The friend, the ally, the trusted one — that is where Greene turns next, and the move is deliberately unsettling. His argument in Law 2 is this: the person you trust most may be the person you evaluate least clearly. Not because they are secretly malicious, but because the emotional logic of friendship and the structural logic of power pull in opposite directions. And when those two things collide, Greene argues, the results can be quietly catastrophic. For example, consider what happened to the Byzantine emperor Michael III. Michael had a childhood friend named Basilius — a man who had started life as a stable hand, with no wealth, no title, no standing. Michael elevated him. He gave Basilius access, rank, and eventually real power. By any ordinary measure, this was an act of extraordinary generosity toward someone who owed everything to the relationship. According to the digest, Basilius later had Michael murdered and seized the throne. Greene uses this story not as a tale of pure villainy but as a case study in structural mismatch. The friendship between Michael and Basilius was built on equality — two people who knew each other before power entered the picture. But the moment Michael elevated Basilius, the relationship was no longer equal. It became hierarchical. And Greene's argument is that friendship does not adapt well to hierarchy. The friend who was once your peer now occupies a subordinate position, and that gap — between what the relationship used to feel like and what it now requires — can quietly generate resentment. The key idea is that friendship assumes equality, but power creates hierarchy, and the mismatch between those two things is where the trouble lives. A friend placed in a position of dependence may feel humiliated by that dependence, even while benefiting from it. They may expect favors that a more neutral colleague would never presume to ask for. And when those favors are not forthcoming, the grievance feels personal in a way it simply would not with a stranger. What Greene is pointing at is something subtler than betrayal. It is envy. He argues that success witnessed up close — by someone who knew you before you had it, who perhaps believes they are equally capable — can be harder to absorb than the success of a distant rival. A distant opponent is easy to dismiss or admire from afar. A friend who watches you rise while they remain in your orbit has a front-row seat to the comparison. And that comparison, Greene contends, is corrosive in ways that neither party may fully acknowledge. Think of it this way: a colleague you barely know does not feel entitled to your good fortune. But a friend who has shared meals with you, who has seen your doubts and your failures, who considers the relationship a kind of equity — that person may feel, at some level, that your success is partly owed to them. And when the power structure does not reflect that feeling, the debt curdles. Greene is not saying that friends are bad people or that friendship itself is a liability. His warning is more precise than that. It is that importing the assumptions of friendship — the expectation of equality, the presumption of forgiveness, the blurring of professional judgment — into a context where power is at stake creates a specific kind of vulnerability. You choose someone for emotional comfort rather than competence. You overlook their failures because the relationship makes criticism feel like betrayal. And you end up, as Greene puts it, choosing the person who feels safest rather than the person who is most reliable. That raises an obvious question: if friends carry these hidden risks, what about the people who were never your friends at all — the ones who opposed you, challenged you, or stood on the other side? Greene's answer to that is where the law gets genuinely strange.