Never follow an ideology just to gain friends

There is nobody as weak in this world as a person who is desperate for friends. There is also nobody as unwanted as someone desperate for friends. You will only make good friends when you’re willing to lose a few who are simply not the right kind for you… Or to lose the whole lot if it comes to that.

A lot of people take on an ideology or a hobby in order to find friends and to find comfort in the company of others. They meet a new person and start mimicking their way of behaving, thinking and doing things. The famous quote goes – “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” but did you know it continues: “…that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” Said by Oscar Wilde. What this means is that for as long as you mimic someone you are not that person’s equal but their copy. They cannot take you seriously for as long as they know you are simply copying what they are doing – monkey see, monkey do.

This is an incredibly difficult connection for some people to make. Which is right:

“I meet someone who has an ideology, to make friends with him I will adopt his way of thinking.”

or

“I think that, based on my observation, things are X, therefore I believe that the matters should be handled like X, and I want to make friends with people who believe the same thing.”

For people who do not understand the concept of looking for friends, this idea makes no sense at all. They see others as constants in their lives, “I was born with these people around me, and fate brought me these additional few people to join my life with, now, we all have to adapt to the same way of thinking so that we can continue being together”. It is as though they’d believe it is not possible for a person to make new friends out of choice of ideology, or that a person can hold an ideology to a higher level of importance than the people surrounding them.

An idealist will always leave the kind of people who do not believe in the same things with them – and to a non-idealist, this is a form of blackmail. THEY believe this person wants to force them to change their ideas “or else I’ll leave you alone!” An idealist values individuality and people’s ideas and their right to be who they are, therefore they’ll rarely force anyone to change their minds – and also, there are certain ideas that cannot be forced upon others if you want genuine friends, let’s say you love poetry, and you want to surround yourself with people who love poetry. Theoretically you have two ways to achieve this; The first attempt often is to try and share poetry with others to see if they’d take to it, but when it doesn’t work, the two possible ways to gain poetry-loving group of friends is to force the people you know to fake liking poetry or to go look for people who already do love poetry – often the far easier answer to the problem, as the appreciation of poetry is a complicated matter that also requires a higher IQ that is most likely readily available in any random group of people like a family or a populous of a small village has to offer.

Sure, if we live in the age of a zombie apocalypse or there has been a catastrophic fallout of radioactive material over the Earth locking us all into small pockets of survivors unable to leave the bunker they’re locked in for the foreseeable future putting them all into the position to having to somehow get along and pass the time with no entertainment or connection to the outer world but the company of each other, the idea of forcing others to AT LEAST TRY and appreciate poetry before you lose your marbles in the close confinement makes sense. If, however, you are free to move around, trying to find new friends who already love poetry it is a better answer to the problem than the attempt to force feed poetry down the throats of a bunch of non-romantics waiting to die.

This is the constant conflict, however. When a person to whom the people they already know, whether they get along or not, are the most important thing in their lives (the Normal Person*) they ask the ones wishing to find new friends of the similar bent for instructions what to do to make them (the Savants*) happy (to stay). When the Savants* tells them to let them go, the Normal Person*’s brain goes into an unstoppable loop like a computer trying to solve an unsolvable equation: How can I make you happy to stay by letting you leave me?

This equation, to the Normal Person*, is an obsession. They CANNOT comprehend the kind of a happy ending in which they give up on a person and their future together. It is like suggesting to a romantic that Romeo and Juliette should have just said good bye to each other and go back to their families and that would have been a happy ending. (Romeo and Juliette is an ultimate the Savants* romance story, which makes sense to the Normal Person* only if they have a preset of an idea that Romeo and Juliette belong together and one of the families is a bad family, but if they first hear about their families, then they would insist the happy ending is that Romeo and Juliette will understand their own families love them more than they could ever love each other and separate permanently… Or, alternatively find a way for both families to adopt each other’s ideals and get along, which is a nice enough idea unless each of the families firmly believed their ideals were the correct ones not to be tampered with. The Savants* family members uphold the values over the happiness of their children, while still being accepting of the happy couples union, however, the Normal Person* thinking family members would oppose the relationship as it is to tear two families apart, which is, to the Normal Person*, unthinkable.)

What both the Normal Person* and the Savants* agree on is the wish to make a primary connection and exclude, or separate all others from their lives to a degree. The Savants* are happy to interact with others outside their primary relationship, while the Normal Person* insist they need to be made an equal part of any relationship that someone they consider primary holds. As in, the Normal Person* parent believes they need to be a close part of their child’s marriage, which is just the ticket to drive a Savants* couple up the walls and into a divorce; The eternal mother-in-law saga. The Normal Person* believe a marriage brings families together, where as the Savants* believe marriage brings the married couple together and doesn’t even consider the component of the rest of the family.

This wish to unite families is great, but the Savants* often feel like they’re the odd one out of the family, the black sheep or the ugly duckling (the swan in a duck family). As they feel they don’t really belong in this family, they want to separate from it and join their lives with someone they feel closer to, but this doesn’t make sense to the Normal Person* who “gets along with everyone” due to the lack of real ideals, and insist upon insisting on staying with them.

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