Unity #10, Finale: Friendship and Loyalty

AT THE MACEDONIAN ROYAL COURT

“… the friendship of young people seems to aim at pleasure; for they live under the guidance of emotion, and pursue above all what it pleasant to themselves and what is immediately before them; but with increasing age with pleasures become different. This is why they quickly become friends and quickly cease to be so; their friendship changes with the objective that is found pleasant, and such pleasure alters quickly.”

— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 3rd Century BC

When the work of a single human rises far above their time, we tend to stop thinking of them as made of flesh-and-blood — instead viewing them in terms of marble statues and paintings, bedecked in regalia and standing in splendor.

But you know, they were all flesh-and-blood too, once.

Sometimes I think about Aristotle — and not the Aristotle of Raphael’s beautiful School of Athens painting, nor one of a statue of him standing vigorously, nor still as an abstract idea and figure of reverence.

No, I think about Aristotle as a little boy, toddling around the court of King Amyntas of Macedon, where Aristotle’s father served as court physician.

I think of Aristotle the orphan, being taken into the custody of one of the family friends as his father passed away.

Those minor tragedies, history has shown, often produce men who mature quickly and work diligently — nothing hastens the end of youth than the loss of one’s parents.

I think of Aristotle the teenager making his way to Athens to study at Plato’s school. Socrates had been dead some three decades at this point, but his spirit lived on in the dialogs and the study of his work. The aging Plato would have moved on to the later stages of his work on government and philosophy, largely departing from Socrates’s methods.

Of course, the 17 year old Aristotle who turned up at Athens was not yet Aristotle; just another young man of the era with a disposition to learning and inquiry.

He spent twenty years in Athens, surely of intense study and debate, before departing after Plato’s death to wander Asia Minor and catalogue the different plants and animals of the coastland an island.

This must have been a happy time in his life, ranging about with friends and companions, studying marine life, taking notes, discussing and theorizing on how plants and animals grow, and the different types of sea life. He met his wife during those journeys, and soon a daughter was born to him.

I imagine that this naturalistic sort of life, and now his young family, meant the more rural countryside and islands appealed to the Aristotle now in his early 40’s. And I think and reflect — and even shudder slightly — that if Aristotle had kept that charmed life going, his greatest works might never have been made and come down to us in the modern era.

King Philip II of Macedon, the son of King Amyntas who Aristotle’s father had served, began looking for a tutor and a rigorous program of education for his 13-year-old son, Alexander.

He made Aristotle the veritable “offer he couldn’t refuse” — his hometown had been destroyed by Philip II some years earlier; if Aristotle would found a school for the young Macedonian leaders, Philip would rebuild, re-populate, and furnish the city.

And thus, the Macedonian Temple of the Nymphs was converted into a sort of prototype boarding school, and Aristotle became the tutor to three future kings and many generals — of course, most famously, the adolescent Alexander the Great.

After three years, the 16-year-old Alexander left Aristotle’s tutelage to become Macedonian Regent while his father was at war. Aristotle likely taught another two to five years before returning to Athens… for my part, I idly speculate whether Aristotle might have closed up shop after the famous incident where the 18-year-old Alexander threw a goblet at the head of the father-of-the-bride of Phillip’s new young wife.

Regardless — Aristotle was most likely back in Athens by the time the 20-year-old Alexander ascended to the Macedonian throne following the assassination of Phillip II. Fantastically wealthy and with one of the greatest libraries of his day after his service to the Macedonian Court, Aristotle set up his school in the Lyceum, the Temple of Apollo in Athens.

For the next 12 years, his scholarly output rivaled by very few of the greatest in history — this is almost certainly when his most wide-ranging and influential works were written.

But I think, too — remember the flesh-and-blood nature of Aristotle — I think he would have stayed in touch and knowledgeable about the campaigns of his young former student.

Certainly all of Aristotle’s works on human nature, politics, relationships, happiness, ethics… certainly all of those drew on his life experience — and he lived through some of the greatest acts of nobility and scholarship, and some of the worst treacheries and disintegrations of all-time.

Drawing on a vast catalogue of human behavior, Aristotle’s writing on friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics is very relevant to us — his work is a key to unlock lessons just as true about the modern world as they were in antiquity.

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TSR’S SERIES ON UNITY, ISSUE #10, FINALE: FRIENDSHIP AND LOYALTY

Over the last ten weeks, we’ve explored how Unity gets built.

It would be possible to write 10,000 pages on the topic and still not have fully scratched the surface — human nature is complicated; people often have confusing and even contradictory goals and patterns of living.

But it’s been fertile ground to explore — the vast majority of people never experience the highest levels of unity possible on really elite and thriving teams, as part of really innovative and dramatically world-shaping organizations, as part of groups where everyone performs at the highest standard and the team becomes able to do things that seem nearly impossible to outsiders.

It’s also covered very poorly, I think, in most modern bestsellers and essays. There’s a number of points that are uncontroversial and fun and light and breezy that everyone would accept and agree on, but there are dozens more concepts of that class of particularly unpleasant truth that most would rather shy away from.

In our exploration, we looked at three broad cuts —

1. The factors promoting unity and disunity,
2. Who it’s possible to get into unity with, and,
3. The mechanics of unity.

We end the series with two concepts are near and dear to my heart, and two of my closest-held core values — friendship and loyalty.

As with the rest of Unity, let’s look at the deep, hard, and often unpleasant truths and hard work necessary to really establish the deepest and levels of friendship and loyalty — and why most people never get there.

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EXPLORING EVERYTHING

In my own reading and studies, I come back to Aristotle again and again. The world was both old and new at the time — it was old in the sense that many of the earliest Ancient Greek writers had already laid down the foundations of philosophy, poetry, rigorous study, debate, and education. There had been internal strife and external wars for the Greeks, and Aristotle was born into lively times with much history and culture to draw upon.

But the world was new, too — modern-day readers often struggle with Aristotle because he’ll spend a sometimes a full page or two defining a very simple term, explaining what he means and does not mean by it… it can seem long-winded; pointless, even.

If we slow down and meditate on the scope of Aristotle’s work, though, we can both understand it better ourselves — and appreciate the sheer scale of his accomplishment.

Before Aristotle, there were nearly infinite disciplines and subjects that could potentially be studied — but which had never been codified, formalized, or given any sort of technical and precise language to.

Aristotle seemed to explore everything — and more remarkably still, sought to give precision and definition to the topics. He was both a rigorous empiricist and observer of natural processes and of the world of men, and a theorist and logician of the fundamental causes that create the observable surface reactions.

I find Aristotle’s work on friendship to be particularly insightful still, 24 centuries later. Before we out Aristotle’s case, a question for you — how much time have you spent thinking about friendship, what it is, how it’s formed? Who you should be friends, and who you should not be friends with?

The vast majority of people, it seems, have never given this too much thought. Friendship either happens or it doesn’t; we have some people who are our friends, and many more people who aren’t. Friendship just seems to happen sometimes, and not other times — for most people, at least.

This bothered me. This never sat well with me. When I spent even the tiniest bit of time thinking about, it seemed to me that friendship was very important — one of the most important things in life is the people we choose to spend our lives with. And yet, most people have never given it all that much thought. Shouldn’t that be concerning?

When I was casually winding my way through the Nicomachean Ethics, wondering if there was anything particularly insightful or intellectually profitable in it, I remember being struck wide-awake when I came to Book VIII, Aristotle’s investigation of friendship.

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FRIENDSHIPS BASED ON PLEASURE

Aristotle identifies three types of friendship — with the first two vastly inferior to the third.

The first is friendship based on pleasure. We touched on it in the opening —

“… the friendship of young people seems to aim at pleasure; for they live under the guidance of emotion, and pursue above all what it pleasant to themselves and what is immediately before them; but with increasing age with pleasures become different. This is why they quickly become friends and quickly cease to be so; their friendship changes with the objective that is found pleasant, and such pleasure alters quickly.”

In this type of friendship, it is all about being entertaining, engaging, witty, charming, pleasurable. Being around the person is amusing or otherwise enjoyable.

But it’s not such a durable type of friendship — as soon as our interests and tastes shift, the foundation that this type of friendship is built on is shattered.

It’s a very, very common story — a person who engaged in a lot of unhealthy and somewhat destructive behaviors cleans up their act and starts living better… and most of their old friendships dissolve. It’s most commonly written about when a former alcoholic quits booze entirely, but really, it happens with all manner of things.

Even when it’s not healthier per se, people’s tastes change. A friendship based on shared consumption of a particular type of entertainment, food, music, or a leisure activity is not durable when one of the friends’ interest in the topic inevitably wavers.

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FRIENDSHIP BASED ON ADVANTAGE

Aristotle says that friendship based on pleasure is most common to younger people, whereas friendship based on advantage is more common to older people.

Take the Mayor of New York City and Governor of New York State — they’ll possibly go out to some meals together, maybe go to a baseball game together, and will often cultivate a sort of friendship — it’s advantageous to do so under most circumstances, so it happens.

But this, too, is fragile. Aristotle —

“Now the useful is not permanent but is always changing. Thus when the motive of the friendship is done away, the friendship is dissolved, inasmuch as it existed only for the ends in question.”

When a given Governor leaves office, is he still friends with the current Mayor? It’s entirely possible that theirs grew into a deeper form of friendship — but again, entirely possible that it did not.

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ARISTOTLE’S HIGHEST FORM OF FRIENDSHIP

“Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good themselves. Now those who wish well to their friends for their sake are most truly friends; for they do this by reason of own nature and not incidentally; therefore their friendship lasts as long as they are good-and goodness is an enduring thing.”

Huh!

Imagine that!

I still remember when I first read that paragraph for the first time — it was like a low and heavy fog cleared from the landscape, illuminating miles of land beyond.

“…alike in virtue… therefore their friendship lasts as long as they are good… goodness is an enduring thing…”

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FRIENDSHIP AND UNITY

Friendship is a very powerful thing — for me, it’s among my core values. I think it’s one of the most joyful things about life… really, I think it’s one of the two or three most important questions about life — who we should spend our lives with, that is.

Towards building Unity, friendship has some major implications — it’s not strictly required to build a functional team, but friendship certainly helps immensely in making things go well.

Well! At least, Aristotle’s third type of friendship — friendship based on virtue.

To the extent that modern organizations try to encourage friendship among their staff, it seems to me that they often lean on creating pleasure scenarios — the thought being, “If people are enjoying themselves together, they’ll become friends.”

But as we’ve seen, this is not a long-lived or durable form of friendship.

And besides — it contradicts the historical record a little bit. Certainly, the U.S. Navy SEAL Teams have elite amounts of Unity, and those groups were certainly not forged on the basis of pleasure. Just the opposite.

But what is this “virtue” Aristotle speaks about? It’s something of a strange and alien word to us in 2018; we don’t use this word any more.

It’s not entirely accurate, but I think the modern reader can understand Aristotle’s perfect friendship best if we defined it as “genuine mutual admiration.”

And while it’s not strictly impossible to find out if you truly admire someone in pleasurable conditions, this seems to often be the opposite of where such admiration is formed — but we’ll come to this point in a moment.

***

WHITHER LOYALTY?

The American poet John Barryman once said,

“The trouble with this country is that a man can live his entire life without knowing whether or not he is a coward.”

What a peculiar statement — how can a person not know whether they are brave or cowardly? Isn’t that something you’d know?

But if you think on it, you might realize something is there. In day-to-day life, there’s few explicit tests of cowardice or bravery. If your day consists of waking up in a decent apartment, cooking a standard breakfast, heading out to the office, doing routine work, and coming home to unwind with some basic leisure — what does this tell you about how’d you act under true stress and pressure? What does this tell you about what you’d do in an emergency? What does this tell you about your character?

You think on the topic some more, and you realize that it might be impossible for someone untested in an emergency or serious dilemma to truly know how they’d react. You could have some preconception about you’d likely react in a crisis — and you might be correct, or might be mistaken.

That is, if you bothered to even think of this at all.

Which most people don’t.

Loyalty seems to function similarly — I believe that we can’t know much about loyalty, our capacity for it, and others’ capacity for it during good times when everything is going well.

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LOYALTY AND DEFECTION

““Stop the truck!” The usually mild-mannered cadre instructor pounded through the canvas to the cab of the truck. “Stop this truck right now!” The truck lurched to a stop on the shoulder of the highway, causing the packed SEALs to accordion forward on their wooden benches.

“Now you guys listen to me,” Ed continued in a quiet voice. “In this business, you will often have to work all day and all night, and then keep going. This is not a profession where you can quit when you’re tired or when you think you’ve done enough. You’re a Navy SEAL. We’re in this business because we believe in it — because of who we are. If this doesn’t sit well with you, then make other arrangements. You’re still volunteers. You don’t have to be in Team One and you don’t have to go to Vietnam. But if you want to be in my team and in my cadre class, clean your weapons, stow your equipment, and be standing tall at zero eight hundred in dress whites.””

— Dick Couch, The Warrior Elite, 2001

The background to that quote was that some SEALs-in-training were grumbling that they faced a brutal schedule after training — they were taking trucks back from mountain training, hadn’t slept and were exhausted, and then were going to need to miss breakfast to clean and show their gear and be on time for an awards ceremony in dress whites.

The cadre instructor, Ed Bowen, told the driver to stop the truck and explained how it goes — “This is not a profession where you can quit when you’re tired or when you think you’ve done enough.”

If you and stop and think about loyalty, in small instances and large, it might look something like that early-morning scene in the back of the truck. The temptation isn’t to break from duties and fellowship and goodwill when times are good, when prosperity is happening, when there’s no hardship, when nothing too difficult is being asked of us.

No, loyalty is tested during hard times — and as far as I can tell, you can’t know much about a person’s loyalty if you haven’t gone through hard times with them.

How hard is it to be loyal when things is going perfectly?

Not hard.

In Issue #3 of Unity, we explored how some people are more prone to “defect” — in the game theory sense — than others. Some people’s natural inclinations are towards lawfulness and always keeping their word; other people are the opposite.

I think the most suitable definition of loyalty is how long a person would wait to defect after it had become advantageous to them to do so.

If a company starts going through hard times, does a team member quit immediately? Three months into a downtown? A year? Never?

Sooner or later, the vast majority of people will break — few people will “fight to the death” for their loyalties, as it were. And perhaps this is as it should be — loyalty is one of the highest virtues in the world, but not the only one. Practicality and pragmatism matter too.

But similarly to how Aristotle describes friendship can be based on pleasure, advantage, or mutual admiration of character and virtue — so too we can see how it’s possible to attempt to build loyalty on each of these three grounds.

Trying to build loyalty based on pleasure seems to be a contradiction in terms — loyalty only really comes into play during hard times, and hard times are typically not pleasurable. If someone takes a job or joins an organization solely because the job seems fun and enjoyable, they’re likely to quit at the first instance of sustained discomfort or hardship. That doesn’t mean they can’t accomplish there, but it does mean that loyalty won’t be there if and when it’s badly needed during hard times.

Loyalty based on advantage, too, is fleeting — and here is the difference between organizations that seek to get and keep team members based on having the highest pay and prestige, and organizations that seek to get and keep team members based on having genuinely worthy missions.

Let’s adapt what Aristotle said about friendship to loyalty, and it seems the quote still holds —

“Now the useful is not permanent but is always changing. Thus when the motive of the loyalty is done away, the loyalty is dissolved, inasmuch as it existed only for the ends in question.”

Contrast why then-Petty Officer Ed Sheehan described why Navy SEAL Team members hold fast and get their work done; and it certainly isn’t pleasure or advantage —

“We’re in this business because we believe in it — because of who we are. If this doesn’t sit well with you, then make other arrangements.”

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BUILDING UNITY — EATING SALT TOGETHER

To make it understandable to modern ears, I would say Aristotle’s “perfect friendship” is based on “genuine mutual admiration.”

To establish both friendship and loyalty within teams, then, will require team members to genuinely admire each other.

This is, hmm, this is more difficult than it sounds.

It’s not possible to truly admire most people. Truly admiring a person means seeing that they rise above the standards of the day, and knowing they repeatedly commit to and demonstrate higher standards in their life.

Of course, we should be courteous, civil, and polite to everyone — and likewise, have some measure of goodwill to all people.

But the highest forms of Unity will have team members having true and genuine admiration for each other; the same type of admiration we feel towards, for instance, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, towards perhaps pro-social and far-sighted leaders like George Washington and Mustafa Kemal, towards people who truly rise above their era.

And Aristotle points out —

“But it is natural that such friendships should be infrequent; for such men are rare.”

Of course, you need not perform at the very highest levels of a field to be admirable — it’s simply that those are names we all recognize and can relate to how we feel about them.

Now, how does one go about cultivating that type of mutual admiration? Aristotle furnishes the answer —

“Further, such friendship requires time and familiarity; as the proverb says, men cannot know each other till they have ‘eaten salt together’; nor can they admit each other to friendship or be friends till each has been found lovable and been trusted by each. Those who quickly show the marks of friendship to each other wish to be friends, but are not friends unless they both are lovable and know the fact; for a wish for friendship may arise quickly, but friendship does not.”

***

GUIDANCE

Thank you joining me for the last ten weeks in exploring Unity. In case you missed an issue, here are the ten topics we covered —

1. Structural Pressures
2. Unit Cohesion
3. Chaotic Evil
4. Selection Procedures
5. Moral Authority
6. Instincts
7. Communication
8. Norms and Defaults
9. Mission Orientation
10. Friendship and Loyalty

On a final note, as you join teams in your life, as build and lead teams, as you choose friends and associates, think on friendship and loyalty.

Aristotle points that most people choose friends based on pleasure or advantage — but these are not so durable; what is pleasant and what is advantageous both change, and friendships built solely on a basis of pleasure or advantage are dissolved when that happens.

Likewise, too many leaders try to form team cohesion and unity on the basis of pleasure and advantage — and to be sure, there’s great advantages to having fun and enjoyable experiences, and likewise, ambitious and talented people will often look for at least a baseline of advantage and utility on the teams they join.

But selecting friends based on virtue and mutual admiration, and trying to facilitate team members legitimately becoming more virtuous and mutually admiring… this is how the greatest teams and greatest friendships are formed.

The path there — counterintuitively — may well be through hardship.

Aristotle says that you can’t know someone until you have “eaten salt together” — a memorable expression, is it not?

For Unity — shared hardships — overcoming — and increased virtue, trust, and admiration as the result.

As with all of the series, it’s hard work — but the result is truly joyful and life-affirming.

For joining me in this exploration of Unity — thank you.

Yours, truly,
Sebastian Marshall
Editor, TheStrategicReview.net

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