Kinship and Friendship

As my quest to pin down morality continues, one important concept that I want to put down is my current take on the facts around friendship and kinship. A recent quote I heard about from my friend (an ardent supporter of all-things-Indic) is echoing the sentiments of his recent guru Ashay Naik:

Hinduism is kinship based not ideology based. Easy to enter in ideological group not so in a kinship network. https://t.co/xpjJAgb6N9
— Damanaka (@AshayNaik1) November 5, 2017

Two things jump out

To begin with, I can’t help but see Hinduism as a melting pot of a plethora of philosophies and ideologies. So the above statement to me reads like “The Ideology capital comprises of groups of people (and ironically, is not ideology based)”: and just reduces to a tautology.
I feel the classification and grouping-by-attributes that apply so well to Abrahamic faiths do not map back to Oriental belief-systems.
I do agree that kinship bonds have a simpler identity marker for the limbic system to recognize. But other than for the closest of relations, I am not sure how much this holds sway. To me, ideological bonds, formed out of necessity, rather than static factors (like birth and happenstance) remain more meaningful and stand the test time.

A pertinent screengrab from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS ironically depicts the possible attitudes of a self-centered culture of kins, who in a zero-sum game, can play the field: as, in that case, greed is rewarded.

Reciprocal altruism

Thinking about how the moral landscape is not subject to feelings of kin-favoritism (as I believe the term nepotism doesn’t exactly work in this context) led me thinking about the selfish gene. Granted that kins are closer in the gene-network than others, there is a fundamental difference between the two: one is natural and the other is not. One of the many understated points here is that people should not necessarily take their cues from nature, as that would not be a congenial society to co-exist and thrive, for, after all, we have spent millennia making civilization possible by understanding that life on this beautiful planet is a non-zero-sum game, and in game-theory terms, we sure are in an essentially infinite game with nature.

and

Game-theory solutions

If you are not familiar with the prisoner’s dilemma, I encourage you to check these out before continuing..

in conjunction with

Karma Chameleon

The point to emphasize here is that the whole point of choosing ideology is to go against nature (as we do with so many other things and actions that we readily associate with comfort and development today; albeit we haven’t been as self-aware of the consequences of some of our attempts at betterment).

and

It is a perfectly good strategy for days when exploration of allies far across known borders was limited, and collective-action was better than self/kin-loathing. The difference is parameter here, with globalization, to parochial equates to being non-sustainable. As can be noted that there are no winners if you want to beat members of your own team!

Friends (relationships, whether or not with benefits) are the support structures around each lattice of the tetrahedron. Inter-dependence is woven into this tapestry wherein following the golden-rule (do unto other’s thing: colloquially translates to “Don’t be a Jerk!”) maximizes the benefits of the local-group, irrespective of whether it is fact-based or family-centric. And to the point of this post, there is a natural stabilization point in this quantified by the Dunbar number: which spells the upper bound for the type of relationship vs depth of connection equation.

The friendship-limit equation

The objective function here is a given: maximizing benefits while minimizing deficits. I haven’t figured out how to model this problem yet, but I will take a shot at the variables involved nonetheless (this is a blog post after all ).. Now for some pretend math

As the emotional currency and the ‘available time’ dimension for individuals are limited, there is an unspoken agreement among the participants is determined, not necessarily by origin and agreement of opinions, but similar to the inverse square law of attraction (be it gravitation or electromagnetism)…

proximity (mental accessibility) - similar to the distance factor
propensity (emotional availability) - similar to the mass or charge of the two-body system

$Friendship\;quotient = \lim_{x\to (Dunbar Number)} \frac{ f\left(\overbrace{appeal_{yours} \circ appeal_{ {(friend_1 \cdots friend_x)}}}^{friendship\,factor\,composition}, \overbrace{\Large\Omega\Theta\omega}^{your\,circle\,strength\,constant} \right)} {proximity ^ 2}$

Bottomline

I feel this voluntary support bartering that shines through, over any fatalistic pre-determinacy that may light our path in the true battle to come: surviving the inevitability of Darwinian nature taking it’s course as the geological and archeological history suggests.

After Hours References:

For more high-level information on the flavors of Games

Friendship: limit x tends to Dunbar