Invisible friends and enemies

The value of having invisible friends

Hands up those readers who, as a child, had an invisible friend? Hmm. Quite a few of you.

Now, keep your hand up if you still have an invisible friend. Those of you turning for a quiet aside to someone unseen before lifting your hand have been counted.

An invisible companion can be a useful and valuable asset for a child. I referred to mine for all sorts of advice. Although my mother recalls a boundary was crossed when I told her, in a suitably lofty tone, that my invisible friend’s mother “would have let me do” whatever I had requested.

This whiff of mutiny engineered by someone my mother could not even see was deemed a step too far. My invisible friend was to be told in no uncertain terms that my mother was actually the person who wore the apron of authority in our house.

I can see the advantages of having an invisible friend as an adult. The ability to confer with an unseen but all-knowing companion could be helpful in many situations.

Meetings with your bank manager or accountant could be a lively affair with a third but extremely transparent person in the room.

The flip side of this idea is — can you have invisible enemies? Some of us have been known to shout at the radio or TV even though we know it has no effect at all because we are invisible to those speaking, but then there is another whole level at which the need to find reasons to blame things on others begins and leads to conspiracies based on invisible factors and othering.

Having just marked Anzac Day, it is a good time to recall how the othering of people, creating invisible enemies where there are none, can be dangerous. I have just been reading about Shelomo Selinger who, now aged 94, survived nine concentration camps. That happened to him because he is Jewish. He was labelled as other, and therefore an enemy, for invisible reasons created to make his otherness a reason to treat him as less than human.

Some things never change. There are those who devote huge energy to telling us about the many invisible enemies lurking just out of sight, waiting to destroy society.

They try to create fears out of a loose collection of misinformation, myths, mutterings and rants, conjuring invisible enemies and threats to social cohesion. Othering is a key strategy. If someone is ‘other’, it creates a dangerous environment in which it becomes okay to treat people as less human and think this is okay. There is no ‘other’ — only another human.