UNLOCK 42.1 Friendship (is not easy)

Episode 42.1: Friendship Is Not Easy Matthew Remski: Hello everyone, this is Matthew Remski with Antifascist Dad podcast episode 42.1, Friendship Is Not Easy, and it's a follow-up on my interview with antifascist folk singer Carsie Blanton. Really grateful for your support and I hope this project brings some joy and hope and utility to your works and days. As always, you can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name. I'm on YouTube and TikTok as AntifascistDad and the Patreon for this show is AntifascistDadpodcast where subscribers get early access to every second part of the main feed episodes or an additional episode every week. I will just announce again here that I'll be pausing payments for a month starting on August 1st. That's in a couple of days, and then I'll be back on September 9th with my regular schedule. Now for this bonus episode, I'm going to run an excerpt from the audiobook of Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. It's Chapter Eight. It's about friendship, and I'm in the mind for it, coming off of my interview with Carsie Blanton, because she's really clear on friendship and solidarity as the antidote to the individualism that capitalism enforces on artists and activists and everyone else for that matter. She collaborates with a whole bunch of people. She decenters herself when she can, even when a song goes viral. And then of course some of those songs are just pitch-perfect expressions of the bonds that develop in mutual aid during difficult times. So here's my take. Chapter Eight. I'll see you all in September. Take care of each other till then. Eight. Friendship Is Not Easy. No experts. I am no expert in friendship. I was an only child for my first ten years. Our neighborhood had many retired folks in it, not many kids, so I had to learn how to keep my own company. I don't know if that matched my natural personality or whether it created it. One of my favorite things to do on long and boring summer days was to ride my bike to the neighborhood park and sit for hours by the trickling creek, either reading or gazing at the sky. It seemed like the right thing to do, but it was also the only thing to do. Ultimately, I don't know whether I'm a loner or just used to being alone. Unlike my parents who worked as schoolteachers, and grandparents who went to war and worked in factories, I've created for myself a solitary profession. That began with being an obsessive writer as a child. It's rare that a day goes by now without me writing several thousand words. As it is for many writers, this is a pretty lonely activity. Even now I'm writing sentences that I know other people, people like you, will read. And they will have to be understandable and relevant to the title on the cover as well as the rest of the pages of the book. But serving that goal is only part of my motivation. Sometimes it's the smaller part. I'm also writing because it is an activity that demands alone time. I do a lot of my work early in the morning, when it is easy to imagine the entire world is asleep. When I am writing, I am soothing myself by creating and ordering a space within me. It's almost like I create an experience of aloneness so that I can learn how to comfort myself within it. There is a public aspect to my writing, and to promote this book I'll be filming a lot of TikToks and doing public events, because how else does a book become visible these days? But it's not in my nature. Whenever I have to be the public face of my work, I feel strange and distant. Small talk is painful for me, and often the big talk can seem fake. In the past I've been in fancy broadcast studios for interviews on live TV and felt like I was sitting in a full costume of myself. A part of me can't believe there are people who do that every day, worrying about every body movement and facial expression. Whenever I got the chance during breaks, I'd sit in a chair in the corner of the studio and close my eyes and try to reconnect with a quiet space inside. There was a British child psychologist named Donald Winnicott who gave this space a name. He called it the incommunicado core. Words I love just saying over and over to myself. Incommunicado means that you cannot describe it, nor can it speak to you directly, nor can anyone else interact with it. Core suggests it's at the center of us. How does it get there? Winnicott says that as infants we transform our innate dependency on the mother or caregiver into a private mystery within us we can depend on. I love this idea, not only because it seems true in my experience, but also because it holds out the hope that amid all of the busyness of capitalism attempting to lock up our attention and anticipate our desires with targeted ads, we have a defense. So long as we can turn off our phones and close our eyes, there is and always will be a private part that no abstract force can own, that remains a mystery to others and even ourselves. And because it emerges in parallel to our primary caregiving relationship, it also fills us with yearning for others. I believe it's this mystery in each of us that draws us toward each other in the curiosity that's common at the beginning of friendship. What are you like inside? What is it like to be you? We never get the full answer, and that makes us keep asking as we build our friendships. They're fun, they're useful, they're the GOAT. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle described three types of friendship. Category one is the person you're drawn to and hang out with because they are fun to be around. Category two is the person who is useful to you in some way. They help with homework or gaming or sports, or they connect you with other people. Category three is the friend you love because you admire their qualities. It's a pleasure to be around them, and they might meet your needs in some way. But even if those two aspects weren't there for you, you would still want to be around them because they give you a deep-down good feeling through their talent or their ability to care for others, or their positive influence on you. In short, you love them for who they are and who they will become, not what they can do for you. This third quality is the most stable, and in my experience its effects can last long after the friend is gone. In a perfect world, we would nurture friendships that gave all three benefits, especially the third. How often, after all, do you happen to meet people who have all of these qualities? My best friend, who died a few years ago, sure did. He was a blast to be around. So he checked the fun box. He also taught me a lot about writing and art, and so he was useful to me. But then he also just inspired me with his generous way of being in the world. Even now, when I think of him, I am filled with the feeling of his goodness. It's not even a memory. It's still with me in my body. He became the type of friend that Aristotle described as a second self, the person whose existence helps you make sense of your own. That's rare. I think everyone can hope to get lucky with a similar friendship. Until it happens, I think Aristotle's categories are helpful for keeping a clear view on what friendships are based on, how you might improve them, how you can avoid feeling bad about moving on if you have to, and how to seek out new friendships, especially those that build on that mysterious third feeling, that lasting warmth and connection that we might call solidarity. This is my main point in this chapter. Friendship might be hard. Its best forms might be rare. And then even the strongest Category Three friendships are impermanent. You will age, move cities or countries, go through different seasons of life, and ultimately death changes everything. But difficult as it is, understanding friendship and how to value and build it is an integral part of being an antifascist. Many antifascist thinkers over the past century have said exactly this: that relationships of mutual admiration and empathy are at the core of preventing and resisting injustice and of building a world of care and respect. They call this prefigurative politics, or the idea that the world you are building will reflect the way in which you built it. Because how could you build a world of care if you don't know what it feels like to enjoy it and take responsibility for it in your neighborhood? Antifascist thinkers also point out that fascism can only thrive where true friendship has become impossible, because every relationship is about fear, competition, aggression, the gender binary, sexual hangups and guilt, obeying orders and maintaining your place in the machine. True friendship is so wonderful that it's almost impossible to describe. But we can get a fuller picture of it by looking at the other side, at what fascist relationships look like. Do fascists have friends? They think they do, but the relationships formed within systems of inequality are conditional, inauthentic and fleeting. This may not be obvious, because the tricky thing is that fascism provides a highly charged emotional environment in which people can feel huge surges of camaraderie and attachment in opposition to the scapegoats they've been taught to fear. Hitler and Mussolini both were known to bring vast crowds to tears with their ranting speeches about the glories of making Germany and Italy great again. If fascists love each other — and I don't know if I should even use the word love in relation to fascists — it is because they are driven together by bigotry or hate for those beyond their realm. I don't think this is friendship, but rather a toxic mimicry of it. Something that looks like friendship but tears people down by eroding their moral core. As I said above, I'm no expert in friendship, but I do have some experience in fascist-type relationships because I spent six years in two different religious high-demand groups, otherwise known as cults. There's a lot to learn about the social bonds of fascists from the way in which rigid but ultimately fragile relationships form in such groups. So I'll look at two scenarios and one common misunderstanding: the traditional cult scenario, the multi-level marketing relationship, and how the popular vision of happiness in capitalist cultures works against the deepest principles of friendship. If we understand a little bit about dysfunctional relationships, we can understand more about what antifascist friendship is all about. I'll give one spoiler: antifascist friendship is not vertical, and does not depend on some outside ideal. It does not need the blessing or approval of any authority figure. Antifascist friendship is horizontal. It happens between equals, not leaders and followers. It is not dependent on anything except the value each person sees in the other. You're not friends because you share the same nationality or leader or religion. You are friends because you share your lives and you treasure each other's value. What cults can't teach you about friendship. Maybe the best way of describing fascist or cultic friendships is that they hack into our natural desire to be close to and support each other, but then use that drive to serve the terrible desires or politics of a leader. They can both flow out of, but also mimic real friendships and even family relationships. They can look and feel like love and solidarity until you realize how many strings are attached. In both of the toxic religious groups I was recruited into, the initial invitation came from real, actual friends who were involved in the group, but not deeply. With the first experience, a friend called me up while I was at a low point and said that a certain spiritual teacher was coming to our small town in Vermont, and she thought I'd find him interesting and inspiring. I went because I trusted her. I felt that she was offering me a kind of care, and she was. But it wasn't about simple things like hanging out or sharing food or being a shoulder to cry on. This care was delivered through a tangle of ideas about who this charismatic teacher was and how he might be able to help me in some ultimate, life-changing sense. As it turned out, he was a deceptive and egotistical guy who exploited his followers, especially the young women around him. At first, the friend who invited me along was my person in the group, introducing me to others, showing me around, filling me in on what to do and what things meant. And for the first while, that friendship connected me with new people in the group. It felt like my circle of friendship was expanding quickly. Maybe too quickly. Why was everyone so nice to me? It seemed like they came from a different world. It felt so good, warm, inviting, relaxed. No one judged me. Or so I thought. If anyone finds themselves quickly immersed in any group experience like this, they should take a moment to think about what's happening. People who study cults say one common recruitment behavior is love bombing. This happens when the group focuses all its attention on the new person in a way that feels overwhelming and creates premature and superficial bonds. The recruited person feels like they have come home or are being truly seen for the first time in their lives. That feeling might be too good to be true. Love bombing works well when the person is in a state of situational vulnerability. That could involve a tough stretch of time for your mental health. It could be that a family member has died. Maybe you lost your job or had to move to an unfamiliar place, or you are trying to manage a substance use issue. Maybe you are socially and economically marginalized. Many people report that their recruitment into a cult happened at a low point in life. This tracks for me as well. In my 20s, I was unsure where life was leading me. I believe I was suffering at the time from bouts of undiagnosed depression. When that friend called me with an invite to that event, it felt like she was throwing me a lifeline. I grabbed on tightly and believed it would help. When I started to follow the spiritual teacher from event to event, it seemed to. He appeared to offer a clear and simple path to regaining my dignity. In some moments he seemed to be speaking directly to me, even though I was just one person out of hundreds in the crowd. This might seem like a leap, but let's imagine this dynamic playing out on a mass scale. Situational vulnerability has been used to help explain the rise of Nazism. In the years after World War I, Germany entered a deep psychological and economic depression. Citizens were mourning the deaths of over two million young men in battle and another million civilians. They had surrendered territory that some considered ancestral homeland. Unemployment and poverty soared. Many historians believe this made the surviving young men vulnerable to the ranting of a charismatic leader who thrilled them with promises of renewed dignity through retribution against scapegoats. Under Hitler's guidance, they formed youth groups that went on nature hikes and wrote folk songs together. They went on camping trips and played games and swam in mountain lakes. They were committed to an idea they called Volksgemeinschaft, or people's community. The term implied the unity of ethnic Germans regardless of class. For the fully recruited, that unity was worth dying for because they believed it was the basis for the strength of the German state. So that should have been a red flag. Nazis were not supposed to be friends out of mutual respect for each other, but because of shared devotion to a higher ideal which excluded Jews, Communists, queer people, the disabled, and the Roma people. Another red flag was that loyalty in this society was not something friends owed each other, but that each individual owed to Hitler. There are countless stories of Nazi youth ratting each other out, or even tattling on their parents for not being Nazi enough. It may have started out with camping trips and love bombing around the campfire, but in the end, the leader, his ideas, his party, and the goals of the nation — these were all so important that friends would have their friends punished for even minor thought crimes. In my personal, less dramatic example, my initial friendship with the woman who introduced me to the spiritual teacher became less important than my relationship with the teacher, his group, and its activities. Before long, I thought of all the new friends as my friends, and I loved the activities we did together. In one group, I learned how to cook for 300 people at a time. It was exhilarating. But it felt strange that I only hung out with fellow group members in the context of group projects and what the teacher wanted. The main thing we shared was this feeling that the teacher was brilliant and irreplaceable and that he had saved our lives. Over time, that shared feeling overshadowed every other relationship in my life. I became distant from my family and previous friends. They couldn't possibly understand how important this group was, how brilliant the leader, how crucial his ideas. It took three years for these feelings to curdle, for me to realize I was caught up in something unhealthy, and to start searching for the exit. So what did I do? I phoned another good friend in Vermont and asked him for advice. As bad luck would have it, he told me to check out another group, this one in Wisconsin. He had been involved with it years before, and so I went and repeated the cycle. Sometimes I feel stupid for repeating that pattern. But I also know that people often repeat bad cycles because they gravitate to what is familiar to them. One good thing about the sudden change was that it gave me some solid information about the first group and whether I truly was a valued member in it. The answer was no. As soon as I left, none of my friends would speak to me. Nobody reached out to see where I was or how I was doing. I even heard through the grapevine that some of the group members were shit-talking me, making things up, saying I'd never been a full part of their group, or that I never understood the leader or his holy mission. I was suddenly a weak and unserious person to them. I didn't understand it at the time, but now I understand that at best, those friends belonged to Aristotle's second category of utility. They were useful to me for a brief time when I was depressed. They connected me to the group and a sense of purpose. They helped soothe my situational vulnerability for a while, and in return, I participated, worked on group projects and spread the message to recruit others. My participation validated their choices. By loving the spiritual leader as much as they did, I contributed to their feeling of being on the right path toward his noble goal. This explains why they felt betrayed when I left. My departure made them question their need to stay. At worst, these friends — and I include myself in this — were all complicit in manipulating feelings of love and attachment to help the group leader acquire more followers and more power. And even though we said we were spreading the leader's message of love and spiritual freedom, our dignity relied on generating a feeling of superiority over those who were not in the group. We needed enemies in order to be friends. Sound familiar? It should, because this is the norm in fascism. Real friends can get you out. Being part of the group was the basis of friendship between members. If any one of us changed our orientation toward the group, that friendship would not only be over. The one who changed would become an enemy. What this shows is that while we felt we were friends to each other directly, there was always something standing between us. The leader's needs dictated how we should regard each other, and we were not to deviate from those rules. But real friends allow each other to learn and change and do new things. In fact, they expect it. They want that for you, not in relation to some third person or set of rules. In their hearts, they hope you will change in ways that allow you to be more fulfilled, even if that means you grow apart in your interests and activities. Your real friendship will last because they love you for who you are, not for what you can do for them. Everybody goes through situational vulnerability in life, but nobody expects to be recruited into a cult. At the same time, I don't think it's hard to keep your eyes open for the obvious signs of toxic relationships and harmful group dynamics. If people have gathered around a charismatic leader who either says or is said to have all the answers in life: red flag. If you get smothered in love and affection as soon as you start interacting with that group: red flag. If you start to realize the group is behaving as though it's on a mission from God: red flag. If you realize the only thing you're talking about with your friend is how great your group is: red flag. Here's the easiest red flag to see. In a healthy relationship, you may disagree or argue or piss each other off, and then you can both draw on something deeper between you — your admiration for each other, your investment in each other's well-being — to repair the conflict and understand each other better. That's not what happens between fascists. What happens between fascists is similar to what happens in cults or abusive relationships. There will always be a competition for alpha status. The one who is dominant will demand total agreement from the one who is submissive. They will test this loyalty constantly. If you submit to the demands, you may feel a warm surge of attention and what feels like love. But it's not love, because if you don't comply or if you express your difference or uniqueness, you will be disciplined and punished. Remaining in this relationship feels like being split between two worlds. In one world, you are safe, but only because you have not angered your friend. In the other world, you are in danger because your friend has turned on you. And you may bounce back and forth between these two worlds, never quite knowing where you are. You'll feel like you are walking on eggshells. In the worst moments, you will be torn by the paradox of craving love from a person who is likely to harm you. Psychologists who study abusive relationships and how they function at a group level call this disorganized attachment. They say it happens when you love and depend on someone who regularly but unpredictably turns against you. This puts your nervous system into a state of constant alarm that feels exciting but also fearful. Things get really weird if you start thinking that this excited-but-scared feeling is the feeling of love. This is a trap that every antifascist should be alert to, avoid for themselves, and think about interrupting if they come across it in the wild. If you see a friend get drawn into an abusive relationship or group or fascist movement, you'll wonder what you can do. It will depend on how secure your friendship is with the person to begin with. You may not feel you have the chance, or you may blunder in and fail at it. But if you have a solid connection with the person, your very presence might remind them what a non-controlling relationship feels like. I can wrap these cult notes up with a short story of how one of my good friends took a risk on intervening when I got recruited into that first group. He wrote me a tender letter checking in on me and confessing that he was worried about me. He expressed curiosity in what I had found in the spiritual leader, but also admitted he always felt skeptical about such influences. He wrote that he had recently recovered from an abusive relationship with a charismatic therapist pretending to have all the answers. He wondered aloud whether something similar was happening for me. The letter was kind and subtle and patient and funny and empathetic, just like him. He took me seriously and tried to imagine and validate my inner life, even though he felt alienated from it. He signed off this way, after worrying — accurately — that I was in a bad place: I ask you to please keep a small part of yourself open to questions and the tiny voices of disquiet all intelligent people carry inside them as a protection against fraud. Know that I love you and that this little diatribe has been brewing in me for a while and is not easy to write. I admit I'm always confused, but sometimes I'm also very perceptive. Am I losing you? Is the world? Please accept my love. I think this is Aristotle's friend of virtue. It's hard for me even now to grasp what a good and generous and loving gesture this was. This friend changed the direction of my life with a single typewritten letter. Don't believe something small like that can't have an incredible effect. Stay away from pyramids. Cult is a dirty word, just like fascism. But the ways they both work should not be a mystery to us. If we've studied capitalism and understand exploitation and the scapegoating techniques of sexism, racism, ableism and more, it becomes clear that cults and fascism are just intensifications of cruelties that are already normal in capitalist life. They are not somewhere out there. Many relationships in our culture are hierarchical, as opposed to direct or person to person. These are mediated by an outside force or structure: school, sports, work, church, social media. Those structures have goals. The overarching goal of many social organizations is to support the general idea of productivity and progress while designing punishments for those who don't accomplish enough. Some thinkers have suggested that this aspect of capitalism induces a kind of psychological injury through feelings of disorganized attachment. On one hand, the culture promises you dignity and riches, but on the other hand it threatens you with failure and poverty. It can even encourage friends to offer each other this contradiction under the guise of helping each other out. Many online connections, for instance, are built to drive people toward buying and selling things through an illusion that looks like friendship. When my older kid was 11, he told me that these ads kept popping up on the YouTube feed he was signed into through his public school Gmail account. The ads were from some young guy selling an online course. Let's call him Rizzy. What was the course about? It was about how to become an online salesperson like him. Rizzy didn't say what the product was. But he must have been successful at it, because half of each ad showed him driving around in expensive sports cars and flying in private jets. But in the other half, the scenes were murky and claustrophobic, the voiceover ominous. Why? His sales pitch said going to school is an utter waste of time, because no school can teach you what he knows. Actually, it's worse than a waste of time. If you are in school, this guy argued, you are being indoctrinated into a life of boredom and low wages. The powers that be, says Rizzy, have only one goal for you: to become lifelong cogs in the machine. How lucky you are that he's offering to rescue you. My kid was curious, but also a little creeped out, because it was clear Rizzy was trying to act not only as if he had some big secret to share, but as if he would share it out of a feeling of friendship or solidarity. And the premise was plausible. Yes, he wasn't saying what the secret was or what it would take to participate in it. I told my kid it looked like a business scam called multi-level marketing, or MLM, in which a charismatic salesperson — sound familiar? — offers a cheap or unnecessary product to sell directly to buyers, like Tupperware, hair care products, get-rich-quick courses. But their money doesn't come so much from the product as it comes from recruiting people into a pyramid structure in which everyone is selling that same product to their own downline of customers or recruits, while paying a portion of every sale back up to their recruiter. Only a tiny percentage of people at the top make any money. Famous examples of pyramid-shaped MLMs include the cosmetic company Mary Kay Inc., health and wellness company Herbalife, and various essential oils companies. In poorer regions of the US, these companies have ruined a lot of lives, because everyone in the downline is paying fees to the person above them while trying to recruit from a diminishing pool of people below them. MLM companies can bankrupt a lot of people, but one of the worst things they do is encourage people to start looking at their friends and families as potential customers. MLMs turn every friendship into the worst type of Aristotle's category two: the friend of utility, the friend who is only a friend because you can get something out of them. Sure, they may still have other things in common, but if the friend becomes a customer, the friendship gravitates to the products and recruitment project. If the friend does not become a customer, the friendship often ends because the seller has little to gain from it and they are too busy with other pseudo-social connections to spend time just hanging out. MLMs have torn families, neighborhoods, and even church communities apart like this. I did some journalistic research on Rizzy to understand how he was putting together his marketing. I found he was plagiarizing a lot of it from other sources — mainly antisemitic conspiracy theories from decades ago, claiming the Jews were trying to control the schools. I signed up for a free consultation with one of his sales guys to hear the pitch in person. I'll call him Rizzy Jr. We did a Zoom call and I asked a bunch of questions that Rizzy Jr. couldn't answer. But what stood out was that Rizzy Jr.'s main technique for trying to get me on board was pretending to be my friend. He pretended to be interested in me, asking questions about my life and family. But like clockwork, every part of the conversation came back to goading or luring me into a sale. I stayed on the call for as long as I could without committing, and then ended it by saying I would consider the offer and get back. What followed was two weeks of texts, voice messages, and emails in which my new friend Rizzy Jr. was like, bro this and bro that, and I just want you to succeed in life, bro. Remember, neither Rizzy nor Rizzy Jr. ever told anyone what the course was. You had to buy it to find out. Suspicious sales behavior is nothing new. In our times it can even elevate someone to the White House. What I think is important for young antifascists to know is that now this stuff is a central pillar of the selling internet, and that it models a form of relationship that cannot help people build giving and lasting friendships, because it hijacks the impulses of friendship and weaponizes them into sales. Everyday communism. One of the most powerful ideas antifascists hold close to their hearts is that we can sense the possibility of a changed world through real friendship, and that real friendship is a form of non-capitalist life that's always-already flowing around us. David Graeber, the anthropologist, once wrote that when we think about a world in which we share things communally — when we think of communism in its broadest form — we should make a distinction between the world of big ideas about history and what should happen, and the world of everyday life. The big-ideas realm, for Graeber, is called mythic communism, in which we think about countries, history, leaders, intellectuals, and what must happen when the great revolution arrives, if it ever does. It is a world of big dreams and almost-religious faith. But in everyday life, Graeber says, most of us have an experience of living according to more personal or neighborly concerns. These dwell outside the dreams of mythic communism, but also outside the logic of capitalism. He calls this realm everyday communism. What is it? It is the common understanding that as humans, most of us will abide by a kind of Golden Rule: from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. What do people need, and what do we expect of each other? If a stranger asks for directions, you'll give them. If you know how to change a tire and you see someone at the side of the road with a flat, you will stop and help them. If an elderly or disabled person is struggling with accessibility to a store or the bus, most of us will lend a hand. If a child falls on the subway tracks, we expect anyone who is able to climb down and lift them out. If an unhoused person asks you for money, many people will have a powerful feeling about their responsibility to offer some. If your neighbor asked for help with food or common necessities, it might feel unacceptable to not open your cupboards to them. And in times of stress and disaster — hurricanes, floods, food shortages, heat waves, the rise of fascism — we know that people feel strongly about pulling together and helping each other. When Hurricane Katrina destroyed major parts of New Orleans in August 2005, hundreds of citizens, without being ordered or told how to do it, sailed their personal boats into the flooded city and rescued over 10,000 people from their rooftops and floating debris. They called themselves the Cajun Navy. Graeber says these unspoken rules of helping out in families, neighborhoods, communities, and even among strangers are at the foundation of how we live with each other. They show how a basic level of trust and expectation of mutual support already exists between us. Our everyday communism is not total or switched on all the time, Graeber says. It won't show up between people and groups who have become enemies, and there can be a strained relationship between how much a person needs the help and how hard it is to give it. So this is not a fantasy that somehow we are all angels wearing capitalist cosplay. But it does say there is a powerful and common habit we share in our daily lives that can remind us that capitalism — with its competition and profit-seeking and demands to work harder and longer or else — is not the way we really are or have to be. If you think of capitalism as a system of debts in which most people in the world are in debt to a small number of people who own most of the power, and most people must work hard just to survive, everyday communism is a powerful idea. You'll realize that in the relationships that matter to you, you don't do that kind of penny pinching. You buy each other lunch. When a friend or family member is sick, you take care of them. If you think of fascism as the enraged outcome of resentments over what inequality feels like, it's even more powerful. Everyday communism says that we don't have to live with our heads buried in the accounting books. It says that even in our worst moments, we have an instinct for mutual aid. In fact, we can't get away from our impulse to share. Maybe this adds a fourth category to Aristotle's friendship types: the stranger we don't think twice about helping, because why on earth wouldn't we?