The Good Friend

«The devil is very busy, and no one knows better than he that nothing is stronger than its weakest part.» Charles Kingsley, letter of December one, eighteen fifty-six

There is a scene that almost everyone who awakens lives the same, with different scenery. You are in the middle of an awakening of consciousness — fragile still, but on your feet— and you feel the natural need to share it with your own. So you seek out the friend of always, the one of the years, the staff you leaned on so many times, and you tell him: that you have seen the corner, that you have named the animal, that you are changing. And then it happens. The smile that minimizes. The «you've always been this way.» The joke that returns you, with surgical affection, to the place you are coming out of — and the round he buys you, that very night, to prove you haven't turned boring. The staff, just when you loaded your weight onto it, breaks. And you discover one of the most expensive lessons of adult life: that the chain always breaks at the weakest link, and that the link you believed to be steel was that friend in whom you deposited your trust.

Before going on, let's put the map on the table, because this was charted long ago. Aristotle distinguished three friendships: of utility, of pleasure, and of virtue. Only the third wants the good of the friend for the friend's own sake; the other two dissolve the moment the benefit ceases — they are not necessarily bad people: they are unsigned contracts that cancel themselves. The friend who exalts your egos belongs to the first two: he pays you in flattery because he collects in company. And Plutarch, in an entire treatise on how to tell the flatterer from the friend, left a portrait still valid twenty centuries later: the flatterer is a chameleon — he changes according to his prey, while the friend is constant; he praises your defects — he calls your anger frankness, your fear prudence, your foolishness character; and he commands a master trick that Plutarch called feigned frankness: he criticizes you on trivial things to earn a reputation for sincerity, and with that credit he flatters with impunity on the things that matter. Read that again, because it is exactly the mechanism that I called, dictating this chapter, concealing your relapse with tares: he distracts you with minor faults so the great one stays asleep. The flatterer does not lie to you about the world; he lies to you about yourself, which is worse. And many times he does not even do it out of conscious malice: the one who has not grown, has not cultivated himself, has not sought self-observation or self-criticism, seeks — like everyone— to see his own errors proliferate in others. Your relapse absolves him. Your awakening accuses him. That is why your growth discomforts him more than your vices.

The word tares I did not choose because it is pretty. In the parable, the enemy sows them «while men slept» — again the sleep; the flattering friend and the sleeping dragon work the same night shift. And there is a botanical fact that seems written for this book: true darnel, the tare of the Gospel, is almost indistinguishable from wheat throughout its whole growth. It reveals itself only when it heads — when it bears fruit. You cannot tell the friend from the flatterer by his words, his years, or his promises: you tell them apart by the head of grain. Which is, word for word, the motto of this house: the habits — the fruits— reveal who one is.

Now comes the turn that cost me to accept, and that turns this chapter into something more uncomfortable than a manual for detecting traitors. Because I have spent pages speaking of the weak link as if it were the other — and it is not the other. Plutarch saw it first and without anesthesia: the root of all flattery is philautia, self-love; each one of us is his own first flatterer, his easiest audience, and that is why the external flatterer always finds the door open — he sells you nothing new: he resells you what you were already buying from yourself. The weakest link in the chain was not your friend. It is the part of you that needs to hear from others the praise you want to receive. That need is not only vanity that inflates the ego: it is one of the great factories of postponement, because flattery is comfortable and growth is not, and we prefer to keep being comfortable animals rather than inhabit ourselves as individuals to seek to become men. We are always fearful of change; we tend, like everyone, to choose the bad that is known over the good that is yet to be known. And my contrary criterion would put it this way: that which is still and calm does not prosper. The flattering friend does not stop you by force — he stops you pleasantly. That is why the chain does not break where the other fails; it breaks where you were already giving way. He only tightens it.

To see this without breaking yourself you need an eye I confess I recently discovered: I have been reading Niccolò Machiavelli, and although his fame precedes him badly, in this he was a surgeon of the truth: realize that not all people are with you out of a true interest in being with you; some are there because, in some way, they draw a benefit. I do not tell you this so that you grow paranoid — I tell you so you learn to have that visual eye that distinguishes the flattering friend: the one with whom you feel so comfortable because with you, you are always the good one, the creator of ideas, the intelligent one… and who, without quite meaning to, lives off you — off your energy, off your validation, off your table. The group version exists and is more expensive: the friends of convenience, the ones who stay close in a constant, ordinary way because the closeness pays them — favors however insignificant they seem, cheap information, borrowed energy; first it is a favor, then a shared adventure, and behind it a web is being built that one day explodes by abusing your trust: little by little they draw a benefit, and more benefit, until the moment they already write you off — and then, until they are done with you. The acid test Plutarch gave and any life confirms: the flatterer clings to fortune — he appears with your success and evaporates in your misfortune; the friend, the reverse. And the day you are no longer there to put in the energy that keeps that relationship alive, the relationship cracks, is lost — and if your identity hung from it, you fall again into your own postponing. You are what is most important; you are the only thing one truly has, and you must inhabit yourself.

There is a word I kept for this point because its etymology does the work of an entire chapter: tribulation. It comes from the Latin tribulum: the threshing-sledge — the wooden platform with sharp stones dragged over the harvest to separate grain from chaff. To tribulate was, before it meant to suffer, to thresh. And there it is, hidden in the word, the difference between the two possible companies: the good friend and tribulation do exactly the same work — they pass over you, yes, but to separate your grain from your chaff; the flatterer does the opposite work: he mixes them for you, packages the chaff for you as if it were harvest, and applauds it. «Faithful are the wounds of a friend; deceitful the kisses of an enemy,» says the proverb, and I know no better summary of this chapter. ^[The most complete biblical praise of the friend is in Sirach six: fourteen-sixteen — «a faithful friend is the medicine of life»— a deuterocanonical book: some Christian traditions do not count it among the Scriptures, and that is why I cite it here at the foot and not in the body. The image needs no credential: medicine, not dessert.] Iron sharpens iron. The truthful friend is a whetstone: friction that polishes. The flatterer is sandpaper in reverse: he leaves you smooth on the outside and without an edge within.

And so what does one do with the antipode friend — cut him off, give him the speech, block him? Here is where I must weigh every word, because my answer is no, and I know it contradicts half of self-help. To cut off would be to judge; it would be to take a side that is not yours to take. The parable of the tares ends with a disconcerting order: do not pull them up — let the wheat and the tares grow together until the harvest— and I subscribe to it with an engineer's precision: you can accompany that individual in your life, but your company should cause him no postponement in his life, nor should he cause postponement in yours. That is the whole border, in one line. To coexist with open eyes is not to keep silent: without judging means without condemning, not without speaking — the truth spoken with love is not a judgment, it is a medicine, and the wounds of the one who loves are faithful. But once the truth is spoken, the rest is not yours. Eventually those roads will have to separate on their own, and it will be destiny — which is nothing other than the result of one's acts, one's habits, of what each one inhabits and lives— that carries the tare where it belongs and shows the other his fruits, for the good of his person, in the present or in the future. Because just as a man plants a fruit tree he will never see bear fruit, so too one can live soundly, with a mind free of conflict, allowing everything to be done even if you do not take part in it. It is not within your right to judge, to cut, nor to do any kind of harm — neither to your brother nor to your person.

The question of the foundation remains, because if the weak link is the part of me that needs the flattery, where does one lean then? Modern psychology measured what the corner already knew: our self-esteem works as an inner gauge of acceptance — we seek approval from the factory, it is human and it is not the sin; the problem is handing it the wheel, because a worth that depends on others' approval is left at the mercy of whoever administers that approval — and the flatterer is, precisely, the one who hacks that gauge. The validation of third parties who never overcame their own fears cannot sustain the weight of a life: a foundation, however hard the ground, must sit on structures of greater strength. For me — I already confessed it to you in the previous chapter and I do not take it back— that structure is the divine approach: the only true and honest decision of free will is to choose God above all things, and it is no accident that the Gospel keeps for friendship its highest step: «no longer will I call you servants… I have called you friends.» That is the pattern-friendship against which the others are calibrated: the one that tells you the truth and stays.

The close of this chapter I dictated before knowing all you have just read, and after investigating it I do not change a comma — only now I know why it was true. Spend time with that friend without judging him. Love him as yourself — which is, well read, the most demanding standard of all: if you learned to love yourself by caring for yourself, to love him will be to care for him, not to applaud his chaff. Grow with his company, because the threshing-sledge too is company. But do not deceive yourself, and do not allow yourself to postpone him or to postpone yourself in the process. And when someone from outside sees you and sees your actions, let him recognize your legacy as an example of life — not because you are better than they are, but because you knew how to enjoy life to the fullest and made the most of the time in this space to better yourself. Think, and guard your thoughts. Act, and guard the results. Have good habits, and with them inhabit your life. You arrived here as an individual; let it show, in your friendships too, that you are now a man.