What’s the lie you tell yourself? Only you can answer. But if we ask ourselves, collectively, what’s the lie society tells us, it’s obvious: you can survive alone. In most developed countries, you never have to leave your house because you can still satisfy every material need. You can work remotely, order food and goods to your doorstep, exercise, and entertain yourself, all in the comfort of your home. To no one’s surprise, the average person is participating less and less in civil society: fewer social clubs, declining church attendance, and community organizations disappearing. This is probably a net negative, even though there are definitely dark sides to civil society. Most of restaurants’ revenue comes from takeout now; our Puritan ancestors rejoice as young people break records in how little sex, drugs and alcohol they consume; Americans are increasingly inside, loner people.

Modern technology keeps chipping away at our material need for friendship, and in doing so, it’s carved out a hole somewhere deeper. Our material infrastructure is increasingly anti-social. And contrary to all the hubbub, this is definitely not a male-dominated loneliness crisis, either.

“Society didn’t make us lonelier on purpose. It made solitude frictionless.”

Apologies in advance to the anti-capitalists out there, but you need to wake up: friendship (and its close cousin, trust) is the most slept-on, undervalued asset in existence. Sadly, it feels like a dying asset class these days.

I don’t want to sound too much like vapid TED talk slop, but this really matters!! Here’s why.

Friendship is political capital. It takes trust to shore up consensus and build relationships across the aisle, especially in the face of rising political polarization. Maybe that’s why Congress seems less effective than ever at passing legislation. The glory days seem behind us. I mean look at these big beautiful legislative pieces: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the GI Bill, Civil Rights. This wasn’t a result of happenstance, moral purity, or perfect alignment; in fact, none of it was perfect, but collaboration wrought progress.

Friendship wins wars. Historian Phillips O’Brien asks us: how many battles do you think the U.S. lost in the Vietnam War? Just take a guess.

Zero. Not a single one. We won every battle but lost the war (the ultimate irony of this expression). What about the Iraq War? Nope, not a single battle lost there either! Yet we fumbled the bag. While the U.S. is incredibly good at operational effectiveness (we love a big scawy name for a mission), we absolutely shit the bed on strategic execution.

We failed to invest in legitimate, durable local allies who could carry the baton after we handed it off.

If we take a gander even farther back in history, even Japan's defeat in WWII wasn't just about American might. Yeah, our superior industrial capacity murked them, but a huge contributing factor was Japan’s inability to coordinate internally - their military branches (army and navy, for example) actively undermined each other for their egos and honor. And contrary to popular mythology, the U.S. needed our allies to win both World Wars, putting aside our self-importance.

The current Trump administration, however, has dialed up this single-minded egotism. They kidnapped Maduro without coordinating with Venezuela's democratically elected opposition, the people who could potentially do the whole “change” part in “regime change”. They keep slow-walking Ukraine aid when decisive support may have already won Ukraine the war. They alienate and scare European allies as they beat their chests in their lust for Greenland. Sure, the Trump admin correctly identified China as the main threat, but everything is for sale in this administration, including our Indo-Pacific allies; they proceed to bully and harangue the very Asian allies we'll need most in a hot conflict with China.

In their worldview, might is right: strength is coercion and friendship is weakness. This is short-term flexing that sacrifices long-term partnerships.

Friendship rides shotgun with trust, serving as the ultimate economic lubricant. Famously, high-trust societies outperform low-trust ones, because this usually goes hand-in-hand with free markets, property rights, complex economic transactions, and strong institutions. These don’t work without trust that rules will be enforced and agreements honored.

And despite persistent myths, the verdict is in: theft and empire-building have rarely produced prosperity.

Matt Yglesias explains best the error in our imperial ancestors’ ways, and how we figured this out the hard way:

“The whole imperialist worldview has frankly never made much sense in the context of societies with market economies and representative governments.

Switzerland was the richest country in Europe as far back as the 1870s without ever having built a colonial empire. Spain and Portugal got started on colonizing the world long before England and France, and became poorer than England and France before the rise of the English and French empires.

The way the cause and effect works here is that being rich makes it feasible to undertake colonial projects, not that colonial projects make you rich. Switzerland just didn’t bother and never suffered for it. Germany got into the empire-building game incredibly late, got stuck with the most obviously worthless colonies, and the Hohenzollern dynasty ended up literally destroying itself fighting with England and France about this. Today, countries like Austria and Finland that never had colonial empires are richer than the United Kingdom. Ireland is now richer than the United Kingdom.

…After all, the whole reason the United States could (and eventually did) seize several of Spain’s colonies is that having this empire wasn’t actually very useful. Nineteenth-century Spain was an economic backwater! America ended up becoming only a very minor colonial power and divested itself of the Philippines starting in the 1930s.”

Post-WWII, after centuries of smashing each other to pieces, we figured out something revolutionary: cooperation is the path to prosperity. Free trade agreements and organizations like the WTO, WHO, EU, and NATO have allowed us to usher in an age of unprecedented prosperity.

You can swipe your credit card abroad in most countries, and it works; you can travel for vacation almost anywhere; store shelves here overflow with goods from everywhere, all times of year. This, by and historical standard, is a miracle.

In the Soviet Union, as wealthy Russians started buying their own televisions, they yearned not for Hollywood’s characters and plots, but for glimpses of life beyond the iron curtain: seeing a character based in Chicago sprinting by an open market, allowing the viewers to see the immense array of goods that even some of the poorest Americans had better access to than the richest Russians, according to historian Sarah Paine.

Free trade, rule of law, stable institutions, peaceful transfer of power - these things are the lifeblood of modern wealth.

Sadly, these are under attack. Trump hits allies and adversaries alike with tariffs, visa bans, zero-sum thinking, and public humiliation. These are markers of a civilization committing suicide, not displaying strength. It’s as though he wants to imitate those countries that ingest poison while thinking it’s venom: Russia, North Korea, Iran, China; countries who chose not only to opt out of the system and make no friends, no allies, but also focus their efforts on actively undermining this positive-sum game.

Lastly, friendship builds institutions that last. At the deepest level, friendship is what allows institutions to outlive individuals. What made Rome so different from the others? Despite being brutal conquerors, they expanded citizenship to conquered peoples. In Tom Holland’s book Dominion, he makes a similar point about Christianity's meteroic rise (however you feel about religion): its power came from universality. Everyone is a child of God. This, at the time, was absurd. You mean EVERYONE can get in the club? The bar was lowered. "Catholic" meant universal.

Today, economist Noah Smith describes the contrast: “Like Napoleon, Trump’s top priority isn’t creating durable institutions that will outlive him — indeed, he regards any such institutions as threats to his own personal power. Many observers have labeled this approach “personalism” or “patrimonialism”, but it’s really just gangsterism. Trump treats America like a mafia organization, and himself as the godfather.”

Simply put, the greatest societies depend on high trust at scale, ergo, impersonal friendship extended to strangers through institutions, laws, and norms. And this does not mean a country should never exhibit power and strength; these are essential deterrents, but they should be used to preserve and strengthen the system, not tear it down.

So what happens when technological progress removes our need to tolerate, negotiate with, and invest in other humans? What then emerges to fill that void?

So far, the answer looks a lot like our most primal, violent instincts: tribalism, paranoia, and resentment.

As a mentor once told me, most of the time you don’t need to learn something new; you need to be reminded. Civilizations that forget what they depend on don’t usually get the luxury of gentle reminders; they get reckonings.

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

_{The vibe-killer disclaimer: The opinions in this post and all other posts only represent myself and do not represent the opinions of my employer or any groups I am a member of.
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