“Keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer”. The phrase can be used in many different situations. It is generally used as motto of self-defense. You want to know your enemy well enough in order to protect yourself from the potential harm they could cause you. I challenge you to stop and really think about this saying. What does it mean by using the word “friends”. Sure, one could take the obvious approach of claiming that friends are simply beings whom you consider to spend the majority of your time with. However, for the sake of the complexity of this world, “friends” might also be considered, “those with the exact same values and opinions as your own”. So now we can reconstruct the phrase to say, “Keep those with the same values and opinions as your own close, but keep your enemies closer”. Aside from being a bit long winded, the saying now more blatantly takes on an almost manipulative meaning. It implies that your friends are completely conditional based upon their beliefs and values. It makes you think a little bit. What if we now did the same thing with the word, “enemies”. If you look one of the google definitions, enemy means a thing that harms or weakens something else. So, it might be fair to say that we could replace enemies with “those of opposing views and beliefs or general differences from you”. Now let’s reconstruct the phrase entirely. “Keep those with the same values and opinions as your own close, but keep those of opposing views and beliefs or general differences from you even closer”. Wow, now twice the size as the original phrase, this newly constructed motto has an almost completely different meaning. Truly, if we would listen to this new phrase rather than the original, the world might be a very different, and generally better place. As a fellow human, I’m sure that you are well aware that there are people in your life who believe differently than you do, who have a different appearance than your own, that have differing values from your own. More often than not, there is this unnecessary, and yet, unrelenting subconscious idea that it would be better to avoid those that don’t exactly fit into our cookie-cutter standards rather than face uncomfortably through interaction. It seems that there is this disgustingly common understanding that trying to gain full understanding of things other than that of your own is betrayal. This is not and will never be true. In this world of political, religious, and socioeconomic hatred, there is an incredible abundance of uniformed individuals. In my own life, I admit to have been the person to turn aside at the mention of something I don’t agree with being a topic of discussion, and how wrong of me! I have never grown in my own beliefs, let alone as a person, through denying myself to listen or to be more accurately educated on the differing beliefs of another. So to bring this back to the phrase, maybe we should be keeping those who have opposing views to us closer simply because we will be more well rounded and more knowledgeable. Not only are you showing your metaphorical “enemies” that you have the intelligence to know something larger than yourself, but you are allowing your own beliefs to develop and grow stronger. As a reminder to the skeptical, this doesn’t mean submission, but it does mean acceptance. It took me my lifetime thus far to understand this. I am living amongst all types of people varying on all different spectrums of beliefs, yet I choose to not hate someone else or bring myself low enough to condescend the views of another. I encourage you to make this same choice.
