Richard BF

I wrote this a year ago, and only just found that I’d emailed it to myself from work.

I’m always facinated by the way people’s opinions differ. We are the sum of what our senses pick up, and the ways we rationalise that information into thought and knowledge. Our opinions change over time, and our tolerance or intolerance of other opinions affect who we interact with. So what is a friend? And why do some of the bastards hang around so long?

Google gave many answers, although my favourite was:

Everybody who has the fortune to be out of the reach of your weaponery.

However the definition I think most accurate is:

A person you know well and regard with affection and trust.

I can know a person very well, but not call them a friend. I can regard someone with affection, but not call them a friend. Simplistically, what is important to me is trust, the definition of which is roughly:

Firm reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing. To have or place confidence in; depend on.

This week I faced three separate situations which made me question what is meant by friendship. One was fairly minor, reinforcomg how different we are as individuals, and that no matter how much we know a person, we can never completely know or predict their opinions, so don’t be surprised when you don’t. Our typical immediate reaction is intolerance, but in conjunction with trust, a sort of moral tolerance, we are able to respect their individuality and difference of opinion.

The second incident involved a web site I accidentally stumbled across, which contained a discussion board full of redneck war mongering intolerant NRA and G.W. Bush supporters, who believed what the mainstream media fed them each day, perpetuated the classic misinterpretation of the U.S. second amendment for militias, and censored any opinion to the contrary. It was when I decided to move on, that I realised that the administrator of the site was someone I’d considered a friend many years ago, and ironically could be considered a father figure for online communities. As our interests always had non-political agendas, I had no idea of his political alignment. Have his opinions changed, or has he just been right wing his entire life?

The third incident involved another friend, in what they perceived as wanting to share a gift, but in reality was an attempt to sell me something. I have no problem buying something from a friend, if I’m the one doing the buying. It’s when a friend is trying to sell you something, that the problems start.

Life isn’t black and white, no matter how hard we try. It would be easy to re-classify each of these people as friend or no friend based upon the definition of friend and trust, and as a logician it was very tempting to do so. But there’s so much more to people than applying simple weighting algorithms to what they do and what they say.

So instead I decided to ask them all over for dinner.