Whenever life leaves me confused, I tend to return to a certain book of reflections and reread what its author wrote. I had done that several times before when friendship started to trouble me. Now the word friend has become confusing again, so I found myself opening that book once more.
At one point I asked someone, “Do you think friendship online should have a kind of chain effect? For example, if I know someone spends time with a person I dislike, my trust in them drops.” The answer I got was simple: “I do that too.”
But I have never really accepted that logic.
The old idea that “a friend of my friend is my friend, and a friend of my enemy is my enemy” sounds neat, but it makes very little sense in real life. Leaving aside, for the moment, the obvious conflicts inside that statement, it reduces people to almost two camps: those who belong to someone’s side, directly or through connections, and those who belong to the opposing side, again directly or through connections. If a person truly chooses friends by that principle, then most of their relationships will remain trapped inside a single social circle. Your friends’ friends become your friends, and also everyone else’s friends within that same circle.
Inside a structure like that, every remark and every display of emotion has to be carefully managed. If everyone in the group follows this so-called chain of friendship, then a falling-out with one former friend—something as minor as an argument—can spread through the network of relationships. The damage travels outward until, in the worst case, the whole circle pushes that person out.
Now back to the contradiction I postponed earlier. A person can be someone’s enemy and someone else’s friend at the same time. So if a person is both the friend of one of my friends and the friend of one of my enemies, does the chain say I can befriend them or not? The supposedly simple binary relation of whether two people are friends is actually far more complicated than that. And ordinary experience already tells us that friendship is not transitive. In other words, “being friends” does not form a transitive closure.
A small code example can illustrate the point, even if code alone cannot prove it:
a = {"like": [1, 2, 3], "is": 1}
b = {"like": [1, 3, 4], "is": 3}
c = {"like": [3, 4, 5], "is": 4}
print(a["is"] in b["like"] and b["is"] in a["like"]) # True a和b是朋友
print(b["is"] in c["like"] and c["is"] in b["like"]) # True b和c是朋友
print(a["is"] in c["like"] and c["is"] in a["like"]) # False a和c不是朋友
So why does this chain logic appear so often? I think the answer is the social circle itself.
If my friends discover that I still associate with someone they dislike, then in their eyes I become disloyal. By the same logic, I can also use association as a quick test of who is loyal to me. Once things work that way, the friend group stops being a loose collection of relationships and starts looking like a rigid organization. A person inside it is like a dog on a leash, allowed to mingle only with the other dogs tied to the same space.
This chain of association is also supposed to be a convenient shortcut. But in practice it is not convenient at all. What it really does is hand over my right to choose my own friends to the people who are already my friends. Their judgment becomes my judgment. That is the absurdity at the center of it.
A friend circle should be fluid. It should be nothing more than a concept formed by the people I happen to be friends with. I have the right to make independent judgments. Whether I become friends with someone should depend on whether we understand each other, whether there is mutual appreciation, whether something real passes between us—not on which circle they belong to.
No one should be trapped inside a circle.
And even when someone seems to break away from one group and lose faith in it, that does not mean they have escaped the system of circles itself. They may simply move into another circle and become disillusioned with that one too. In that case, they have only stopped believing in one specific group, not in the whole structure that keeps dividing people into groups. After that, they either keep jumping from circle to circle, or they search for one that finally makes them feel secure. But will they really find such a circle? Is there even such a thing as a circle that can make a person feel at ease?
Circles are not much fun. Some people inside them want admiration. Others want belonging and recognition. In the end, everyone is only trying to get what they personally need.
Joining a circle is easy: all you have to do is label yourself. People love putting labels on themselves. They say it helps them understand who they are, and helps others understand them too. But labels are not free. Once attached, they flatten a human being. A complex person collapses into a labeled one.
“He called me out in his friend circle—what will that whole group think? How will they see me?”
A chain of associations does not lead to real friendship, and circles do not set people free.