How to Keep Your Friends Together
An essay. About three paperback pages.
Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. This essay was published on February 6, 2024.
When I was a sophomore in high school, I took an elective called Comparative Government. The idea of the class was to take a look at the structure of government and basic cultural makeup of a handful of countries, compare them, and draw a few inferences about what makes for a successful polity. This was the rare example of a high-school class that wasn’t a complete waste of time. In fact, it did the one thing a secondary curriculum can really aspire to: it taught me a useful concept that I would remember forever.
Factions break countries.
Factions are subgroups that persistently identify themselves in opposition to the remainder.
Subgroups are unavoidable within a group of any size. It’s baked into what it means to be a group in the first place: a group is multiple people, and everyone’s different in some way or another. Articulating those differences is equivalent to defining subgroups. Your group could comprise nearly homogeneous urban middle-classers, and you could still break it up into subgroups according to neighborhood, gender, personality, whatever. Subgroups are unremarkable.
But a faction is something different. A subgroup becomes a faction when several distinguishing characteristics overlap neatly along the same lines, carving up the group in the same way repeatedly and reinforcing the same divisions. Quantity has a quality all its own, and as the same subgroup becomes definable in a greater number of ways, it becomes less meaningfully regarded as a subgroup at all; eventually, it becomes another group entirely.
The application to countries is obvious. When one part of a country’s population practices Religion A, and the other part practices Religion B, it’s unremarkable. When those same subgroups also speak separate languages, and God forbid, when they’re also associated with different races, wealth classes, or geographic foci, the country itself is at risk of decoherence—first as a meaningful cultural concept, and then as a state, with the attendant social upheaval. In other words, if the only remaining description binding a group of people together is a border drawn on a map, soon it won’t be. That’s the warning we 15-year-olds drew from the class, if we hadn’t already picked it up from American History. Factions break countries.
The flipside of a warning is an instruction, and this instruction is straightforward to translate: make sure your subgroups intersect. If you want a country to stay together, then some of its Christians should be rich; some of its poor should be Christians; some of the urbanites should be educated; some of the uneducated should be urbanites; and so on. It’s prophylactic, but it’s also hopeful; it’s not just about not falling apart, it’s about pulling together. Treat your people like woodgrains in a laminate, weaves in a net, hoplites’ shields, or interlocking fingers. Choose your analogy.
The real value of the insight is its generalizability. We studied factions in the political context, but the idea applies everywhere. Today, where I live and in the socioeconomic stratum I inhabit, I am unlikely to ever have a meaningful voice in the design or maintenance of my country. Extended family communities are dispersed and transient beyond repair, and civic society is mostly gone, too, which means that—realistically—my friend group is the only community in which I’ll ever have a meaningful role. So with gratitude, I’ll do what I can to maintain it.
Contrary to intuition, that means willfully engaging in exclusive sorting. Tender hearts and childhood adages about friendship advise against leaving anyone out, but you must in order to build a resilient network. College, grad school, and work did some of the heavy lifting for us, sending some to the same new cities and leaving others behind, then shuffling the deck and re-dealing once or twice. But now, as we wear into the long and formless years of our thirties, the burden is ours to be more intentional. So we should sort ourselves into certain small groups for certain activities and relationships, and into others for others. In my friend group of about 10, let friends A-E play games together without F-J; but let D-H have book club while A-C and I-J sit at home. Let F be a confidant for G’s marital embarrassment, but let G accept financial help only from H or I, and let I share her manuscript with only the gentle J. Where some live in the city and the rest in the suburbs, let us drive out to the east side for a bike ride on Sunday morning, but meet the westerners for a movie night with the kids. Let us go for breakfast with a single couple, lunch with a couple singles, and dinner with anyone that likes sports. Everyone can eat FOMO for dessert.