For me to call someone a True Friend, it means that person treats me, and I treat him or her, with genuine care, loyalty, and respect.

I have a few True Friends in my life. When you become my True Friend, that bond is hard to break, no matter how often or how strongly we disagree, no matter who or what comes between us.

Moreover, when someone cheats you, takes advantage of you, or disparages your good name, that person becomes my Enemy. And, until my friend tells me differently, that Enemy will bear my wrath, and face my vengeance, when he or she least expects it, until the day I die. I don't say that to be a mindless tough guy, but to be mindful that in a world of coyotes, you can't protect the lambs with goodwill alone.

However, if two true friends of mine find themselves in disagreement, it is my duty to make the peace between them. Making the peace between two friends is never easy. It takes courage, strength, and wisdom. But it can be done. In a true settlement between friends, neither is happy with the agreement. Each loses something in the bargain. ideally each side feels they have gained as well. In that way, we achieve a true peace, based on humility, forgiveness, and compromise.

I never want a winner-take-all result between friends. The aggrieved party never forgets, and, as a result, our friendship is forever altered. And, for me, the loss of a True Friend is the greatest possible loss (greater than the loss of money, prestige, property, and, as I've learned at long last, even family). That said, in the interest of protecting and defending my True Friends, I am willing to discard those earnest imposters, who trade on friendship, who talk of "friendship," and who, because they cannot master their own demons, micro-manage my behavior under the rubric of "decency" and "integrity," because, in their need to "Discipline and Punish," to borrow from Monsieur Foucault, they don't know what a True Friend truly is.

My business, my world -- the entire world really, though it knows it not -- operates on friendship. Not on legal agreements. Not on police or armies. But on the code of honor between friends. In fact, the very survival of the civilized world rests on a return to True Friendship.

There are those, raised in a Machiavellian culture of greed, one-up-man-ship, and entitlement, which do not understand True Friendship. For them, friends are pawns, rooks, and knights in an elaborate chess game. Numerous parties, dinners, and assorted social engagements serve to reinforce the ego-validating ownership function at the heart of their friendships. What matters to these mounebanks is not the rigors of True Friendship, but Counting, Measuring, Amassing, and Winning. In this utilitarian view of friendship, friends serve to validate. And when friends dare to disagree with one's politics, one's lifestyle, one's values, they must be discarded.

In business, in love, in all their personal dealings, these congenital deceivers are not interested in examining their role in any disagreement. They regard expressions of honesty and self-reflection as weakness. They do not see, as the Zen Buddhists see, the emptiness behind their rabid defense of position and point of view. They are accidental nihilists, who end up destroying the very edifice upon which their ego feeds for sustenance. They literally eat themselves alive with cancer, greed, anger, control, and hubris. And we, by turns, become the unwitting victims of their grandiloquent, and often painfully beautiful, delusions.

Naturally, these lonely, lost egoists are happy to resolve conflicts through the legal system because in that friend-less environment they have the advantage. Because the legal system, by its modern nature, is no longer built on the time-honored virtues of respect, honesty and self-reflection that make friendships work. Though I am no shallow, knee-jerk basher of the law or lawyers, winners in today's legal system often triumph based on gamesmanship and technicalities, the invocation of which in a True Friendship would be considered a boorish insult to friendship itself. Though law grew out of the customs that occurred between ancient friends and families, it has become the preferred refuge of sophists and scoundrels, who, in a world based on True Friendship would feel the visceral pain of their multiple malfeasances.

It is often hard to spot these enemies of True Friendship. After all, they cloak themselves in the rhetoric of the mob. They champion “the people.” They are big crusaders for “justice” and “choice.” They fight against “un-earned privilege.” They see the problems of the world as best remedied through changing “the system.” They are often generous supporters of art and free expression. Even if they are of a rearguard sentiment, they still push everything to the outside. They prefer to outsource (cleaning, cooking, gardening, any kind of difficult manual labor). They even outsource their psychological health to highly paid shrinks and therapists. All problems can be resolved through transforming this or that external paradigm of thought, structure, or operation. They are acute manipulators of emotion. They are the soulless Svengalis behind most movies, most political campaigns, and most of the leading inventions of our time, including, perhaps, the very computer on which I type. “By whatever means necessary” is their mantra. Latter day Randians, their designs, their concepts, their projects and products, their unbridled pride and prejudice trump all considerations of decency, goodness, and communion. It is far important to them to be right, to be on top, than to be in accord with all sentient beings, regardless of rank.

They do not see that the original sin of our times lies deep inside their cold and ruthless hearts. In what they consider important. Perhaps in their very DNA. In almost all cases, these so-called Success Stories, or the craven manipulators behind these Succcess Stories, regard compromise and remorse as signs of psychological weakness. They think forgiveness is for chumps. Compassion is for losers. They shudder at the mere mention of the word “gratitude." To these sophisticated aliens, “gratitude” implies accountability to the Other. It involves the dreaded “Guilt,” an impediment to their arrogant and unbridled Will. A categorical rejection of "Guilt" is a tell-tale sign you are dealing with one of these tricksters.

If you mistakenly see such a person as a True Friend, you may get a rude awakening. At the critical moment -- and all friendships face at least one critical moment -- when the very nature of the friendship is tested, they do not behave like a True Friend. They cowardly backslide, deny, and distort. They renounce all culpability, all involvement, all previous agreements, all personal reflection, and blame YOU and YOU alone. Instead of honoring the code of honor that builds True Friendship, they weasel out of agreements, smugly dismiss you out of hand for picayune "mistakes," delays, attitudes, and other imagined indignities, and run to their obsequious klatsch of sycophants, where they find highly trained shysters willing to defend their specious claim, however antithetical it might be to the very notion of True Friendship.

These faux friends are found everywhere today. The phenomenon seems to grow in synch with the rise of digital media. As a species we are being hard-wired to make lightweight commitments in all areas of our life, and to make light of that which is simple, good, clear and enduring. Most important, we are losing our power to detect the malevolent nature of these puffed up peacocks of seeming truth. The pioneers of Facebook and Google claim they are creating accountability via "the wisdom of the crowd." But I see precisely the opposite. Because so much today is transacted digitally, because so much is learned horizontally via superficial search, instead of vertically face-to-face, the true colors of these artfully arrayed peacocks are hard to spot, especially as they hide behind the feel-good rhetoric of the nonprofit or a deceptively benign social network of "friends" and "fans."

On this day when billions celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ of Nazarene, we behold the story of one man, long ago, who bucked up against the righteous, self-serving hypocrites in his own tribe, who were the enemies of True Friendship in his day. In an enlightened society, our laws would be subordinate to the rulings of such an extra-judicial wise man, who would insure that all decisions were tethered to the norms of True Friendship.

But in America, we don’t have that arbiter. No ayatollah, no king or queen, no priest, llama, pope, roshi, or rabbi. We have only each other. In a way, this is a good thing. We are, after all, a nation of laws. But we need to be far more than that. We need to be a nation of friends. Only by seeking True Friendship with everyone we meet can we overcome the false and meaningless distinctions of race, class, religion, orientation, and the myriad tired categories we create to construct a wall of distinction separating us from our better natures. Only through the healthy governor of True Friendship can we ameliorate the anything-goes back side to our western nostrums of unbridled personal freedom and untethered technological "advancement."

As Christmas Day approaches, I am reminded of that incomparable poet of American Promise, Walt Whitman, who understood that for this nation to be great it must discard the ossified complaints, grudges, fears, and moralities of the Old World and build anew on the terra firm of True Love:

"Camerado, I give you my hand, I give you my love more precious than money, I give you myself before preaching or law; Will you give me yourself?"

That is, we must embrace the stranger as our True Friend. Or, as W.H. Auden put it, “We must love one another or die.”

May the selfless spirit of Christmas permeate your life, regardless of your beliefs. And may the pursuit and protection of True Friendship become the code by which you navigate the way.

Sincerely,

-- James Marshall Crotty
December, 24th, 2009, Gramercy Park, New York