A Friend in the Fire

Image yourself alone — all alone. No other people, no other faces, no other to view yourself in. This degree of aloneness is ethereal to most people, and rightly so. In no place, in no time in modern society can one consider himself fully alone. There is always the mother, the father, the caretakers, the teachers, the peers, the co-workers, the strangers, etc. As Sartre puts it “People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends.”

(What are you doing tomorrow?
I was thinking about chaining myself to a bulldozer. Do you want to come?)

Marx noted that capitalism reduced family to a nuclear unit — a size small enough to propagate capital in the case of the bourgeoisie and workers in the case of the proletariat. But family isn’t the only thing capitalism atomises and disintegrates — friendship too withers. No, there was never a golden age of friendship but the depth of friendship has given way to a new scope of friendship. I might have hundred acquaintances and not one person I might dub my ‘best friend’. I may have a database of names, ages, likes, and dislikes but the genuine shared experience of friendship eludes me.

(Everything is the same, even if it's different.)

Woe is a sense of compassion — “the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.” The lack of compassion, the ‘heartlessness’ of capitalism, is what I call ‘reciprocal intangibility’. I can neither understand you nor can you understand me. That is why the bond of true friendship is insurrectionary. It breaks out of the chains of capital and allow people to overcome their suffering together. This is why I feel an irresistible urge to feel compassion — because it is my class nature to do so.


(I can't believe you guys actually exist.)