The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

The push and pull:
As we saw in the Jane Williams story, enviers often
use friendship and intimacy as the best way to wound the people they
envy. They display unusual eagerness to become your friend. They
saturate you with attention. If you are in any way insecure, this will
have great effect. They praise you a little too effusively too early on.

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Through the closeness they establish they are able to gather material
on you and find your weak points. Suddenly, after your emotions are
engaged, they criticize you in pointed ways. The criticism is confusing,
not particularly related to anything you have done, but still you feel
guilty. They then return to their initial warmth. The pattern repeats.
You are trapped between the warm friendship and the occasional pain
they inflict.
In criticizing you, they are experts at picking out any possible flaws
in your character or words you might have regretted, and giving them
great emphasis. They are like lawyers building a case against you.
When you’ve had enough and decide to defend yourself or criticize
them or break off the friendship, they can now ascribe to you a mean
or even cruel streak and tell others of this. You will notice in their past
other intense relationships with dramatic breakups, always the other
person’s fault. And at the source of this pattern, something hard to
discern, is that they choose to befriend people whom they envy for
some quality, then subtly torture them.
In general, criticism of you that seems sincere but not directly
related to anything you have actually done is usually a strong sign of
envy. People want to bully and overwhelm you with something
negative, both wounding you and covering any tracks of envy.
Envier Types
According to the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882–1960), certain
people are prone to feeling envy their entire lives, and this begins in
early infancy. In the first few weeks and months of life, the mother and
infant are almost never out of each other’s presence. But as they get
older, infants must deal with the mother’s absence for longer periods
of time, and this entails a painful adjustment. Some infants, however,
are more sensitive to the mother’s occasional withdrawal. They are
greedy for more feeding and more attention. They become aware of the
presence of the father, with whom they must compete for the mother’s
attention. They may also become aware of other siblings, who are seen
as rivals. Klein, who specialized in the study of infancy and early
childhood, noticed that some children feel greater degrees of hostility
and resentment toward the father and siblings for the attention they
are receiving at their (the enviers’) expense, and toward the mother for
not giving them enough.

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Certainly there are parents who create or intensify such envy by
playing favorites, by withdrawing on purpose to make the child more
dependent. In any event, infants or children experiencing such envy
will not feel grateful and loved for the attention they do get but instead
feel continually deprived and unsatisfied. A pattern is set for their
entire lives—they are children and later adults for whom nothing is
ever quite good enough. All potentially positive experiences are spoiled
by the sensation that they should have more and better. Something is
missing, and they can only imagine that other people are cheating
them out of what they should have. They develop an eagle eye for what
others have that they don’t. This becomes their dominant passion.
Most of us experience moments in childhood in which we feel
another person is getting more of the attention that we deserve, but we
are able to counterbalance this with other moments in which we
experience undeniable love, and gratitude for it. As we get older, we
can transfer such positive emotions to a series of people—siblings,
teachers, mentors, friends, lovers, and spouses. We alternate between
wanting more and feeling relatively satisfied and grateful. Those prone
to envy, however, do not experience life the same way. Instead, they
transfer their initial envy and hostility to a series of others whom they
see as disappointing or hurting them. Their moments of satisfaction
and gratitude are rare or nonexistent. “I need, I want more,” they are
always telling themselves.
Because envy is a painful sensation, these types will enact lifelong
strategies to mitigate or repress these feelings that gnaw at them. They
will denigrate anything or anyone good in the world. This means there
aren’t really people out there worth envying. Or they will become
extremely independent. If they do not need people for anything, that
will expose them to fewer envy scenarios. At an extreme they will
devalue themselves. They don’t deserve good things in life and so have
no need to compete with others for attention and status. According to
Klein, these common strategies are brittle and will break down under
stress—a downturn in their career, bouts of depression, wounds to
their ego. The envy they experienced in their earliest years remains
continually latent and ready to be directed at others. They are literally
looking for people to envy so they can reexperience the primal
emotion.
Depending on their psychological makeup, they will tend to
conform to certain envying types. It is of great benefit to be able to

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recognize such types early on, because they are the ones most likely to
turn active with their envy. The following are five common varieties of
enviers, how they tend to disguise themselves, and their particular
forms of attack.