Landon Carter

Everyone has friends. I don't think everyone deserves to have friends though. Unfortunately it's not my role to play God, so I'll just content myself with giving my opinion on what a good person should be, and how I choose my friends.

Last year at a mentoring presentation night, a student from Scotch College presented his topic 'What makes a good man?'. Personally I thought it was very interesting, especially with the inclusion of Catcher in the Rye and The Outsider. But as so often is the case with philosophisationing, there was too much discussion and no conclusion. I on the other hand have pondered long and hard on this topic, and some time last year came up with some concrete theories. I delude myself to think that what I write has meaning, so please read slowly and try to take in what I mean.

But first I must apologise to the less-than-ten blog readers for the delay (to put it mildly) between this and the previous blog post. I've been tired and uninspired, and I can't work when I'm like that. Anyway, as some wise guy once said, better late than never.

A good person is someone who is nice. Not necessarily polite, or smart, or inspired, but nice. "Great, but what is a nice person?", I hear you ask. Good question. From my experience, a truly nice person is someone who can empathise with others and makes an effort to act accordingly. Anything less is selfish. Think about it.

I wouldn't be writing this though if the secret to choosing good friends was contained in a couple of sentences. Inevitably, problems arise.

Nowadays, there are too many fake people who have learned to adopt the facade of a polite and caring person. Those people appear friendly and interesting just like everyone else, but when you get to know them better, you realise that they don't have any qualities that you like at all. This kind of person has the most annoying character because there's nothing that can be done about them except to avoid them thenceforth. It's quite difficult to be sure that someone is a good person. Any good deed, if it makes you trust them more, might have a selfish motive. Judging someone's character therefore is a matter of pure intuition and comes with experience.

However, sometimes one deed is all that is needed to demonstrate that someone is not a good person. One thing working in our favour is that maintaining a mask requires infinite patience, and people are always going to make a slip sometime or other, showing their true selfish character. Take the analogy of climbing up a very tall ladder. Going up is slow and arduous, but it's easy to fall all the way back down again.

Therefore, you should get to know people better before deciding that they're a good person. In this regard, talking to them is ineffective because that kind of person has built up a lifetime's worth of experience with talking. I agree with a theory that I've heard somewhere, that people's true characters are only revealed during times of emotional stress, so you should make judgements based on that.

People constantly excuse their own or others' wrongdoing by blaming it on their emotional state, and this could not annoy me more. If someone can't control their emotions then they might as well be Doctor Frankenstein's creature, wanting but not knowing how to go about it. In fact, even worse than Frankenstein's creature because their predicament is their own fault. After all, emotions such as anger are not one-off events, it's bound to happen again and therefore a single event cannot just be dismissed.

Okay, that's all great, now onto the grand finale, how to go about making good friends. Firstly make sure your own character is likable. If you're not capable of making friends, you certainly won't be able to choose friends. Don't always jump into everything that's social. Be like Mr Darcy from Pride and Prejudice (I think he's really cool) and observe others from a distance. Of course don't run away if someone new talks to you, but just be wary, especially with people of the opposite sex, because sense is almost always blurred to some degree in those cases. Decide if the things people do are really out of generosity or have selfish motives, that's important. Be as nice to people as you can without trusting them foolishly. As an old saying goes, in order to make friends you have to be a friend. But in order to make good friends you also have to use your brain.

This time I really do owe the reader a thanks for reading, because I realise that most of the stuff above is just me rambling on and being hard to understand. Even the last paragraph fails to tie things up properly. Apologies for that.

p.s. I realised I forgot to mention anything about whether a person is interesting or not. About this I say that it doesn't matter. As long as they're a good person, they deserve your friendship.

p.p.s. I also realised that I neglected to mention the very important fact that people change. If you hate someone, wait a suitable amount of time and give them a second chance (building up the friendship from scratch).