Abstract

Can ‘friendship’ be a way of resisting today’s centralizing, technocratic and capitalist system? Where ‘Big Capital’ and ‘Big Government’ are joining forces to promote both oligopolies and control of people through mass marketing techniques, friendship may have the potential to react from the basis of society. Aristotle identified two types of less-than-ideal friendships, those of pleasure and those of convenience or utility (as consumers and producers). Better are ‘deep’ friendships that are not egoist, but, rather, other-regarding. In these relationships, each friend seeks the good of the other for its own sake. While ‘deep’ friendship is usually considered to be incompatible with the other two types, we argue that the three Aristotelian types of friendship are not contradictory but actually their combination promotes small-scale and decentralizing development.This is supported by an analysis of both literary and religious sources of South Asian origin. According to the theological and ethical ancient treatise of the ‘Bhagavad Gita’, different spiritual paths suggest different friendships which complement each other. Friendships of pleasure, friendships of utility, and deep friendships are not so separable, and they combine in different and unique ways in different friendships. In the ‘Bhagavad Gita’ this transfer of wisdom takes place by recognizing the other’s divinity: Arjuna, who hesitates to fight a ‘just’ battle, recognizes the divinity of Krishna, his charioteer and friend. This requires a certain type of friendship which allows to recognize each other’s divinity. Similarly, concepts like ‘Darsan’ (the auspicious sight / seeing in the eyes of a deity in the temple) and ‘Guru’ (spiritual teacher) refer to allowing and/or accepting exchange of awareness through a higher level of “friendship”. This is also confirmed in non-religious sources like the ancient folk tales of the ‘Panchatantra’ (also forming the basis for “Arabian Nights”, “Sindbad”, and Jean de la Fontaine’s fables) which recommend friendship and solidarity for obtaining liberation and freedom for small-scale actors in a ‘big scale’ economy and a centralizing political power system, in both the economic and the spiritual sense (much like E.F. Schumacher’s ‘Small Is Beautiful’ and Aldous Huxley’s ‘A Brave New World’). Summarizing, South Asian sources supports the idea that ‘friendship’ facilitates empowerment of the ‘small’ and that it is multi-dimensional as there are different spiritual paths according to each personality type.