Could friendship also tear the State apart? Is Ron Paul’s Love Revolution possible? Can we dissolve the State’s monopoly on violence through fellowship and comraderie?
It sounds fantastical, but I have experienced the simple miracle of Good Friends. When people come together to listen to and provide each other’s needs, they no longer call for the force of government to take resources from one to feed another.
This episode of The Tom Woods Show scratches the mystery of friendship and offers several resources for digging deeper (links below).
My life has been transformed by loving friendships. I underestimated the power of these relationships for a long time. Now I wonder if this Love is so close to the perfect Love of God that it carries the strength to move populations out from under the yoke of governmental power.
There is much to mine here.
Friendship seems too to hold states together, and lawgivers to care more for it than for justice; for unanimity seems to be something like friendship, and this they aim at most of all, and expel faction as their worst enemy; and when men are friends they have no need of justice, while when they are just they need friendship as well, and the truest form of justice is thought to be a friendly quality.
-Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
The Tom Woods Show: What is Friendship (and Should Politics Interfere?)
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Books mentioned:
Books by Tom Woods and Gary Chartier: