I have developed a rather ambiguous attitude towards friendship. On the one hand, such qualities as honesty, kindness, adequacy, etc. help make friends (or rather keep them). But at the same time, there is an opposite tendency: educated and intelligent people, on average, are more lonely than ordinary people. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote about this.
Friendship needs common interests. For a large number of people, such interests can be football, beer gatherings, fishing, etc. For intelligent people, such things are often not very suitable.
The problem of lack of communication is not common among the sectarians. I think people join sects not because their faith in itself makes someone happy; the reason is much more prosaic (although the sectarians themselves are not aware of it) - sects help people to unite, to acquire connections. In a sect, a person can find a wife / husband, rent or lease an apartment, etc. Since it is necessary to have large issues (“snakes in one’s head”) to join a sect, it turns out that large issues make a person more successful and adaptable.
The general idea of this post can be expressed as follows: for friendship, people need common goals and hobbies, but the lower a person's level of critical thinking, the easier it is for him to end up with all sorts of erroneous goals or unhelpful hobbies, thanks to which he will unite with those like him.
Schopenhauer wrote:
Nothing betrays less knowledge of humanity than to suppose that, if a man has a great many friends, it is a proof of merit and intrinsic value: as though men gave their friendship according to value and merit! as though they were not, rather, just like dogs, which love the person that pats them and gives them bits of meat, and never trouble themselves about anything else! The man who understands how to pat his fellows best, though they be the nastiest brutes, — that’s the man who has many friends.
It is the converse that is true. Men of great intellectual worth, or, still more, men of genius, can have only very few friends; for their clear eye soon discovers all defects, and their sense of rectitude is always being outraged afresh by the extent and the horror of them.
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
To live alone is the fate of all great souls
Sad but true. I remembered the story about the great Julian Schwinger, then I quote Wikipedia:
ОтветитьУдалитьDuring Schwinger's graduate studies, Rabi felt that it would be good for Julian to visit other institutions around the country, and Julian was awarded a travelling fellowship for the year 37/38 which he spent at working with Gregory Breit and Eugene Wigner. During this time, Schwinger, who previously had already had the habit of working until late at night, went further and made the day/night switch more complete, working at night and sleeping during the day, a habit he would carry throughout his career. Schwinger later commented that this switch was in part a way to retain greater intellectual independence and avoid being "dominated" by Breit and Wigner by simply reducing the duration of contact with them by working different hours.
However, I would like to hope that there is friendship, which is contrary to logic and interests. Honest and sincere friendship, mutually beneficial for both in terms of development, because everyone has defects.
Wigner was the physicist who suggested "Wigner's friend" paradox in quantum mechanics?
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