Table of Contents
I. Introduction: How to Go Beyond The Mind-Body Politic
II. They Fuck You Up: Families and Sociality
III. There Is No Love: Intimacy and Sociality
IV. Lonely Are the Brave and the Millennials: Friendships and Sociality
V. “Louis, I Think This is the Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship”: Camaraderie-&-Solidarity, Identity, and Utility
VI. Conclusion: Our Sociable Sociality, Hammers, and Blue Guitars
The first installment contains section I.
The second installment contains section II.
The third installment contains section III.
And this installment contains section IV.
But can you can also read or download a .pdf version of the complete essay HERE.
IV. Lonely Are the Brave and the Millennials: Friendships and Sociality
Jack Burns: I didn’t want a house. I didn’t want all those pots and pans. I didn’t want anything but you. It’s God’s own blessing I didn’t get you.
Jerry Bondi: Why?
Jack Burns: ’Cause I’m a loner clear down deep to my guts. Know what a loner is? He’s a born cripple. He’s a cripple because the only person he can live with is himself. It’s his life, the way he wants to live. It’s all for him. A guy like that, he’d kill a woman like you. Because he couldn’t love you, not the way you are loved.[i]
Today, members of the millennial generation are ages 23 to 38. These ought to be prime years of careers taking off and starting families, before joints really begin to ache. Yet as a recent poll and some corresponding research indicate, there’s something missing for many in this generation: companionship. A recent poll from YouGov, a polling firm and market research company, found that 30 percent of millennials say they feel lonely. This is the highest percentage of all the generations surveyed. Furthermore, 22 percent of millennials in the poll said they had zero friends. Twenty-seven percent said they had “no close friends,” 30 percent said they have “no best friends,” and 25 percent said they have no acquaintances…. In comparison, just 16 percent of Gen Xers and 9 percent of baby boomers say they have no friends.[ii]
27. In the absolutely first-rate but relatively little-known 1962 film, Lonely Are the Brave (with a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, just emerging from the McCarthy era anti-communist blacklist, and starring Kirk Douglas), the anarchist cowboy Jack Burns tells the woman he loves, Jerry Bondi, that he’s “a born cripple” because “I’m a loner clear down to my guts,” and that a loner is “a cripple because the only person he can live with is himself.”
But Burns also has a close and indeed best friend, Paul Bondi, who’s married to Jerry Bondi, and in jail for aiding illegal immigrants; and later in the film Burns risks his own life in order to break Paul out of jail, and then suffers serious injury—and the death of his beloved horse, Whiskey—as a consequence of that.
Meanwhile, in a recent real-world poll, “30 percent of millennials say that they feel lonely”: more specifically 22% say they have “no friends”; 27% say thay have “no close friends”; 30% say they have “no best friends”; and 25% say they have “no acquaintances.”
Philosophically speaking, what is going on here?
28. In order to answer that question, as per my discussion of family relationships in section II and my discussion of intimate relationships in section III, in this section I’ll argue that a careful description of the characteristic phenomenology and normative structures, as encoded in certain inherent guiding principles, of these two basic kinds of social relationships, together with a critical analysis of the pathological cases that fall under the two distinct kinds of friendships and also of the hegemonic ideologies that, in contemporary neoliberal democratic societies, overlay and pervade our beliefs about friendships,
not only (i) adequately explain what is going on in Lonely Are the Brave and with the epidemic of loneliness amongst millennials,
but also (ii) provide us with several more profound insights into the emancipatory politics of everyday life.
29. Let’s recall that in the Introduction, I postulated that all healthy, sane rational human animals possess a set of innate dispositions that naturally manifest themselves as human needs for several distinct basic kinds of social relationships, needs that naturally vary in level of intensity and broadness or narrowness of scope across individuals, over time, and in different contexts, amongst which are needs for
(i) relationships with close friends, and
(ii) relationships with a wider circle of friends and more-or-less-casual but still friendly acquaintances,
One crucial issue to get out of the way at the very outset of this section, however, of the is the connection or lack of connection between my discussion of friendships in the context of the theory of sociality, and Aristotle’s famous discussion of philia, usually translated as “friendship,” in the Nicomachean Ethics.
As Richard Kraut correctly points out in the “friendship” section of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Aristotle’s ethics, translating philia as “friendship” is potentially misleading, since philia also explictly covers family relationships and intimate relationships, as well as instrumental social relationships of virtually all kinds, whereas “friendship” in English clearly and distinctly does not cover those sorts of social relationships.[iii]
In the context of the finegrained theory of sociality, however, translating philia as “friendship” is actually misleading.
This is because, from the standpoint of the finegrained theory of sociality, Aristotle’s term philia, in effect, covers every one of the seven basic kinds of social relationship for which we have true human needs, hence what Aristotle is calling philia would be correctly translated only by “social relationship” in the terminology of the theory of sociality, and not correctly translated by “friendship.”
At the same time, not surprisingly, there are some important samenesses and differences between what Aristotle has to say about certain special sub-types of philia and what I have to say about the two basic kinds of friendship in the theory of sociality, but I’ll leave that comparative and contrastive exercise for those who are particularly interested in Aristotle’s philosophy.
30. That all being so, my main claim in this section is that all healthy, sane rational human animals need
not only (i) close friendships, insofar as close friends (aka “best friends”) are people we
(ia) particularly enjoy being with, and whose company we treasure during the times we spend with them, just as they particularly enjoy being with us, and treasure our company during the times we spend with them in return,
(ib) who have a special interest in and are specially supportive of our intellectual, affective/emotional, and practical well-being, just as we have a special interest in and are specially supportive of theirs,
(ic) with whom we can, to a greater extent than is possible with any other people we know, “be ourselves,” open, and unguarded, and not fear being moralistically criticized or judged, just as we also provide the same special “best-friend-zone” for them, and
(id) whom we can rely on and trust for special kinds of fidelity and help, just as we also provide the same reliability and trustworthiness for them,
but also (ii) a wider circle of friends including more-or-less casual but still friendly acquaintances, insofar as they
(iia) are, on the whole and other things being equal, pleasant to be with,
(iib) are, on the whole and other things being equal, well-disposed towards us,
(iic) are, on the whole and other things being equal, not overtly judgmental towards us, and
(iid) are, on the whole and other things being equal, helpful to us,
and therefore, in other words, the members of our wider circle of friends and friendly casual acquaintances socially validate us, ceteris paribus.
As in the case of my accounts of the characteristic phenomenologies and normative structures of intimate relationships and family relationships, there might also of course be contingent overlaps between close friends or people belonging to our wider circle of friends and friendly casual acquaintances, and people falling under one or more of the other five types of social relationships.
31. In sections II and III, respectively, I’ve said that families involve symmetrical or asymmetrical care-relationships, and also that intimate relationships involve an essentially embodied bonding, including sharing special feelings, emotional attitudes, cognitive experience, and physicality, including some degree of sexuality.
If I’m correct about those, then it’s easy enough to see how close friendships and wider circles of friends and friendly casual acquaintances are different from them and also from one another, in that, first, one’s close friends needn’t necessarily be either intimates or family members, and are necessarily not members of one’s wider circle of friends and friendly casual acquaintances; and second, members of one’s wider circle of friends and friendly casual acquaintances are necessarily not either intimates or family members.
32. Moreover, we often mark these differences in the ordinary language we use to describe them.
For example, we can normally say that we “see” close friends or members of our wider circle of friends and friendly casual acquaintances; and it wouldn’t be at all odd or semantically misleading to say that we’re “dating” someone who is a member of our wider circle of friends and friendly casual acquaintances, or that we’re “partnered with” someone who is also an intimate, a close friend, and a family member with whom we’re in a symmetrical caring relationship, i.e., a care-partner; but it would be very odd or at the very least highly semantically misleading to say that we’re “seeing” or “dating” intimates (unless we’re confusing being in a sexual relationship with intimacy), or that we’re “seeing” or “dating” family members, or that we’re “partnered with” any of the members of our wider circle of friends or friendly casual acquaintances.
To be sure, ordinary usage isn’t by any means perfectly accurate or consistent, since intimates are also sometimes referred to as “boyfriends,” “girlfriends,” “special friends,” etc.
This brings me up (or down) to pathologies and hegemonic ideologies of friendship relationships, especially those involving loneliness.
33. A significant pathology under friendship relationships, and, corresponding to it, a significant hegemonic ideology about friendship-relationships, are both vividly illustrated by the Jack Burns character in Lonely Are the Brave.
Now the theory of sociality allows for natural variations, across individuals and contexts, in the strength and scope of the seven basic needs.
And in the cases of close friendship, this would allow for people who naturally or in context have either especially strong needs or only relatively weak needs for close friends, whether just one, a few, or many more; and it also would allow for people who naturally or in context have either especially strong or only relatively weak needs for having a wider circle of friends and friendly causal acquaintances, whether just one, a few, or many more.
And it seems that, not only as a self-described “loner,” but also as someone who is willing to risk his life for his best friend, Burns by nature is someone who has a very strong but also a relatively narrow need for close friends—one close friend in the entire world will satisfy that need—and relatively weak and narrow needs for intimacy, family, and a wider circle of friends and friendly casual acquaintances.
But we also learn in the context of the film that Burns, as we might now anachronistically say, is suffering from serious “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” aka PTSD, as a result of his compulsory military service in Korea.
Nevertheless, the philosophically deeper explanation from the standpoint of the theory of sociality, is that Burns’s true human needs for intimacy, family, and a wider circle of friends and friendly casual acquaintances, have all been systematically frustrated and distorted by the destructive, deforming social institution of his military experiences in Korea.
They fuck you up, your draft laws and your military.
–Not to mention, as supplementary fuck-you-uppers, the hegemonic ideologies of patriotism and the USA’s “moral obligation” (closely related to its “exceptionalism”) to intervene militarily in Korea, Vietnam, and all the rest, since World War II.
For now, in fact, Burns has no intimates, no family, and no wider circle of friends and friendly casual acquaintances—and whenever he gets into situations in which he might even begin to form a wider circle of friends or friendly casual acquaintances, e.g., bars, he goes on a bender and gets into fights instead.
Indeed, what still remains of the healthy, sane expression of Burns’s natural needs for intimacy, family, and a wider circle of friends and friendly causal acquaintances have all been sublimated and twisted into his pseudo-intimate, pseudo-familial, and pseudo-friendship relationship with his horse, Whiskey.
Therefore, the fictional Jack Burns is truly lonely.
Correspondingly, however, it also seems very likely that the hundreds of thousands of real-world cases of veterans suffering from PTSD since Korea, Vietnam, and all the rest of the USA’s military interventions since World War II, would have an essentially similar deeper philosophical explanation for their suffering.
34. Now what about the lonely millennials?
Here I think that we’ve got another significant pathology under friendship-relationships, and, corresponding to it, another significant hegemonic ideology about friendship-relationships, that are importantly different from the ones afflicting Jack Burns.
Assuming that the YouGov poll mentioned in the second epigraph for this section was properly administered and is fairly accurate, then it seems clear that an anomalously large percentage of people between the ages of 23 and 38 are having their natural needs for close friends and a wider circle of friends and friendly casual acquaintances—and presumably also for intimate relationships—systematically frustrated and distorted.
But what explains this?
One hypothesis that seems at least prima facie plausible to me, is that there’s a close and indeed even direct causal connection between the epidemic of loneliness among millennials and what’s sometimes described as a worldwide mental health crisis of social media addiction.[iv]
To be sure, virtually everyone in the contemporary world, of every generation, has been exposed to the same smartphones, the same social media, and the same phenomenon that I’ll call “the digital-industrial complex,” by which I mean the massive worldwide capitalist system that’s grown up to provide, serve, and make enormous amounts of money from smartphones and social media, and yet only the millennials seem to be suffering from an epidemic of loneliness.
Yet if we trace the emergence of smartphones, social media, and the digital-industrial complex to the general availability of Facebook in 2006 and to the appearance of the first generation of iPhones in 2007, then the oldest millennials have been fully exposed to them all between the ages of 25/26 and 38, and the youngest millennials between the ages of 10/11 and 23.
This means that the millennials are the only generation to have been fully exposed to smartphones, social media, and the digital-industrial complex throughout their late childhood, adolescence, and/or early adulthood prior to middle age—that is, throughout the ages when our most important friendship-relationships are naturally created, developed, and sustained.
If this is correct, then it explains why so many millennials have been and are systematically withdrawing from genuine, essentially embodied social relationships of friendship with actual people in actual spacetime, into disembodied, distant, hands-off, electronically-mediated digital relationships of various kinds, all of which are fully enabled (in the bad sense) by the digital-industrial complex, and also why, as a direct consequence of all that, so many millennials are systematically confusing social media “friends,” “followers,” or “likes” with genuine close friends and a genuine wider circle of friends and friendly casual acquaintances, and then suffering the effects of all that under the general heading of loneliness.
Or in other and fewer words, a great many millennials’ true human needs for friendships have been systematically frustrated and distorted by the destructive, deforming social institutions of smartphones, social media, and the digital-industrial complex.
Granting that, then it’s easy enough too, to see how and why so many millennials’ true human need for intimacy has in all likelihood also been systematically frustrated and distorted by the same social-institutional causes.
They fuck you up, your iPhone* and your Facebook.**
*(Or any other kind of smartphone.)
** (Or any other kind of social media.)
35. Now what?
At this point, I could go on to explore the large variety of other pathologies or degenerate cases under close friendships and relationships with a wider circle of friends and friendly casual acquaintances, not to mention exploring any or all of the bad, evil cases that fall under the general rubric of false friends.
But instead of doing that, since the poignant case of the lonely millennials and the more general phenomenon of social media addiction are so directly relevant to our contemporary everyday lives, I want to end this section by briefly considering a recent critical analysis of social media by Benjamin Y. Fong in the American democratic socialist journal, Jacobin.
Fong writes:
For the Left, … social media presents an imminent threat: it attracts people who are natural fodder for socialist politics and then absorbs them in the unthinking narcissism of pseudo-political statement pronouncement, where they enter the negative feedback loop that distances them from the reality of everyday human engagement. Twitter is thus not just a medium of expression for the “psychic pathologies” of what Mark Fisher described so well as the “Vampire Castle.”[v] It is the Vampire Castle, doing capitalism’s work by further atomizing and distancing people from the kinds of conversations required for real political engagement. The sooner we realize this about social media, the sooner we can get to the work of dismantling it.[vi]
Here, in turn, is a four-step rational reconstruction of Fong’s argument:
1. Socialism—whether democratic socialism or social anarchism (aka anarcho-socialism, libertarian socialism, etc.)—is fundamentally concerned with respect for universal human dignity; with human freedom of thought, expression, choice, and action; with individual and collective creativity and flourishing; and with the universal satisfaction of true human needs.
2. Internet-based social media may appear to be highly promising and legitimate vehicles for the realization of socialist aims.
3. But in fact, social media are an essential part of the “military-industrial-university-digital complex” that not only produces widespread mind-control and mental slavery, but has also enabled a worldwide mental health crisis of social media addiction.[vii]
4. Therefore, anyone who recognizes the value of the fundamental concerns of socialism should
(i) engage in a serious critical analysis of social media,
(ii) “log the fuck off” on a regular basis, or even detach from social media altogether, in order to resist their largely malign influence, and also
(iii) wholeheartedly individually and collectively commit to subverting and dismantling the digital-industrial complex.
I think that this argument is sound, and also that not only the lonely millennials, but all of us, should be changing our lives, choosing, and acting, accordingly.
NOTES
[i] Dialogue between Kirk Douglas (Jack Burns) and Gena Rowlands (Jerry Bondi), in Lonely Are the Brave (directed by David Miller, screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, 1962). See also Wikipedia, “Lonely Are the Brave,” (2019), available online at URL = <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonely_Are_the_Brave>.
[ii] B. Resnick, “22 Percent of Millennials Say They Have ‘No Friends’,” Vox (1 August 2019), available online at URL = <https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/8/1/20750047/millennials-poll-loneliness>.
[iii] R. Kraut, “Aristotle’s Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), ed. E.N. Zalta, section 9, available online at URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/aristotle-ethics/>, at sub-URL= <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/#Frie>.
[iv] See, e.g., M.D. Griffiths, “Addicted to Social Media?,” Psychology Today (7 May 2018), available online at URL = <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-excess/201805/addicted-social-media>; C.T. Nguyen, “Escape the Echo Chamber: Why It’s As Hard to Escape an Echo Chamber As It Is To Flee A Cult,” Aeon (9 April 2018), available online at URL = <https://aeon.co/essays/why-its-as-hard-to-escape-an-echo-chamber-as-it-is-to-flee-a-cult>; and M. Schulson, “User Behavior: If The Internet Is Additive, Why Don’t We Regulate It?,” Aeon (24 November 2015), available online at URL = <https://aeon.co/essays/if-the-internet-is-addictive-why-don-t-we-regulate-it>.
[v] See M. Fisher, “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” Open Democracy UK (24 November 2013), available online at URL = <https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/mark-fisher/exiting-vampire-castle>.
[vi] B.Y. Fong, “Log Off,” Jacobin (29 November 2018), available online at URL = <https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/log-off-facebook-twitter-social-media-addiction>.
[vii] See note [iv] above.
Against Professional Philosophy is a sub-project of the online mega-project Philosophy Without Borders, which is home-based on Patreon here.
Please consider becoming a patron!
