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Uh....many people don't think like that.

For most of the people I know, they aren't looking for anything besides connection to other people. They're complete & whole people on their own, they don't need anything else. They don't hang around their friends because they're looking for a halo of success. They don't do it for prestige or looks or humor. They just do it because they like company.

It's really a difference in worldview. For some people, things come first in their life, and they surround themselves with people who will help them achieve those things, or ones who have already achieved them so they can bask in their glow. For others, people come first in their life, and they surround themselves with things that will help them relate to the people they care about.

I've been on both sides of the fence, and I can tell you, I have felt miserable every time I tried convincing myself that success was all that mattered. I'm trying to find my way back to a place now where the people matter more than the accolades - it's not all that easy, because it really is a worldview, and once you've optimized your life for success, it's pretty hard to un-optimize it and build relationships. But I can tell you that my friends don't care if you're a hot-shot developer for Google or a yoga instructor or a public-policy consultant or an urban planner. People are people, they're complex, and they're a lot more than a laundry list of characteristics you might like to have.

It would be impossible to have a meaningful friendship on such grounds. That is not friendship it's a trade between "fame/money" and "rich friend". It's not just "less pure", it's insane and wrong.

It's entirely possible to be true friends with people of vastly different status. People have a great instinct for real friends when they see one. The problem with rich/famous people is that their lifestyle changes vastly since they can afford not to work, they live in more isolated neighborhoods and it becomes increasingly rare to bump onto people with similar goals in life.

If you're super rich you can work your way through the social elite, but if you're averagely rich this doesn't seem to be an option.

>For some reason people seem to think that someone wanting to be around because of a person's fame or money is less pure than other reasons because it's not real.

There's a big difference between a person's intrinsic properties and his money. You like your friends; you like the rich guy's money.

And when you're around someone for his money you're playing a part. It's a job. You're not going to tell him what you really think about anything. That's pathological.

"You like your friends; you like the rich guy's money."

Oh?

So you think that there aren't a large number of rich people that are interesting and have achieved something which is the reason they are rich? And it would be great to spend some time with them?

Steve Jobs was rich and had power and fame. So the only reason anyone would want to be around Steve is because of the money, the power and the fame? Or Larry Ellison? Or Warren Buffet? Or even Paul Graham? He's doing ok and I'm sure he would be interesting to be around even for people who have no interest in the startup scene and nothing to gain by knowing Paul.

But even if someone was born into money for that matter then as a result of having money they also could be interesting and nice to be around for exactly that reason. Or at least entertaining (the Kennedy's come to mind..)

Sure. You can like a rich guy independent of his money. But if his money is the basis for the friendship it's not really a friendship, IMO.

the only reason anyone would want to be around Steve is because of the money, the power and the fame?

You completely miss the point- it isn't that nobody could like Steve as a person. It's that, how can Steve tell who likes Steve and who just likes Steve's money?

That test really only happens in truly-down-in-the-dumps or life-and-death situations.

That would kinda be the point.

How so?

It's easier to demonstrate a counterfactual than to prove the theorem. Therefore the burden of proof should be on you to demonstrate the counterfactual.

I don't think you're wrong, I'm just asking for some elaboration.

Because it is during those periods when you need your friends the most and when it is most inconvenient/difficult for fake friends to come to your aid. It is naturally the most effective way to separate the wheat from the chaff, even though it may not be a nice process.

Are you being intentionally obtuse?

You were talking about "wanting to be around because of a person's fame or money" being just another reason to be around. The "You like your friends; you like the rich guy's money" is just a way of restating your apparent original claim.

So coming back and saying, well, Steve Jobs is interesting, is missing by a mile what you're responding to.

Here's the thing though.... If there was more of a gift economy in these cases, the intrinsic properties would be something like generosity, fairness, and honor. You have a lot of money and have a reputation for these things, who is to say that isn't more real?

The problem though is form. I am generous with my good fortune to you. What are you doing for me in return? It used to be that a gift demanded reciprocity (as would injury or misbehavior), and to be forgiven for not doing so was a bad thing and an insult to one's honor. Then Christianity came and we all got screwed over by this obligation to forgive.

Interestingly we know from anthropology that money came about as a way to quantify debt, not the other way around. So perhaps this is only less real today because of how we account for our possessions and how we relate to our money, not because of any intrinsic issue with a relationship based on disparity of this sort.

Interestingly Cicero brings up a similar point in his work on friendship. At a time where Roman society was very stratified and friendships were supposed to be between economic equals, he suggested that the best friendships would be made with people below one's social status, for the specific reason that they would be more loyal. Friendships in Rome were all about a gift economy (as they still are in many parts of the world today. I have a friend who studied with Edgar Polome for his PhD and said Polome used to use India as an example if this. He'd get a gift-- maybe a new wallet or something-- from someone one year and a request for help getting a job or a car or something else a few years later. And when he'd turn them down they'd be unhappy because it was not fulfilling his obligation for having accepted the gift. This is true all over Asia as my wife always reminds me never to accept a gift from someone unless I know what they want in return.)

I think the examples you mention would fall into the sphere of "acquaintances" or "family friends" or "connections" or "not enemies" today (in the business or strategic sense). We are talking about actual close friends, comrades, (BFFs if u want) here.

I don't think that's all though.

Case in point, read the Old English poem "The Wanderer" (ideally in Old English but if necessary in translation) and remember that the relationship the narrator is lamenting is this sort of relationship.

The point is that gifts tie us together. As one person said, "obligations unite us, debts drive us apart." The idea that you give money and there is some sort of a moral obligation to reciprocate in some way (but not a quantified debt) creates the bond.

The way gift economies work is that you give gifts out and therefore obtain communal esteem, and people reciprocate to get that esteem by giving you gifts.

Making the claim it's better in Old English is just a transparent way of bragging you know Old English. And it's subjective how best to enjoy something. It's like telling someone they need an ice cube in their scotch.

Irrelevant and pedantic point here, but I would suggest it's more like telling someone they need to not have an ice cube in their scotch, very few scotch snobs would argue pro-ice :)

Just a transparent way of telling me you know how to drink Scotch. Damn knowledge snobs!

Actually despite being a scotch snob who spends a lot of his money on really nice bottles... I do enjoy it chilled sometimes (though a friend got me "whiskey stones" for Christmas, so I use them instead of ice!) I'm a snob to what I consider bad whiskey, not to what might be considered a bad whiskey drinker :)

The issue is that in translation, something is always lost. There are a few phrases[1] in the poem that are darned hard to translate adequately although knowing Old English well enough to read the poem is not a guarantee by itself of getting more out of it than in Modern English.

In general, if you can, reading a work in the language it was composed in is better than reading it in translation. It is generally hard to disagree with that.

The fact is that translation into contemporary English from Old English and Old Norse is deceptively difficult.

[1] wyrd bið ful aræd is probably the best example. It's usually translated as "Fate is wholely inexorable" which is not a good translation. "The turn of events is fully complete" is better, as would be "My fate has now been decreed" depending on how you want to look at wyrd (fate, but literally "that which has turned" and often personified as a woman) and araed (decreed, established, spoken).

Edit Changed the above OE to proper characters, and adding this:

While I am bragging, as you put it, about my understanding of languages I will point out that the structure there of wyrd becoming established through the spoken word is also found in parallel Old Norse traditions, where we have the description of the Norns in Voluspa ending with:

þær lög lögðu,

þær líf kuru

alda börnum,

örlög seggja.

This is again difficult to translate because of the variety of things lög could mean. "They laid laws" or They laid layers" or "They allotted lots" are all viable translations. My overall translation would be:

They allotted lots,

They chose lives

for the sons of men,

They uttered fate.

If we're going to be Old English, there'a a damn more about the nature of hospitality and guest-right that's important to know.

Back then, these things were evidence that the other guy wasn't going to knife you in your sleep.

This is reasonably true. But there is also some likelihood that the hospitality and guest-right system was not only very old (since it is found across many other Indo-European branches as well) and part of this. Isn't there an episode in one of Homer's poems or something (I don't have my library with me in Indonesia :-( ) where two people are fighting on the battlefield and discover that one of their ancestors gave hospitality to the ancestor of the other and so they have to quit fighting?

Oh yes. Hospitality is the central theme of Genesis 19, for instance, which definitely predates The Wanderer. I feel a little bad now, because I can't provide you with a solid set of sources, but every culture all the way back to the earliest stories we have will give references to the obligation of a host, the duties of a guest, and how gift-giving plays into that. The whole point of the Trojan War wasn't precisely that property had been stolen, but more importantly that it had been done by a guest to his host. (As modern readers, we recognize a breach of private property more clearly than we recognize a breach of hospitality.)

It's the earliest form of debt-as-community-glue, really. It only survives today in the habit of bringing a bottle of wine to a dinner party, and in the handshake. We mostly rely on codified laws of hospitality instead (which govern restaurants and hotels).

The value of friendship is to understand and to be understood. Every other motive (rightly) feels like a cheap plastic substitute.