Suppose you want to change the world for the better. Where to begin?

One place is friendship. We are, as Aristotle teaches, social animals, designed to live in community, to build societies where each plays a role as part of a whole, and to find meaning through relationships.

Aristotle suggests in the “Nicomachean Ethics” that eudaimonia – true happiness or blessedness – necessitates genuine friendship. A man can have all the material goods in the world, but if he has no one to share them with, he cannot be happy. Thus, in addition to the practical necessity of having people work together for society to function, human connection is also paramount to the discovery of meaning and those deeper aspirations of the soul.

In fact, a lot of troubles in the modern world can be traced back to the disruption of human connections. People who ought to be friends are no longer friends. People who ought to go together no longer go together. For example, when spouses are separated from their children or each other, the foundation of society and culture fractures. Weak families make a weak society, and families become weak when key human connections deteriorate.

Economically speaking, most people are no longer friends with the folks from whom they buy the necessities of life. After all, how can you be friends with a multinational corporation like Amazon? Because friendship is lacking, it’s easy for economic transactions to become dehumanizing and exploitative. Companies aren’t concerned for the good of their employees or their customers; they’re concerned with the numbers at the bottom of their balance sheets.

Politics ought to grow organically out of friendship, yet it, too, has become a question of exploiting advantages, angling for profit and power, and perpetuating warring factions. In theory, someone ought to enter politics because he’s concerned for the welfare of his neighbors and friends and wants to fight on their behalf and for the life and culture they’ve built together. Personal loyalty means more to him than profit or power.

The good politician is the great friend of the people. Yet today, politicians too often shackle themselves to corporate interests and lobbyists, eschewing the ties of friendship and loyalty in exchange for cash and influence. The friendship between the governors and the governed has broken down.

A lack of friendship also contributes to the modern crisis of meaning. In a 2024 poll, 20% of Americans reported feeling lonely on a daily basis. Loneliness contributes to anxiety, depression, and even health problems. Moreover, most of us find meaning through relationships with others, which means that isolation contributes to cultural malaise and ennui. The emptiness so many experience in modern culture has to do, in part, with a lack of genuine human connection and self-sacrificial love.

To work against all these forces of dissolution, then, it’s necessary to rebuild friendships, the ties that bind. When so much in our world tries to tear us apart, we must cling more tenaciously than ever to one another.

A healthy society is connection. An unhealthy one is division. We may not be able to single-handedly restore our country’s political, economic, and social wellbeing, but we can build stronger relationships with those within our orbit.

Doing so has a far bigger effect than we realize. The math adds up quickly: If just 10 people formed stronger relationships with 25 people they know, and those 25 were inspired to do the same, that’s over 6,000 with improved relationships. That’s reweaving the fabric of society.

Moreover, no one who wants to launch some serious reform movement can do so on their own. Whether you want to start a charity, run for office, protest an unjust law, or publish a book, only your network can propel you to success. Cliche though it sounds, it’s not what you know but who you know that counts. The broader someone’s network of friends, the greater that person’s influence, the more potential social capital they have at their disposal to effect meaningful change.

All the most profound works of reform originate in friendship, which is to say in love. One thinks of saintly figures throughout history who brought religious or moral revival. Fundamentally, they did this by loving others and inspiring them to imitate their example.

G. K. Chesterton makes this point beautifully in his essay, “The Twelve Men,” beginning with the concept of a jury and then tying it to the greatest movement the world has ever seen. What he says here encapsulates well everything I’ve attempted to articulate about friendship and social change:

Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: PickPik