In an undistorted world, friendship is utilitarian. You get something out of it, and I get something back: Company, security & protection when necessary. It is a reciprocal relationship of necessity. This tension of self-interest between the two parties keeps the friendship going, and if the equilibrium is broken, the friendship becomes untenable.
Put in another light, the utility in friendship is implicit, if it ever became explicit, the relationship becomes a power struggle and difficult, if not definitionally impossible, to continue as a friendship.
So there has to be in friendship, a certain kind of indirection of motivation or intention. A person acts in kindness towards his friend, with an expectation it will be remembered and reciprocated.
The aggregation of these individual friendships driven by self-interest results in a sort of harmonious broader societal love. This societal love is broken for the same reason as friendships break down: an imbalance of self-interest towards one party, and the threat of resulting retribution from the offended party.
Is there any way to keep friendships in an eternal equilibrium so that peace at large can be retained? One way achieve this might be to increase people’s tolerance levels towards their friends and, by extension, others. Are there ways of intervening with distortions to induce people to tolerate their friends even when their friends shift the power balance towards themselves.
(By the way, shifting the power balance toward oneself in a friendship will be easy because there is an inherent trust by parties involved in a friendship that you won’t do this, and thus you will not be guarding yourself where you otherwise might, from say an enemy.)
Some philosophical training as part of a young person’s education may be useful to this end (of increasing tolerance levels at large). But I would argue it is impossible to increase tolerance levels to the required amounts to retain a peaceful equilibrium. Take an extreme example: What if your friend runs off with your wife? What if your friend abuses your sister? When the expected tolerance levels are unbearable, surely a commensurately violent response is part of the human condition.
