Are the People Who Help You Really Your True Friends?

Bruno Aguirre
 

Help is borrowed very easily, but 

it is always repaid with interest.

“Great obligations 

do not make a man 

grateful, but vengeful.” 

— Friedrich Nietzsche

in, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

• Have you ever thought about why, when people are not helping you in any way whatsoever during your bad times, your truest friend helps you? 

• Or that you are the defeated one, and your own friend who cares for you wishes for your victory?

• Or does he quietly rejoice at seeing you crushed beneath his feet, thinking to himself that only he in this world can help you?

• Perhaps one weak person feels a little more powerful next to another weak person?

• Does it really happen that people care for a defeated or weakened person, or that they hold pity for him?

• Have you ever tried to think about why your friend is helping you in your bad times? 

If it has happened with you that a friend helped you at a time when you were completely finished, when you did not have the courage to rise, as though a drowning man had found the support of a straw, and you came out of that heavy problem…

In such a situation you will become the lifelong slave of that friend, and he knows this, but he will not say it till his dying breath; yet you will never become conscious of your slavery. 

This is the final condition of help received in a bad time.

Now you can also use this as power, and perhaps you may also be betrayed. 

What if the person you help turns out to be an opportunist, or what if that person turns out to be a turncoat? 

Traitors can have many names; there is no point stretching this out.

Now you have to determine whether you need help, or whether you want to become the one who helps.

If you need help, then from whom and on what terms; 

and if you are to help, then whom and on what terms.

1. Who is your true friend, the one who stands with you in every adverse circumstance? 
2. But when no one is standing with you in your adversity, why is your true friend standing with you?
3. Perhaps to show that he is your well-wisher and that he holds good wishes for you?

Or, while helping you, does he want to tell you that you are weak and that only he can help you, and that he is more powerful than you, and at every moment you will keep feeling that apart from him you have no one at all in this world.

When you take someone’s support, you yourself indirectly grant that supporting person the status of an authorized individual, by which that person becomes a direct participant in the decisions connected to your life. And in this state you introduce him to everyone as a member of your family.

None of this says that taking a person’s cooperation is not right. 

Understand only this much: 

Whoever you take help from, it should not be used as a force or a pressure in your life, whether it be your financial decisions, or your familial ones, or any personal decision.

You must always remain free, because slaves follow orders, and they spend their lives dependent on the scraps of others.

Take help from someone only with the thought of help in return for help. 

But when you think this way, the person from whom you are taking help also knows that you will be of use to him, and then the power of both persons operates equally. Because when you think that you too will consider it proper to help in return for help, you do not carry a weak personality; your time may be weak, but you yourself hold a generosity toward assisting a weak person, and then you will experience that you yourself are a mass of power.

But if you feel that in your sorrow only your friend can support you, or that he wants to, then you are wrong, because help is a price that is borrowed very easily but has to be repaid with interest.

And the person who cannot repay it is discarded, called a traitor or an opportunist.

Is your friend, whom you are calling true, actually true, or is he merely running an act of being a true friend?

There is no definition of a true friend at all, because you call a true friend only the one who stands ready to have his backside beaten red alongside you; in return, you too hand over your backside to him like a gift box, and you also grant him the right that, like magic, whenever he opens that box, your backside is ready to be reddened. No fixed period of time is required for this; it is measured by the definition of the help: the bigger the help you have accepted, the longer, and for whatever problem, he can put your backside to use.

Your true friend may be social, he may be strong in his financial position, he may be familial, or he may even be a criminal, but when you are asking him for help, you should be aware of which principles your value is behaving in accordance with.

1. Is it merely accepting slavery in exchange for help, or will it turn into a harsh punishment, or will you be called a traitor? 
2. Can you return his help? 

• If yes, then you will easily be able to carry a humble and mature friendship that will remain alive for a long time. 
• If not, then like dogs you will only be called loyal, which will serve merely to improve their personal social image; and if someone says something against them, you will bite that person in the gathering and prove your true loyalty.

The above friendship is forgotten after proper use; after that, the person need not keep any relation with your loyalty, because he has kept many other dogs. And when such pet dogs confront other loyalists, a claim has to be staked there to being the truest loyalist. 

This seems difficult for those people who must give help in return for help but cannot give big help, and whose own condition cannot hold together without taking help, and such people are very soon kicked out of the gatherings.

Contradiction is also necessary in true friendship: the demand of time in exchange for time, the demand of money in exchange for money, or else you have to give or fulfil other help of the same value. 

Friendship is neither only continuous taking nor only continuous giving; it is arranged in the form of ice, which can change the form of its help when the need arises. 

In true friendship there is no expectation, yet without expectation true friendship cannot be sustained either.

If you befriend a snake, you will be bitten sooner or later; and if you befriend a monkey, you will surely be robbed. 

You will have to determine which option you choose and how painful your friendship turns out to be. 

That betrayal will happen is certain; how prepared you are is what needs to be known. 

Calling someone a true friend with your eyes closed, and calling someone a true friend even with your eyes open, is just like calling a tomato a fruit or a vegetable. 

Because there is no true friend at all in this world; a true friend exists in the form of some kind of price, which you will have to pay sooner or later. Whether you give him your time, or repay the debt of your friendship with money, or present the proof of your might by helping a troubled friend through some piece of information.

Now if someone tells you that God is the true friend, then even there you will find many people as helpless as those filing a petition before God for the resolution of a problem. 

Now, some people’s work gets done and some people’s does not; those whose spoiled work is set right attach themselves forever to that religion, that god, that sect, that monastery. And they throw themselves for all time into the propagation of that god.

But those whose work does not get done search for the path of another god, because only those people come to God whose work has gone terribly wrong and whose true friends of the human race cannot repair it. 

The problems over which a particular individual has no control are left at the door of faith; and when the work gets done, the only repayment is propagation. The meaning of saying this is that you will certainly have to repay something in return for help, even if God asks nothing of you.

There you will not consider it proper to be called a traitor, because at the door of faith no one will call you a traitor; but in order to escape a fear, the fear of self-reproach, you go on repaying the debt of your help very happily.

The final essence of the above article is this: 

Whoever your friendship is with, it is selfish, even if you have no awareness of it. 

But it is a mental acceptance of certainly giving in order to get something. 

A true friend truly does not exist at all; 

it is an exchange of time. It is a display of your own might; it is a false high in the weak companion’s mind that a friend is with him. Everything is as clear as water. A true friend and true friendship are an impossible coincidence, and this true friendship is only a loan taken before receiving something.

If you stand, stand together; otherwise you will be called a traitor and a selfish man.

“Are you a slave? 

Then you cannot be a friend. 

Are you a tyrant? 

Then you cannot have friends.” 

— Friedrich Nietzsche

in, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

in, Nietzsche Wisdoms