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, though this likely still falls short in most cases. Co-conspirators are at least willing to confide in one another and to take risks together for mutual benefit. While there are certainly tales of this falling apart, and one party taking advantage of the other, or throwing the other to the dogs, there are also tales of mutual defense between criminals, including efforts of mutual defense that arise from feelings of love and respect for the other individual. This may have been especially true among the illegalists and expropriationists, who, bound together ideologically and not just sentimentally, engaged in activities such as robbing banks, burglarizing the rich, and so on. I imagine that among these daring individuals there had to have been true friendships formed, even if toward unhealthy ends. Similar experiences of comradery are understood to occur on the battlefield, again an unhealthy setting.
There can be a thrill to doing something dangerous. This is, after all, what drives people to participate in extreme sports such as sky diving, bungee jumping, ski jumping, BMX biking, skateboarding, aggressive inline skating, and etc. Participating in such exhilarating activities with others, which indeed come with a sense of freedom, can certainly be bonding, also, and can be a crux for companionship. But the content of the telos, the purpose, falls short of the sorts of things that establish true friendship, because falling short of the sorts of things that establish true freedom. Shared interests in sports, fictions, crimes, and other such things fall short of an alignment of values and principles, and a shared, transcendent or evolutionary purpose. They are shallow pursuits, and shallow pursuits don't give way to real friendships, here qualified by the dedication to the mutual protection of freedom.
What might a friendship look like that has healthy ends? It would have to be based on something constructive, rather than destructive. The illegalists were right in their mutual dedication to emancipation, but followed the prior mutualists, whose same dedication had led them to the formation of the Society of Mutual Duty, a mutual protection society. It was the Society of Mutual Duty from whence the Canuts Revolts took place, the first organized revolution to be undertaken by an industrialized working class. While the Canuts Revolts had been preceded by earlier industrial workers' rebellions, such as those by the Luddites and during the Radical War in Scotland, and would be followed by similar such revolts as the Silesian Weavers' Uprising, the Canuts had established a network of fraternities that composed a revolutionary workers' republic, organized along the lines of proto-syndicalism.
Friendship requires organization to flourish. The Saxons had long understood that frith was not something that could practically be promised on an interpersonal level, but that required the organizational commitments of a guild. Aristotle's sociology likewise acknowledged the importance of an organized community to the development of close bonds between people, these bonds being translated into Germanic tongues as friendships. According to Aristotle, friendships rely on organized societies to develop because organized societies provide the grounds from which a shared life of interaction and common destination, strength of character, and terms of justice and reciprocity can develop. Pierre Charnier, a guildsman, likewise, carried this manner of thinking into his Society of Mutual Duty.
The Canuts mutualists would go on to inspire the peasant philosophy of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who would become a figurehead of anarchism, based upon the premise that the Canuts had demonstrated the working class to be able to self-govern by way of its civil associations. Had the Canuts not made such a demonstration, Proudhon's project of anarchism would not have been viable, and the Paris Commune would never have come about. This would have changed the history not only of anarchism, but of socialism more generally.
While friendship is most certainly interpersonal, the conditions for friendship are very much social. The development of friends requires interaction and dialogue, which cannot be easily had where discussions are moderated, third places are absent, and conviviality non-existent. Those aware of the dearth in friendship should busy themselves with the development of third places where speech can go unhindered, individual pursuits can be discussed, and amicability can develop organically to fuel collective efforts, which may then develop into friendships.
There is no greater potentiator for the catalysis of friends than the pursuit of mutualism, especially as pursued under a pantheistic worldview. Only mutuality acknowledges, rewards, and protects the endeavors of each, such that all may find freedom and security in recombination. All attempts to unite human individuals beyond the capacity of mutuality to do so produce resentment, which functions as a faultline for their attempt at unity. Mutuality is the satisfaction of every participant, and ceases to exist the moment this satisfaction ceases. It is the absence of mutuality that is the cause of disunity.
Quakers are a radical bunch who call themselves the Society of Friends. This is befitting of a group that is understood to have developed and to function according to the process of consensus decision-making, whereby decisions are made according to general consent, the “sense of the meeting.” Friends recognize the inner light in one another, and allow for that light to shine outward. The tamping out of one's inner light is not an act of friendship, but of malice. In recognizing the inner light and in operating according to the sense of the meeting, Quakers maintain unity.
Friendship is interpersonal mutualism, and friends serve as the foundation for social mutualism. For this reason, mutualists have constructed associations known to be friendly societies. Built upon the Saxon tradition of frith, these societies engage in mutual protection by way of the provision of mutual assurance or insurance to one another, and some of them, however unofficially and incompletely, contributed to the spirit of mutual duty that weavers of the Radical War had found. Mutual insurance is an adequate but insufficient practice of mutual protection, and the same can be said for all mutualist economic projects, such as mutual credit, cooperation, unionism, and reciprocity. They are adequate because definitely forms of mutual protection against such things as loss and employment. But they are ultimately insufficient, insofar as incapable of engaging in physical defense against those who would use physical aggression against them.
In today's society, only a small fraction of the power of the ruling class is derived by way of physical force. The foundation of the ruling class's power is derived from the ignorance and inadequate ideas of the multitude, which have allowed for institutions of abuse to be established in the first place and to, thereby, rely on physical force especially against the outliers of the bell curve, who are either criminal or revolutionary. Outside of the criminal and the revolutionary there are those who gleefully participate in their exploitation or who willfully do the exploiting. This means that mutual defense need only depend upon the defensive use of violence where aggressions are expected, and that it may otherwise take forms other than the might of militias. Because the levels of physical aggression are low, however, the need for physical defense is low, even if still unmet. The extent to which it is unmet is the extent to which there is a dearth in genuine friendship and a culture in which we consider acquaintances who believe we need to be controlled to be friends. Such acquaintances, stuck in ignorance and inadequate ideas, should not be considered to be friendly while such beliefs are held, but as dangers to one's freedom.
Mutualism is not a dogma, but a tool. Just as people with different beliefs can use a hammer, and as bows and arrows can be used on both sides of a siege, mutualism can be wielded by people with various different aims. Nonetheless, mutualism can only be purposefully implemented by mutualists, just as a hammer or bow and arrow can only be proficiently wielded by the carpenter and the archer. Just as there are different nails to hammer and bullseyes to hit, there are different pursuits to be achieved through mutuality. However, whereas the hammer and the bow are not necessarily coalescing, mutualism contains in its ends the combination of interests and the joining together of pursuits into a larger organism, that of society, and to that extent is as much a societal end as it is an interpersonal means.
Like mutualism, friendship is a tool that can belong in any human hand. Friends need not be the same, but require only complementarity. The carpenter and the archer can establish friendship in recognition of each other's good character and in exchanging the carpenter's bows for the archer's meat. Each has their particularities, and these remain fully intact. However, friendship, even between particulars, is itself a universal, insofar as it requires a general set of behaviors. If this were not so, one could befriend a shark as readily as one does a dog. The dog has the capacity to live in a space of mutual respect, and has admiration for and will protect its caretaker, as a good friend must. This cannot be asked of the shark, whose biology forbids it from reciprocating. Humans, like dogs, have the capacity for friendship. And as the particularities that differentiate the identities of the dog and the human do not impede upon their friendship, likewise, particular differences between individual humans need not impede upon their friendship, except in absence of mutual respect, admiration, and protection. Without regard for these universals, the particulars divide, but universals bring friends together despite, and even with benefit from, the particulars.