Much can be determined about a person based on the company that they keep. By observing one’s friends and one’s enemies, we can gain a great deal of insight about the way that someone lives their lives. This is true individually as well as within larger groups. Sadly, geopolitics and business politics greatly resembles the cliquishness of the average high school, and so the insights we can gain from one particularly unpleasant part of life can help us deal with other, more momentous but equally unpleasant areas of life. Let us therefore ponder a little bit about what the company we keep says about us.

Let us first note that the company we keep has to be bound together by some sort of common element. There are a variety of ways that people can be bound together. People can be bound together by common belief systems, common interests, a complementary personality (people who like to talk with people who like to listen to them, for example), as well as mutual respect. The more of these shared qualities we have, the more tightly we will be bound together with them. This is true of others as well; we can recognize at least some aspects of the behavior and values of others by their friends, and the same thing can be recognized of us.

This can be both a good thing and a bad thing, depending on the course our life takes. Some people, for example, cultivate friendships with a wide variety of people, and show themselves to be friendly with just about everyone, and having friendships that are more or less deep depending on the level of similarities. There are other people, of course, who are friends with people for mercenarial reasons, or friends only with sufficiently “cool” people, and such people will likely to be rude with those who do not necessarily have much to offer when it comes to monetary or social capital. Again, though, the friends that they keep will be easy to recognize, and from those friends it will be easy to triangulate just what sort of priorities a person has based on the people that they associate with. That which we value will be reflected in those people who we spend time around the most.

It is also important that the company we keep is also the company that keeps us. We may be friendly and warm and open to others, but unless those people are friendly and warm and open to us, our friendliness will not particularly help matters. In fact, being friendly to others can sometimes lead others to think even worse of us, if they assume that our friendliness comes with ulterior motives. Likewise, there are people who are guilty of such wickedness that we should probably not be desirous of being close to them, if they show no desire to repent of their sins and show themselves to be changed people willing to struggle against their evil. Yet if such people are “cool,” we may be led to enjoy their company even if they are wicked, and that will tell on us even as it tells on them as well, while those with more stern standards of justice may not be as welcome among the unrepentant.

It would be nice if social matters were less complicated, but because our lives are full of complications, the interactions we have with other people are fraught with the same complications. Some of us are bound by common experiences of such an intense nature that there is an intuitive understanding of where others are coming from long before there is explicit conversation about those experiences. There are shared interests in life that pull us together with others just as there are differences and even similarities that may drive people away (for example, we may not always like people to be similar to us–people who like to dominate conversations or are particularly critical do not generally like to be around others with the same temperament). Over time, though, other people will be able to tell good things and bad things about us based upon the company that we consistently keep. Whether that speaks well or ill of us depends on the choices that we have made. Let us choose wisely.