How the Devil Defeats Us

I know a guy who for many years has enjoyed quite a bit of respect in some Catholic circles. He’s bright and articulate, though, admittedly, sometimes he argues with a certain biting rhetorical edge. Over the years, I had noticed that his opinions had become increasingly extreme, and, though perhaps not heretical, pushed boundaries that placed him outside the intellectual boundaries of Catholic tradition on at least a few subjects. Recently, I discovered that because of a disagreement over some of those opinions, he had angrily disassociated himself from a community of Catholics who had consistently celebrated him and his intellect.

It’s a sad thing when arguments, whether intellectual or personal (or both), fracture or terminate friendships. That’s especially the case today, when such a startling number of Americans have so few, if any. Per a 2021 survey, the proportion of men who today have six or more close friends (about 27 percent) has been cut in half since 1990, and the number of men who have no close friends (about 15 percent) has increased by a factor of five during that same time period. A separate 2025 survey found that among American males between the ages of 16 and 28, about half of them had two or fewer close friends.

It’s difficult to exaggerate the consequences of these trends. Certainly from a political perspective, representative government is premised on the idea that citizens will maintain various types of friendships, both so that they can freely and charitably debate the most important issues of our time, but also so that they can form and maintain all types of organizations, from civic groups to volunteer societies to churches. George Washington in his farewell address urged, “That your Union and brotherly affection may be perpetual.”

The spiritual effects, of course, are even more dangerous. If you do not have close friends, or you isolate much of your inner life from those friends, trouble is almost inevitable. The yearning for relational intimacy, built into even the most unsentimental of souls, is ineradicable, and if it does not find its natural object in other people (and supernatural object in God), it will try to find it elsewhere. Thus do we have epidemics of drug, alcohol, video game, social media, pornography, and online gambling addictions among American men. More than half of young men play video games every day or almost every day, and more than a third of young men game two more hours nearly every day. Nearly 40 percent of young men say they view online pornography weekly or daily.

And then there are the intellectual effects. Well-documented is the fact that younger Americans are more receptive to socialism and communism, a result, no doubt, of the leftist lean of the academy, which has been radicalizing college students for generations. Alternatively, many young men identify with the conservative “manosphere,” “alt-right,” and (self-professed Catholic) Nick Fuentes’ “Groyper” movement. Antisemitism and fascist sympathizing are becoming more common among younger conservatives, evidenced by several scandals just this year. All of this only further reinforces the need for authentic friendship, which provides accountability not only for the moral life, but also the intellectual.

In his forthcoming book Tolkien and the Inklings: Men of the West, Hillsdale professor Bradley J. Birzer discusses one of the most legendary of male friendships: that of the Inklings, an informal group of literary enthusiasts at mid-twentieth-century Oxford who counted among their number C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. “Where the two gathered, men changed, coalesced, and became something greater than they had been alone as individuals, no matter what level or type of genius each possessed,” writes Birzer. “Through their friendship—and especially its most important manifestation, the Inklings—Tolkien and Lewis created what their mutual friend Owen Barfield would call a ‘commonwealth of the spirit in which there is no copyright.’” Granted, few men would today be capable of replicating the intellectual rigor found among the members of that august company—we are, after all, talking about some of the most brilliant scholars and writers ever produced by the British Commonwealth.

The point is not that men need to “think great thoughts” that attempt to rival the intellectual prowess of the Inklings, but that they need fora in which to talk and share and debate one another. They require a place to communicate what they value and think, but also to have their opinions challenged and honed. “In our arguments, we always were arguing for truth not for victory, and arguing for truth, not for comfort,” wrote philosopher, poet, and author Owen Barfield, known as one of the “first and last” of the Inklings.

Anglo-Irish scholar Nevill Coghill in turn observed that poet and essayist (and fellow Inkling) Charles Williams was the only one, besides Tolkien, who influenced Lewis’s thought. “It was Charles Williams who expounded to him the doctrine of co-inherence and the idea that one had power to accept into one’s own body the pain of someone else, through Christian love,” explained Coghill. “This was a power which Lewis found himself later to possess, and which, he told me, he had been allowed to use to ease the suffering of his wife, a cancer victim, of whom the doctors had despaired.”

That visceral example shows that the intellectual component of friendships isn’t some cerebral, esoteric exercise reserved only for the brainiacs of this world. It is a means to help us navigate the troubles and sorrows of this world, equipping us with the knowledge necessary to practice virtue and refute vice, but also to understand suffering and make sense of social and political trends happening around us. “A friend, and a prudent friend, can help to shape a friend’s decision. He does so by virtue of that love which makes the friend’s problem his own, the friend’s ego his own,” writes Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper in The Four Cardinal Virtues.

Men need true friends who will offer support and challenge them to confront the vices in their lives. They also need friends who will help them carefully think through the host of problems and crises they face in this terribly confused world, friends who will question opinions that might not only be wrong, but could very well cause unexpected personal or professional strife. The echo chambers of our digital age typically do the opposite, encouraging a more bitter, higher-stakes means of communication, where bad ideas are either uncritically celebrated or provoke cancellation. Families are broken, careers ruined, communities torn asunder over such things.

“Every friendship is an act of opposition to a society that desires to conform and homogenize,” sagely writes Birzer. It is also an act of opposition to the devil, who in all things aims to achieve the diabolical, which is more than simply evil, but that which divides and dissociates. We were made for authentic communion, not only with God, but with each other. “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13, emphasis added). To forgo or minimize the role of friendship in our lives is to harm our bodies, souls, and minds, because it is integral to our this-worldly flourishing and our salvation. It is how the devil wins.