LAW 2: NEVER PUT TOO MUCH TRUST IN FRIENDS, LEARN HOW TO USE ENEMIES

Elevate a friend and you disturb that equality; gratitude curdles into resentment because favors are hard to repay and easy to resent. Friends take your generosity for granted and grow comfortable or entitled.

An enemy you have won over, by contrast, has everything to prove. Having once opposed you, they must work to demonstrate loyalty, and they never assume their position is secure. Greene's example is the ninth-century Byzantine emperor Michael III, who raised his stable groom Basilius to co-emperor out of friendship. Basilius, owing everything to that friendship, came to feel it was simply owed to him — and eventually had Michael murdered to take the throne outright. The friend elevated became the assassin.

The deeper mechanism is psychological debt. A favor done for a friend strains the bond, because friendship pretends to be free of accounting while power runs entirely on accounting. The former enemy carries no such illusion; the relationship is openly transactional, which paradoxically makes it more stable. Greene is not arguing for cruelty toward friends — he is arguing against the blindness affection induces, the failure to see that the people closest to you have the clearest view of your weaknesses and the strongest motive to envy your rise.

Reversal — the law does not mean you should have no friends, only that you must never mix friendship with the mechanics of power without clear eyes. The applied takeaway: when building a team or coalition, judge people by competence and incentive, not warmth of feeling. A skilled rival you've converted is often a better lieutenant than a beloved friend with no edge to prove. And watch, always, for the envy of those who feel they are your equals; it is quieter, and more dangerous, than the open hostility of those who are not.

Greene presses a further, counterintuitive benefit of enemies: they keep you sharp. Without opposition, ambition softens and vigilance fades; an able adversary forces you to stay alert and honest about your own weaknesses in a way comfortable friends never will. He cites the pattern of leaders who deliberately preserved a rival rather than destroying them, using the tension as a spur. The practical synthesis is double: be wary of elevating friends past the point where envy poisons them, and learn to convert and employ enemies — they are more useful, more loyal once won, and more clarifying than affection allows friends to be.

What "never put too much trust in friends, learn how to use enemies" means, in one line: judge the people you rely on by their incentives, not by how much you like them. A friend tends to feel owed; a former rival knows they have to earn their place. The law is mostly about who you hand power to, not about who you spend your time with.

An example, with its moral. Imagine a founder hiring a head of sales. One candidate is an old friend who needs a job. The other runs sales at a competitor and once beat the founder to a big client. The friend may treat the role as a reward for the friendship, find it hard to take direction from someone they knew as an equal, and be almost impossible to let go if it doesn't work. The former rival arrives with a record to prove and no history of favours to collect. The moral, in Greene's terms: favours done for friends turn into debts that sour, while an enemy you have won over has a reason to perform. The example is invented to show the law; it is not from the book.

Where it backfires: most people are not running a court, and treating friends as likely traitors costs you the support that gets you through hard years. The law makes its strongest case where friendship and authority overlap, such as working for a friend, managing one, or starting a business together. Outside that, it mostly breeds suspicion. Winning over an enemy also fails when the old conflict was personal rather than a contest for the same prize. The law follows Law 1, never outshine the master, which is about the people above you, and leads into Law 3, conceal your intentions.