“We try to be real nice and friendly to people, but sometimes they take advantage of that.”
“It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.”
In this episode, we discuss "friendliness" as an idea which refers to strategic kindness and sympathy shown towards others primarily out of interest in social standing rather than genuine concern. We discuss how this phenomenon, conceived by Michael Moffatt, an anthropology professor at Rutgers in the 1980's, operates and what validity we ascribe to it.
