Something that I have strongly disliked for a long time is befriending someone for the purpose of potential future gain. I feel that such actions abuse the significance and trust of friendship. I have always disliked very politically motivated people for trait. However, today I attended a lan gaming event and stayed behind to chat and hang out with the organizers of the event.
I now need to reflect upon my actions to determine whether I'm acting hypocritically or why what I'm doing isn't the same as what I hate. Like I said before, I dislike "intentional networking" because I feel it abuses the value of friendship, that a friendship is faked in order to achieve potential favour from someone. So does actually becoming friends with a useful person alleviate this problem? I don't know. If one person was initially motivated by self-gain to meet the other, does their eventual friendship excuse the action of the motivated person? I feel like it wouldn't.
What if the person tells their friend that their initial meeting or friendship was motivated by self-gain? I would think that if the friend would still accept the person as their friend after hearing this entire truth, that such an action can be forgiven. So fundamentally, the issue is an openness of knowledge and intention. That if a person would still befriend you and help you even after you made it known that you initiated the friendship for personal gain, such an action is excusable.
To complicate this further, what if the person whom you look for help from, wouldn't freely give their help to people whom they do not know? Is it ok to befriend them in order to increase the likeliness that they would help you? I don't think so. In this situation the befriending has the intention of increasing the likelihood of personal gain.
I feel that the answer to this question lies within the primary intention of the person. I believe that whatever social actions a person takes, there must exist a realistic and true reason or interest other than networking. It could be learning the views of others, or attending a society or club that they involved in for personal enjoyment. I suppose what I mean in conclusion is that it is never ethical for networking to be your primary intention, it should only be an incidental benefit to what you would be doing either way.
For me, the primary reason for attending all these events, is the social enjoyment as well as learning about the various gaming communities and cultures. I can finally put my mind at ease, knowing that what I'm doing doesn't conflict with my own personal ethics. I also now have a blog post that I use as a guide in future whether I feel unsure of the ethicalness of my actions.
In Summary
- It is not right to befriend someone primarily to gain favour and personal gain
- Befriending someone valuable is fine as long as the friendship was incidental to you acting primarily for another reason
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