginnings. We’d be willing to sacrifice a little bit of our own largesse in order to help the community as a whole. That’s what you do for friends, you treat them like a person and not a people.