I wrote about relationships as transactions once. And I think it is true, if you define transactions of value, as I did there, as involving anything that has utility for a person. Even a person’s humour or kindness, by this logic, is of value to one who appreciates it. In that sense, anything that contributes to my happiness, that I believe I want, has value for me, and the relationship I enter to derive that value is a transaction.
But if I see the word ‘transaction’ in the ordinary sense it is used, usually I don’t employ such a broad, open definition of ‘value’. Someone who blatantly networks and collects contacts like Big Tech collects my data, greedily absorbing everything that might potentially come in handy someday, few would have qualms in labelling transactional. Someone who feeds the poor or volunteers for causes or hears out their friends’ problems, I might argue, derives happiness from his actions and therefore is also engaging in transactions, like the other, albeit transactions of a different kind.
While logically coherent, I can’t deny that such an all encompassing notion of ‘transactionality’ goes against the real sense of the word as it is used. The greatest evidence of this is this very need to explain and justify such a broad definition. Such an open-ended interpretation also reduces everything to absurdity – any action, you could argue, is transactional, except the one that positively harms you. And even that, if you make the case that this harm itself is of some value, is transactional. A definition that encompasses everything is redundant.
That video makes an interesting point on friendships, three different categories of friendships, categorized along the spectrum of transactionality. The lowest level of friendship, the friendship of transaction – what I’d call acquaintances rather than friends – is purely transactional in this sense. Purely transactional in that each party seeks some benefit from the other as the reason to engage. Of course, there’s nothing wrong in this, and many relations are naturally transactional, and perhaps both parties prefer it that way. It might, though, be a problem, if that’s all you have, a life of only transactions, a life maybe unimaginably sad.
The next are the friendships of beauty. If we can stretch this restricted definition a bit once more, I think this lies in the middle of the transactionality spectrum. It’s somewhat of a transaction for one party, and nothing for the other, unlike the lowest level of pure transactions at both sides. Para-social relationships, I imagine, belong here, one person investing heavily in someone unaware of their very existence, admiring their looks or intellect or fame or success or some such quality, some ‘beauty’ they possess. Of course, it’s not just restricted to the para-social – even real relations can be one-sided, one person deeply admiring another who doesn’t harbour any such admiration in return. The problem with this, obviously, is that if the beauty goes away, the friendship presumably does too, conditional as it is on the beauty. And even more than this, I think, the real weakness is that, more often than not, one is friends not with a real person, but with an image of a person, a touched-up and idealized image, an image only in their head, that reality cannot live up to, if it ever even gets the chance to attempt to.
Finally, that leaves us with the highest level of friendship, the friendship of virtue, ‘cosmically, beautifully, useless’. The friendship that is devoid of transactionality, in the sense that you don’t want something from someone, whether it’s their network or their beauty. You ‘love them for who they are’, truly interested in them, and vice versa. Obviously, the first thought that comes to mind is – how is this any different from the lowest level, the friendship of transactions? Even if all you really want is that they be who they are, you still want something, the test of that being that a person wouldn’t establish such a relationship with just anyone. Which means there must be something that goes into it, that determines the choice of developing this kind of friendship with this particular person rather than that other one.
Hence the fuss over the definition of a transaction, over just how far and how wide this definition stretches. When I retain the widest definition possible, I do indeed reach the rather trivial conclusion that relationships are transactions. When I restrict it, however, it opens up space for a more interesting classification, such as the three types in the video.
I think arguing about which conclusion is ‘correct’ is as fruitless as it is stupid – the conclusion you end up at depends on the premises you begin with. Which means arguing about the validity of a conclusion is really arguing about the validity of the starting premise, about whether ‘transaction’ means X or Y. It is, in fact, the same type of argument about whether a particular job is ‘better’ than another, whether being a software developer is better than a marketing lead or a business owner. Without knowing better for whom, and what that person wants out of it, any conclusion is in fact inconclusive and arbitrary.
Since it seems moronic to claim a monopoly over how a word is to be used, I couldn’t possibly conclude that either classification of friendships – as transactions, or into 3 levels, or something entirely different, is ‘right’. Although ‘correctness’ seems impossible to achieve, consistency is still a worthy measure, and the consistency of any conclusion I draw depends upon how I follow and build up my chain from my starting premises.
When I keep my definition of transaction narrow, as the word is normally used in ordinary life, I do see a difference between the friendships of virtue and those of transaction. The friendships of transaction are the ones where I engage because someone will prove useful, either today or someday in the future, for getting a job or doing some work or even for something I don’t know yet. The friendships of virtue are the ones where I engage even if I don’t – at least ostensibly – derive any benefit from it, and yet I feel the better and happier for it.
I admit though, that the cynic in me would like to claim that there is no difference between the two, that it is all a transaction, that a friendship, of whatever kind, only exists because you get something out of it. It’s not a particularly sharp or bright observation- it is a fairly obvious argument to make, and yet, not an easy one to counter, other than by resorting to the appeal of ‘different strokes for different folks’, that my definition of transaction differs from yours.
However, there is a difference, and that difference I think is easier to illustrate by argument by analogy, notwithstanding its many potential stumbling blocks. Most people, I imagine, would admit to a difference between categories of books, particularly fiction and a specific type of non-fiction, the productive, self-help sort. Almost no one, I think, reads fiction because it’ll make them more money or help them advance their career or make them more attractive. Whereas, there is a particular category of books that you usually only read because it promises you something. The latter is the counterpart of the friendship of transaction, and fiction (and some non-fiction too falls here) the counterpart of the friendship of virtue. I think this is a fair analogy, notwithstanding that I also believe that the books you read for no tangible gain, often fiction or otherwise, are also usually more useful than the supposedly useful ones. If anything, this only strengthens the analogy, because the same holds for friendships of virtue vis-à-vis transactions.
If I am willing to admit a difference when it comes to books, that there are books I may read for pleasure rather than sordid utility, then why not friendships? The cynicism, if any, would apply evenly. Yet the absurdity of telling someone that they read Kafka only because that makes them a better analyst or Dostoevsky simply because that helps them with their writing skills is difficult for me to deny. This idealism, then, that I can accept that one might read for something beyond mere utility, for a kind of pleasure, should, I think, carry over to the realm of friendships as well, even if only few of them. Here too, the abstract is more pernicious than the particular – abstractly I might like to tell myself it is difficult to imagine friendship without transaction, yet when I look at particular friendships of mine, the difficulty is in fact in identifying any transaction whatsoever.
But there remains one question I have left unanswered – that a friendship of virtue too, is not simply random, one human befriending whichever human they come across – but a conscious choice or selection. Does that make it a transaction? The argument being that were it really transaction-free, there would be no such judgment of whom to befriend. That the judgment, the selectivity is based on some consideration, a utility, just the same as any transaction.
I think not. Extending the previous analogy, the choice of which book to read is also a selection, a judgment one makes, but I would hardly claim that that makes the reading of the book transactional. That I choose to read Kierkegaard over someone else doesn’t mean that reading Kierkegaard is no different from reading something promising to teach me the dark arts of making untold wealth. The choice is a selection, based on what one likes, what one is interested in, just the same as in friendship, and choice in itself need not be transactional.
For all the talk of not being judgmental, I think every choice is a judgment. Nor is there anything to apologize for in exercising judgment – were that the case, then every moment must one be apologizing. The choice of career, of spouse, of clothing, of food, and yes, of books and of friends, is, after all, based on a judgment, and yet that need not by itself make any of these a transaction.
That judgment obviously, is what a person makes for themselves. It need not be entirely subjective – some books clearly appeal to a lot more people than others, just as some people clearly have a lot more friends than others, because more people want to befriend them. Which means that there would be some objective parameters you could deduce that go towards making a book or a friend ‘better’ than another, though it’s not what I’d want to get into now, not least because it’s difficult to establish that any parameters you come up with are not arbitrary.
In any case, ‘elitism’, whether literary or artistic, of the kind that passionately argues which work or artist is ‘better’ strikes me as extraordinarily stupid. Who after all, cares whether Einstein was ‘better’ than Newton, even if you could know what ‘better’ meant in this context? Certainly neither Einstein nor Newton, both now peacefully and happily long dead. In any case, convincing anyone of your argument changes nothing. And even if I could prove that, for instance, Chekhov was ‘better’ than Turgenev, that’s still no reason why someone couldn’t prefer Turgenev if that’s what they wanted.
Judgment then, is for a person to make for themselves. Some people may read only if there is some tangible gain to be had, and some may only network with those from whom they perceive a benefit, while ignoring the rest. I don’t know whether that is conducive for happiness, but I do think that people are smart enough to choose the kind of books they want to read, if any, and the kind of friendships they want to have, if any, without needing anyone to do that for them.