“Friendship is a root of freedom”
“When peasants were ‘freed,’ during Hobbes’ time, it often meant that they had been forced from their lands and their means of subsistence, leaving them free to sell their labor for a wage, or starve. It is no coincidence that this lonely conception of freedom arose at the same time as the European witch trials, the enclosure of common lands, the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, and the colonization and genocide of the Americas. At the same time as the meaning of freedom was divorced from friendship and interdependence, the lived connections between people and places were being dismembered…
In neoliberal friendship, our everyday lives aren’t tangled up together: we don’t really need each other to live. But these insipid tendencies don’t mean that friendships are pointless; only that friendship itself is a terrain of struggle. The dominant order works to usher its subjects into flimsy relationships where nothing is at stake, and to infuse intimacy with violence and domination…
There is no individual that comes before the dense network of relations we’re enmeshed in. We are always shaping our worlds, and being shaped by them. Freedom can mean nothing other than the active participation in affect: the expansion of what we’re capable of — what we’re able to feel and do together…
Freedom is the space that opens when knee-jerk reactions and stifling habits are suspended. It is the parent learning to trust their kid, or the teen who flees a violent home with support from friends. It is the scream of refusal that elicits rage and action from others. But the key is that one never does any of this alone, whether a humble gesture causing a subtle shift, or a decisive act catalyzing dramatic change. Freedom, gentleness and ferocity always comes from — and feeds back into — the web of relationships and affections in which everyone is immersed. ”
Related:
“Survival of the Friendliest”; “Why Other People Are the Key to Our Happiness”; “The Clique Imaginary”
