Ideology and friendhip

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There has been always one issue who has bothered me for much time. And I would like to see this thing more clearly, perhaps step by step, with the help of people here. Being an autistic failed anthropologist I will call it with a technical term. It’s what I call “endogamy”. It means that you tend do marry with mates who belong to your group. In preagrarian societies the important group was the family or the tribe. And you might mate in the tribe or in the extended family (with due respect to the incest rules) or outside: the first is endogamy, the second is esogamy. Now, family and tribes are still very important in many parts of the world but not, in the matter of choosing a mate, in western society: I would like to understand this problem when “in” or “out” are not the tribal group, which does not exist anymore in the west (at least along neat explicit lines), but the religious or political affiliation, and when there is not marriage at issue, but friendship, companionship. How much is it possible for each of us to make friends, real friends, with persons of different political alignmentes or professing a different religion? This becomes much more complicate when religion is not a superficial adherence to a confession, but an important piece of you personality and the same holds for political and ideological persuasions.
This problem has a large fallout in our general problem of making and keeping friends.

I think maybe we are stuck with the likes and dislikes of the family (what politics or religion our family approves of) with regards to others. Once we get older and become more independent in thought, we question these inherited beliefs and decide that other people who may not be 'approved' by our own family or religious tribe may actually be OK, then our range of potential friends/partners increases. Maybe?

Are you exploring the collective, wondering what is 'me' and what is the collective?

This is very true of religion (it comes with the family, like language), it’s a little less true of political affiliation, especially in continental Europe at least a little time ago. But anyway how much is disturbing in a friendship that there are colliding interpretations of politics, of the world, of life? Even if our friend dislikes a book, a movie, a kind of music that you like, this produces some disturbance. They call it “cognitive dissonance” and, after all, many relationships are born and grow on common likes and dislikes.

How much cognitive dissonance can a friendship take, I am wondering. And what determines the degree of it we can take before our friendship ends? I am thinking of a hypothetical friend. This person has become a dear friend, he/she shares the same religious and political views, on many things you agree. Then the friend says 'I must tell you something about myself, in the past I committed a crime', and then tells you all about it. It is something which you find abhorrent. Your moral code says that you should forgive your friend, but still it is always there between you, this horrible act that your friend has done. How much dissonance can one take without the friendship ending?

I have no problem with associating with people of different ideologies, or having friends with different ideologies.

The only issue would be a potential mate if her ideology contrasts sharply with mine. For example, I am a political liberal (probably between John Kerry and Hugo Chavez). I would not do well with a partner who routinely watches the 700 Club.

Tim

The crime case is very apt. But there are many situations where, without having committed a crime, you are accountable. Someone who works in the secret services will not tell everything he does to his/her mate. We are never such limpid rivers, not even to ourselves. You may realize some time in your life that your behaviour has been all a mess. And you are even unable to make all things clear to yourself: It’s not so much a problem of moral responsibility as of knowing whom you really are, given that somehow it is possible to know. In the case of immoral acts, we do so many of them inevitably, that the problem of interpreting their weight may be a paralyzing burden. By immoral I do not mean a breach of a formal norm, but something which mirrors your weakness, your fiber, your character.

Perhaps it is a test of character how many of your crimes (small acts of your own that you have been ashamed of maybe, times when you secretly know you have not given of your best, dark thoughts that you know are unworthy) you can bear. Confronting your own shadow I suppose Jung would call it. How often our shadows possess us! Then we must face ourselves honestly without trying to wriggle out of it with excuses...it is not an easy thing to do! But maybe when we can acknowledge the darkness within ourselves, we feel closer to every other human being.
"The dread and resistance which every natural human being experiences when it comes to delving too deeply into himself is, at bottom, the fear of the journey to Hades" - CG Jung

"Between John Kerry and Hugo Chavez?"
That would go for me too. But it’s also a problem of styles of life and consumption. I wouldn’t want to accompany a friend to a meeting of Benny Hinn not so much for my disagreement, as for my repulsion of such things. I don’t know what kind of folks go there, and there might be decent, if naif and fanatic, people. But…no I would say no.



To stand up to our shadows is right, but perhaps the only way to do it is to admit that these are not mere shadows, but are pieces of our character and to pretend to ignore them is to go on driving the car withou being able to drive.
And I know that this may be more difficult to accept, but I am convinced that all faults, all sins, all crimes, all misbehaviours are the result of a deformity or flaw of character. There is something missing in your inner structure, something gone awry because of nature or nurture or both. I have read the book by Gitta Sereny on Stangl, commandant at Birkenau. He does not seem a monster, only a cog, who in the limited realm of his responsible “free” acting (as always in the family) was perhaps a decent man. But do monsters exist if not only in the literal meaning of defective products of birth, like the freaks? What do we do with freaks? We put them in custody if they are unable to survive without doing damage. But we do not recognize spiritual freaks, they may feign some normality all their life, they may become CEOs or prominent politicians (I think that prominent politicians are generally spiritual freaks), or judgesor anything. I don’t believe in the existence of evil as an autonomous essence, in Satan, like so many evangelical preachers go about shouting. For me evil is a defect not an essence. I might elaborate may be.

I have some more thoughts but they may have to wait a while, my brain says 'enough for today',
I have enjoyed our conversation today Paolo and Tim_Tex. It has given my brain a workout

It's almost like people have to share the same ideologies, in order to be good friends.

I think that in western industrialized nations, we tend to create our own tribes or join up with a group that fits who we are, our upbringing notwithstand

ing. From these Subculures, we choose our mates, our friends and sometimes our livelyhood. I lived in Berkeley for 10 years and that was nine years too many. As odd and "accecpting of differences" as Berkeley is reputed to be, it still has its "tribes". Did I fit in? Anywhere? Even in my own religious community? No, but I did fly under the radar and could fake it pretty well when I had to.

I did marry a fellow Aspie, though we didn't know it at the time (the understanding of AS as it applies to us is very recent). We felt a connection on all levels - spiritually, politically, with a strong streak of identity and independence, a high level of applied intelligence, all of it.
I didn't choose as wisely with the men in my past. None of them could match me in any way, so I "settled" and those relationships went badly, indeed.

As far as trusting someone who doesn't share my beliefs - politically or religiously, I have to tell you that the person would get a mesure of trust, in a sort of "trust but verify" way, but I'd never fully trust that person with my life or my health or my heart. In my experience, if I disclose who I am in the above regard, any feelings of acceptance I might have engendered will go right out the window.

Re: The Shadow:
Paolo said: "To stand up to our shadows is right, but perhaps the only way to do it is to admit that these are not mere shadows, but are pieces of our character and to pretend to ignore them is to go on driving the car withou being able to drive."

In the Craft we are taught that there cannot be light without the dark and those who deny that aspect of themselves will likely get bitten in the ass by it when they least expect it or can afford to deal with the fallout.

In the old question of nature vs. nurture (Biological Determinism vs. Cultural Constructionism), I going to be unpopular with both camps and venture to say that it is both. Anyone who has ever had dogs, horses or children can see this and what behaviors come through from previous generations, partiularly if those individuals are no longer living.

I’ll put it this way now. I think that relationships should run according an unwritten, uncoded language which many of us, should know, but don’t know. Isn’t this what autism is all about? It’s like having to entertain a conversation in an elevator whith people you have seen sometimes, but that you really don’t know. So you say something, usually about the weather. But when you have exhausted the weather you turn to something else. The last thing you want to approach is politics or religion. These are controversial, sensitive subjects that you can approach only with friends. They touch deeply felt beliefs. Even with friends you must be cautious. Many friendships were born out of common political affiliation. Some political affiliations are in fact a sign of a style of life, of common cultural consumptions, at least in Europe. Sometimes the affiliation may be itself a badge worn to elicit relationships or to avoid them. Like T-shirts. So political affiliations end up to make the fabric of sociality. I am not sure it’s a good thing, but in modern society it’s often the way people congregate. Couples sometimes split with their party fissures. Or about issues becoming prevalent over affections.

Is that a reference to you and me? Politically, we're very different.

No. It's a reference to the general human population.

I was referring to somebody that I used to go to school with. I'm sorry.

Last edited by CockneyRebel on 22 Jan 2007, 12:49 pm, edited 2 times in total.

i would tend to agree strongly with this point. you can look at in jungian terms of the shadow, or of freud's id, or even the idea of abjection and the semiotic of which julia kristeva wrote. however the point is, that this dark/primeval/shadow self is a true aspect of the self, the self that exists in the space between existence as a civilised (i.e. constructed by society) individual, and the true essence of our being, i.e. the prelingual phase during which our true human instincts and drives exist unfettered by social constraints and constructs. to leave this aspect of the self locked away and repressed in the subconcious i feel is a grave mistake, and perhaps in large part one of the reasons that civilised societies find themselves in such a malady in modern times.

to this end, we have a tendency to "other" those who display consciously aspects that we all harbour deep in our own psyche, in an effort to distance ourselves from it and define ourselves as civilised subjects. this may in part explain the hysterical reactions and lack of compassion we see so often among our communities, and fueled by the tabloid press and mainstream media.

Jung did say that our shadows definitely 'belong' to us as part of our Self, the shadow being aspects of ourselves that are not be welcome in polite society. (Unless there is a war on, in which case we are expected to hate the enemy. Hate being so much easier to engender than the desire to try to understand 'the enemy') To see our own shadows is not easy, it means admitting that we have rage, hate and other emotions that we have been brought up to believe are 'not acceptable'. I would say that to pretend to others that we have no shadow and are 'civilised' is what the collective expects. To pretend to ourselves that we have no shadow is self deception.

I have been wondering about this. I may not be understanding you correctly but do you think it is possible for some people to be without flaws of character? Would that not make us more than we are - human and subject to instincts etc. It would mean that these 'flawless' people are approaching the level of a god? Surely we would not then be human? We would be 'good' but is it possible to have 'good' without also 'bad',good and bad being a dichotomy, a point on the scale between two extremes.




I am intersted in Stangl (if this is not too far back in the discussion to revisit) I have not read the book and am wondering if he presented some kind of justification for his actions?