"We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same"
About this Quote
Swift’s line is a polite smile with a knife behind it: our “fondness” isn’t noble affection, it’s mutual recognition of damage. He frames intimacy as a kind of support group for the flawed, suggesting that what passes for friendship is often less about virtue than about the comfort of shared dysfunction. “Ailments” is doing double duty. On the surface it’s bodily complaint, the common 18th-century reality of illness and fragility; underneath it’s moral and social sickness - vanity, greed, hypocrisy - the quiet epidemics Swift made a career diagnosing.
The genius is how he makes the mechanism of bonding sound almost clinical. People don’t simply like each other; they form attachments because sameness lowers the cost of being seen. If we suffer in the same way, we don’t have to explain ourselves, and we don’t have to feel uniquely culpable. Shared weakness becomes a loophole: you can confess without consequence because everyone in the room is complicit.
In Swift’s world, this is less sentimental observation than social satire. He wrote in an England and Ireland stratified by class, sect, and colonial power, where civility often served as cover for predation. The line hints that solidarity can be real but also self-serving: we cluster around those who mirror our own defects, not to heal them, but to normalize them. It’s bleak, funny, and painfully modern - the idea that community can be built as much on mutually agreed denial as on genuine care.
The genius is how he makes the mechanism of bonding sound almost clinical. People don’t simply like each other; they form attachments because sameness lowers the cost of being seen. If we suffer in the same way, we don’t have to explain ourselves, and we don’t have to feel uniquely culpable. Shared weakness becomes a loophole: you can confess without consequence because everyone in the room is complicit.
In Swift’s world, this is less sentimental observation than social satire. He wrote in an England and Ireland stratified by class, sect, and colonial power, where civility often served as cover for predation. The line hints that solidarity can be real but also self-serving: we cluster around those who mirror our own defects, not to heal them, but to normalize them. It’s bleak, funny, and painfully modern - the idea that community can be built as much on mutually agreed denial as on genuine care.
Quote Details
| Topic | Friendship |
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