The soul of an anti-woke intellectual: Jamie Q. Roberts
We’re all gonna die
-Sufjan Stevens
What thing in this world might you balance against a soul? What, then, could be better to review than a soul? And what more topical soul to review than the soul of an aspiring anti-woke intellectual? Meet Jamie Q Roberts, and meet me, but only insofar as I am meeting Jamie Q Roberts.
Jamie, a close friend, had recently written a book on the history of the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW). My initial plan was to review Jamie’s book to help him out. Since book reviews are forbidden this year, I’ll review him instead. As I wrote this, it became clear that intimacy and comprehension are not natural allies. To grasp a soul - to achieve fellow feeling - is so often achieved by seeing yourself in the other, but to see yourself is so often to misapprehend. I’ll try to be honest then- I can’t keep myself out of the piece, so I’ll be open about it. I also quote a lot of lyrics and poems- most of which are very dear to him, and so are an efficient pinhole.
Just the facts, ma’am
Jamie is in his late forties, has two children, was recently divorced, and works as an academic in international relations focusing on pop culture. He has recently written a book-length history of the intellectual dark web, The Intellectual Dark Web: A History (and Possible Future). He is short but not markedly so, a long-distance runner superb for his age, in a recent-ish long-term relationship post-divorce and owns a block of land next to a national park which he hopes to commercialise. He finds himself increasingly drawn to the political right. Jamie has a large circle of friends and is a natural leader, or so practised as to appear effortless.
Pain and taking up arms
Although Jamie resisted this description, I think it’s impossible to understand what is happening to him without understanding his suffering. He is recently divorced. His mother is in the advanced stages of dementia, and he paid to keep her in her own home for as long as possible. He is being pushed out of his job as a lecturer. His son has just developed chronic fatigue syndrome. His book was unpublished by Routledge, seemingly due to political criticism. As a result of all of this, he is at risk of bankruptcy. He would like to stride forth with a sword - but if he is, it is sharpened on the whetstone of these griefs. If he wants to be, as he says quoting Nietzsche, “Carefree, mocking and violent,” these are the cares to be slain.
We often don’t think of the stand against powerful antagonists as an altruistic act- indeed, this is reflected in our language - standing up for yourself. But it is an altruistic act. Costly resistance is a form of altruistic punishment. Many readers will be sceptical of the value of Jamie’s fight, others will be fully supportive. To the sceptics, I suppose I would say of Jamie’s fight that this much is true. Jamie is standing up to real bullies, and whatever he may be getting right or wrong, that has value. For Jamie, I think, the rejection of the bully might be close to the beginning of all moral values.
Musk and the physical world
Musk, for Jamie, is a totemic figure. He represents getting something done in the physical world in an intangible age. An age of circling back, checking in, lit reviews that go nowhere, and innovative best practices in marketing. Musk has revolutionised space. Is Musk a good person? Well, perhaps it is better to say that: "Rare are the good men who have accomplished great things.”
We might divide people this way. There are people who imagine the world expanding out endlessly and are terrified of the vastness, and people who imagine the world shrinking down quickly, terminating possibilities, and are frightened of being crushed. Jamie’s certainly the latter. He wants to expand his soul, and so he wants a world for it to expand into. His greatest fear isn’t destruction, it’s desiccation by a hundred hundred intermediaries who never build anything, never really even destroy anything- just demand a fee payable in obeisance. His instincts then are very much like Musk’s- at least what we see of Musk.
The pervasive frustration with the intangible is an essential part of this moment. A sense that we need to will ourselves back into physicality, having become half incorporeal. A sense also- not necessarily in Jamie, but among many others, that we might need to do some ugly things for it, but damn, we need reality again. No more bullshit jobs, no more bullshit generally. Clear connection between action and consequence, between merit and consequence. Such feelings are not exclusive to the right by any means; there is no end of complaints about “bullshit jobs” on the left. Indeed, a rare point of unity between the online left and right at the moment seems to be hating HR, precisely because it seems to exemplify power without doing anything of consequence. The route to a critique of “Wokeness” from here is plain enough- Mark Fisher did it to mixed reception twelve years ago in Exiting the Vampire Castle - imagining wokeness as a kind of psychic sink, a moral police force sustained by unclear lines of authority and ensconced in a fortress of lying words:
“The solution was already there – in the Christian Church … the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological torture instruments Christianity invented, and *which Nietzsche described in The Genealogy of Morals. This priesthood of bad conscience, this nest of pious guilt-mongers, is exactly what Nietzsche predicted when he said that something worse than Christianity was already on the way.”
When he labours on his land out near Wollemi National Park, that’s when he feels free of it. Either the thing is built or it is not- either the SpaceX rocket goes up, or it does not. Everyone can see the results for better or worse. He organises a twice-yearly (or so) event called Quest Week- a kind of competitive treasure hunt which he meticulously plans. There, people compete, and either they win or they lose, with little room for argument. He would cheerfully admit that sometimes the best do not win, but there’s an odd kind of justice to that, too- everyone faces that risk. I have known him mostly through helping him with Quest Week. A great deal of work goes into it- so much so that Jamie considers himself the pioneer of a new kind of art, and we call the property The Art Farm. A well-run Quest Week is an extraordinary thing, like a well-made escape room, but stretching out over a mysterious bushland. The force of his planning, leadership, adaptability and persistence in that domain is impressive, a modern day Antaeus, he’s filled with energy by touching the earth.
On being male
The only ‘male’ thing I’ve ever felt I needed to be able to do because of my gender is hand-to-hand combat. All the other stuff- change a tire, load a gun, talk about sports- it all washes over me, maybe because I’m gay. The only thing that upsets my sense of manliness in a way that hurts is the thought that I might be ineffective, or worse, cowardly, in a fight. I wonder at this residual sentiment a lot.
Jamie’s different. He draws sustenance from MAN stuff. You can see happiness fill his soul when he lights a fire, plays with a chainsaw, or performs some feat of athleticism. Even more so, you can see the pleasure in him, the relaxation, when he talks with another man about chainsaws or fire management or climbing mountains or team sports. We, of course, cannot read the aetiology of a behaviour off its presentation, but Jamie’s behaviour invites this. There’s something very biological-seeming about it. It’s unlikely that chainsaws are in his DNA, but one can imagine proto-Jamie avidly explaining to a fellow caveman that you must weigh the spear 1/3 of the way from the tip or else it won’t kill the mammoth. De gustibus non est disputandum I guess.
Men & Women
Jamie first encountered the question of men and women at six, when his father left him and his mother.
For Jamie, a bleak(ish) view of human nature is necessary. Men are all at least a little bit cad and a little psychopath. In return, women seek out bad men, not despite their badness but because of it. Men are bad, and women enable it. They are, in the words of Coleridge, who Jamie loves to quote, “wailing for their demon lover”. Another excerpt he loves- Carly Simon, You’re so Vain:
You walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht
Your hat strategically dipped below one eye
Your scarf it was apricot
You had one eye in the mirror, as you watched yourself gavotte
And all the girls dreamed that they'd be your partner
We are told promptly that the mysterious man at the heart of the song is 1. A conceited bastard 2. Beloved by women and 3. These traits are not conjoined by accident. That, for Jamie, is the gender problem, and free love has made it worse- a bad deal for most members of both sexes, but perhaps especially women.
Jamie admires radical feminism- and he used to admire it even more. The radical feminists are basically right in their diagnosis of how men treat women- they’re just far too optimistic about the cure because they assume a “blank slate” approach to humanity. Instead of trying to change men and women, we must restructure institutions to reward the right behaviour and shape us away from our darkest instincts. Such an alliance- however partial- between conservatives and sex-negative feminists is not new, but it is rarely so honestly acknowledged.
Father
Jamie, as a father, is a man who doesn’t want his children to suffer what he has suffered. It is not that he doesn’t want his kids to suffer, he wants them to grow and struggle and maybe have their hearts broken a few times and all the needful, but he doesn’t want them to replay his calamities- especially the things that wasted his time. Consider his son. He doesn’t want his son to be trapped in a system that stresses him out, that cares nothing for him but expects all the care in the world. He doesn’t want his son to fight for recognition in the academic system- Jamie’s not pushy about it, but he’d much rather his son went into a trade than university. He’s afraid of a world that won’t let his son be a man, as he sees it, precisely because he feels so wounded by a world that wouldn’t let him be a man.
Jamie used to fear power in a kind of Foucauldian way- he associates this with the earlier naive leftist phase of his life. He thinks becoming a parent has made him reassess this, made him recognise the need for benevolent power. I wonder about this. We all, myself no exception, want politics generally, and our politics in particular, to be an allegory of our experience, just as past generations wanted religion to be an allegory of their struggles. We alter our telling of our lives, and our politics till they meet in the middle.
The dialectic of belonging and fidelity
Jamie wrote a PhD in which he identified the core tension in any moment of liberatory struggle as the choice between affiliation and faithfulness to an indefinable good. This is where it all comes from intellectually- an accusation that apparently emancipatory acts are often really just a signal of belonging. Relatedly, there is a struggle between affiliation and truth. The prototypical warrior for truth is the child shouting, “The emperor has no clothes”, despite community disapproval. The lowly truth teller, or even the troll who says something just because they are not supposed to say it has the potential to bring us to a higher good by rejecting false affiliation, the enemy of the true and the good. The trickster- Prometheus, who shuns the fellowship of the gods to give us their fire- is the archetype Jamie loves best.
All of this was already prefigured then in 2009 when he finished his thesis. A reminder that often people aren’t a bag of traits, they’re a narrative.
The sacrifice is the next step in Jamie’s thinking- “what I really, really, really want to think about and explore”. The sacrifice of yourself, of others, seals bad faith. Bad faith is at the heart of Jamie’s diagnosis of the world’s problems. It resembles, but is not identical with, Sartre’s analysis of the concept of bad faith- akin to mauvaise foi but with a sunk-cost ratchet. “I have done now this terrible thing-or thing I pretend to myself is terrible-and so I can’t turn back. I no longer need to worry about turning back- I needn’t fear the sudden hand on my heart yanking me towards the good. I am confirmed in evil, and thus can stop worrying about the good” One makes a sacrifice to enter an evil web because one wants to be trapped in the web- it offers great networking opportunities, you understand, and paradoxically it relieves moral anxiety- you’ve already made your choice. Others give you opportunities to perform the evil sacrifice because once you have, you are bound to them and their practices. The extreme version of this is those gangs where you’ve got to kill or rape someone to be a member- the comraderie of the damned- the less extreme version is hazing freshers. This dynamic- a bad act done for acceptance- a sacrifice that is truly a sacrifice of moral independence, even if it presents itself differently- is ubiquitous for Jamie. It explains wokeness as much as anything. The barbed tweet, the denunciation- those are membership dues and payable upfront.
Meritocracy and its perversion
Wokeness, in Jamie’s view, is a perversion of meritocracy. It is an attempt by the lazy and incompetent to claim senior positions they otherwise could not achieve, or would not want to have to fight for. It reminds me of the related thought, often articulated on the left, that wokeness is an attempt to compete in meritocracy, aided by a critique of meritocracy that the meritocratic system finds acceptable. “The overwhelmingly important thing is that positions be distributed according to talent, but malign structural forces are rendering this impossible. This is why I must be given a promotion, it is simply correcting the thumb on the scale against me”. Much of what is called “wokeness” and “anti-wokeness” is an intra-paradigmatic battle within meritocracy between two sets of advocates- one of which thinks that special measures are necessary to remove barriers to meritocracy (race, gender, disability and so on) and the other of which denies it.
Both, however, agree that what matters is who the elites are rather than the balance between elites and non-elites or, mirabile dictu, creating a world in which it isn’t overwhelmingly important who goes to a handful of colleges and walks a narrow path starting in their early teens to make them one of the masters of the universe.-
Wokeness breaks a key condition for the goodness of power that Jamie identifies. When I pushed Jamie on whether or not he wanted to be useful or famous, he responded that he wanted a world in which the one followed from the other- in which power/respect and usefulness are coupled:
“I think the pursuit of power is entirely natural and fine and good and in a healthy situation, the power or the kudos you get is commensurate with the goodness that you provide for the world.”
Desert flows naturally, it doesn’t take special arrangements- but then nasty pieces of work subvert our institutions, and suddenly it doesn’t. Jamie has a kind of Adam Smith liberal perception of kudos and power- when all is right with the world, everyone wants it, and people give it out on the basis of usefulness to them. Benign power is thus distributed much like monetary rewards to useful activity, in a spontaneously incentive-compatible way. However, like Smith, Jamie is wary of “conspiracies against the public”- respect follows usefulness until people come up with power-respect cartels. Wokeness is a kind of cartel or power-respect market manipulation exercise.
Driving and tweeting
On Twitter, especially the trendy-irony parts, one sees crystalline souls that have polished all their facets into a perfect refracting jewel of self-awareness, and often a performance of self-contempt, so no one can ever accuse them of being cringe. David Foster Wallace said that there is a deep narcissism in self-loathing. Well, let me add that there is often a deep narcissism in self-awareness.
Once, when we were driving, Jamie told me a story. He had come upon the scene of an accident, quickly asked if everyone was okay, and then left. Jamie regretted this- what if they’d only said yes because they were in shock? Indeed, he felt it spoke very poorly of him- such tests may come up only a few dozen times in one’s life, to fail one of them, and for so little gain, was not a small matter.
Jamie appears to me the way so many intellectuals do- a peculiar mix of self-awareness and blindness. Presumably, you and I, too, reader. But how much of this really matters? Jamie saw, laser-like, that he had done the wrong thing- he was able to avoid making some stupid rationalisation, or, more probably, forget it. He is a rarity among men in a crusade - his powers of internal observation are not vestigial.
Weakness and resentment
What Jamie detests most in himself are the vices of weakness, past and present- if he had fought back better in the past, he would have less to forgive. His lack of forgiveness, then, is the trace of his previous failures, and is thus at least in some sense in bad faith. He doesn’t forgive all his enemies, and he doesn’t forgive himself for the conditions that prevent him from forgiving all his enemies- past weakness. “If only I could be strong, I could love and be generous like I should! If only I were not prevented in my expression, my expression would be benign.” Is this a touch too convenient?
Jamie, I think, wants very much to be Christian. This is the spirit of the age- so many people find themselves wanting to be Christian but unable to leap.
Shakespearean interlude
Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill.
Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
Jamie loves Shakespeare and cannot talk about wokeness for more than five minutes without quoting the above sonnet. I think he would find great happiness in writing poetry or fiction, but he doesn’t anymore. He’s written a few unpublished novels- on immortality, on fantastical worlds. He tells me the strangest thing he believes is that the universe has a telos- a good, and an orientation towards the good. It may be theistic, it may be impersonal- a sort of moral law of thermodynamics. He hopes to write a science fiction book on it one day. I think he’s vague on the details in his own mind. As so often with Jamie, the shadows are sharp and defined, the sun is distant.
I still don’t get it
In truth, despite all my affection for him, I cannot really put myself in his point of view. I could answer questions about it, but I couldn’t feel it. I agree that:
1. There should be less public shaming, and a lot of public shaming at the moment is associated with wokeness. But there has always been too much public shaming, and to the extent that there is more, much of it is due to the internet. People are always saying stupid and hurtful things while reaching for status.
2. A lot of taboos arising from ‘wokeness’ are stupid. But there are always stupid taboos, and if wokeness weren’t making stupid taboos, something else would be.
3. A variety of incompetents have ridden this ideological wave to power. Sure, as with all previous ideological waves.
Jamie told me once that his boss remarked- as he was struggling with his son’s chronic fatigue- that perhaps he was having a hard time with his son after his recent divorce because he was used to having a woman do all the work for him. There can be no doubt that there is a contingent of nasty people who have advanced their nastiness under the banners of equity and empathy. I’ve met them myself. There can also be no doubt of the sincerity of Jamie’s need to fight them. To what degree, though, is wokeness itself the operative factor here? Haven’t there always been people, unstable or deliberately cruel, who have advanced their cruelty under the flag of the moment, raised on a pole of laudable moral values? If it wasn’t wokeness, perhaps a 1950’s boss might have made some snide remark to the effect that his struggles with fatherhood reflected the kind of personality that would lead to divorce, had Jamie lived in Sumer, his supervisor might have murmured that some neglect of ritual had invited Lamashtu, the child-stealing demoness, to feast on his son’s vitality. The cruelty wears varied garments, but they always clothe the same terrible body.
Jamie, as a child, was bullied. He was short, his parents were divorced, and he was probably a little too introspective- an ideal target. Jamie loves the image in Back to the Future III where George punches Biff the school bully, remaking time in a better form. He’s talked about it often to me. The decisive moment of confrontation with a fundamentally cruel and nasty individual, enabled through moral courage, maybe a little “unwise”, yet externally and internally cleansing.
Perhaps I see an echo of myself in him. I made some grand gestures against what is now called “woke” when I was younger- for example, I organised an event called “against identity politics”- setting off an online riot against the event, of a virulence never before seen in the local left. One Facebook comment suggested the only possible reason I might have made an event like that was a taste for raping women. I used to make a big deal about the importance of a rational, cogent left rejecting what might be called ‘postmodernism’ in a broad sense. You can bet that a lot of my intensity of feeling here was about fighting bullies. But I wonder if there isn’t a danger in making so much of what you value about opposing bullies- bullies are everywhere, thus any political cause can be presented as fighting bullying if one is not careful. Even if we are completely on their side, why think James Damore’s claim is more urgent than Andry Romero’s, or Aziz Ansari’s claim is more important than Johnson of Grants Pass v Johnson?
Likewise, what of Jamie’s anger at the woke scepticism about reason and empiricism? People have been doing this for a long time. “The jesting Pilate asked Christ, ‘What is truth?’”. The Sophists said that man was the measure of all things and that they could make either side of an argument sound the stronger. You can find it in the Zhuangzi, in traditional proverbs, in Montaigne, in Nietzsche, whom Jamie adores and in the postmodernists before they ever turned “woke”. It has always been a part of the humanist tradition, one not likely to go away, and sometimes even useful.
The claustrophobia of the culture wars
More than an Eric Weinstein or a James Lindsay, wokeness is uncomfortably near Jamie. It is not quite that it is under his skin, as if he were tempted to believe, although a few times I think he has felt that way. Rather, he is crossed with the scars of old encounters, inscribed in his mind like the electric shock that follows the bell for a lab rat. This is by no means uncommon. How many of your beliefs are the scar tissue of old wounds? Certainly, a lot of mine are.
Jamie, as an aspiring anti-woke intellectual, is in a never-ending encounter with wokeness. I see this in him- the endless, fresh and raw restatement of the dynamic- the lying, hectoring, stupid priest of bad faith, and the one that might confront them. But are these thoughts circling around themselves, like words spoken with an imaginary interlocutor in the shower, or are they spiralling out to some new knowledge? What is Jamie’s new doctrine on wokeness? It is fine to have an emotional itch about a topic, but if you haven’t also got the intellectual itch, where do you go as an intellectual?
I push Jamie on this- there are so many people who want to be enemies of wokeness, what do you uniquely have to offer, given that you are a thinker and not a political organiser - what is your contribution? He simply says that sometimes one must just keep saying that the emperor has no clothes, and that to gather together the history of others who have fought against wokeness has value. Sometimes speaking the truth is better than speaking the new. But it seems to me there’s a clear danger in repetition, particularly of the negative.
What matters? The answer can’t be our resentments- Jamie knows that as well as I do, yet I feel them taking ever more real estate in both of us, and in everyone. We are all run through with scar tissue and it seems to be getting worse. What production can we imagine if we could shed our scars? Increasingly, I see the answer cannot be found inside. If it can be found at all it’s in the other- in having the self-awareness necessary to stop being self-aware.
Wokeness?
Nothing more to think, and nowhere to move on to. Haven’t we been over this, as readers, as a culture? The points have all been made, we simply don’t agree on them. That’s pretty pretentious, though, isn’t it? “Merely saying the truth isn’t good enough! I demand originality!” As if the point of it all were virtuosity? Here’s the dialectic: Some things must be repeated, but repetition makes the voice hoarse. Where to from here? I’m not sure.
What do I think now? Why must there be one answer about wokeness? 1. I suppose some of what is called wokeness- a lot really- is, in my view, just good. 2. Some of it is people choosing to be nasty because they’re malicious, bored, or afforded too many opportunities through the internet. 3. Some of it is a kind of necessary protocol for navigating difficult social issues with politeness, even if it seems forced. 4. Some of it is just a bunch of stupid fads- no more or less harmful than a trendy diet, and 5. Some of it is false, but wise, kind, and politic to say. 6. Some of it is true, but unwise, unkind, and impolitic to say 7. Some of it is a genuinely politically dangerous misconception of the current situation facing the world generally and the left in particular.
But the more interesting question is, what’s the positive program? Earlier, I said that Jamie, from the days of his PhD thesis and even now, sees the struggle in the human soul as a struggle between affiliation and fidelity to the good and the true. He has spoken so much about how affiliation can take us away from truth and goodness, it must surely be time for him to tell us something about truth and goodness themselves. He has it in him, he just needs to turn his back on the war. Maybe it needs to be shown and built, not spoken.
To be grandiose about it, I begin to imagine Jamie as a warrior in a battle that’s been swinging back and forth for a very long time. Perhaps there is a repeating pendulum in history- an endless alternation between periods in which it is fashionable to say a bad word, and periods in which it is not. Jamie’s attire and appearance change and flicker, like a movie moving between parallel dimensions, and whichever alternation we are on, somehow Jamie’s boss always finds a way to insult his parenting in the context of his divorce and son’s illness, here in one parallel dimension the one way, in another, the other. They needn’t be a boss, they might be a commissar, or a lord, a general, a power or a principality. But there are always tyrannical dickheads. That’s the constant across all hitherto existing societies- so what should we do about it, insofar as we can do anything?
When it comes to killing old thoughts, ideas die more through boredom than critique, but how to move on? If a better world is going to come about, I do not think it will be the result of a pure policing action - a reassertion of the boundaries or orders of merit. The culture is sterile; something new must be built, but I don’t know what. Jamie has his own stones to lay. Maybe it is a science fiction book about telos and the laws of the universe, maybe a cheap group activity that actually gets people interacting in the physical world again and meeting others, or maybe it’s a way of understanding wokeness, power, the sacrifice- all of it- that points out a road to transformation and the dignity of all before all. Whatever it is, negation alone will not do.
Politics
It saddens me that Jamie’s problems haven’t drawn him closer to my politics. That the cost of caring for his mother hasn’t made him keenly aware of the action of the government in aged care. That his experiences in the workplace haven’t made him an advocate of more secure employment. It’s not that he’s opposed to these things exactly, but I don’t think he feels it in his soul. The sneering HR consultant is just so much nearer than the instruments of fiscal and industrial policy. No issue matters as much as it should unless someone can explain why it’s an attack on your dignity, and we’re all weighed down by so many attacks.
On cultural politics and Jamie, I again wonder how much of this is the dust of old, painful roads. Though I won’t litigate it here out of concern for fairness, it is astonishing to me how many intellectuals have decided that Blanchardism, a speculative theory about the origins of trans women, is established fact. Jamie is not here to defend himself, but I would argue that negative polarisation and oppositionality lead to epistemic failure by raising affiliation to a “resistance” over fidelity to the good and true just as surely as normal polarisation.
We are living out the script of a much smaller world - a world of a few dozen people in a migratory band, where the personal truly was the political. Subsequently, the political is fueled by questions of personal dignity and affront, even as millions die and billions are persecuted- we cannot end that, but we need to find out how to rearrange it more productively. Nearly unimaginable it may be, the angel of history must bring a stop to the accumulation of history-as-discrete wounds. We must weave all our indignities, contradictory though they may seem, into a collective demand for dignity- into the constitution of utopia. We have already made worlds that would look like utopia to our ancestors, and we can do it again.
Loss and time
I ask him what he craves. Time, he responds. He knows that he is getting old; he will be 50 soon. He is physically fit, but his age tells on his face, and presumably he begins to feel its nibbles in his mind. All the suffering would be tolerable if only it had the courtesy to leave him enough time to write his books and make his mark.
He plays with AI, but I do not think he has yet Grok’d (haha) what is coming. Soon, all worries about meritocracy perverted will be redundant- there will be no such thing, human merit will be a meaningless currency. But the positive content, what will exist, is yet to be decided. The hour is late, I’m grateful to have a friend.