Think of a boss, a coach, a parent, a president you genuinely respected — someone whose leadership you were, on balance, grateful for. Now be honest about the other feeling that lived right alongside the gratitude: the small, private irritation at having to answer to them at all. The flicker of pleasure when they slipped up. The relief when their term, their season, their run finally ended, even though you'd have said you admired them the whole way through.
That's not hypocrisy. Robert Greene's claim is that it's the actual, universal structure of how humans feel about anyone with power over them — love and resentment running simultaneously, not one after the other.1
The pattern starts in the nursery. A child with reasonably attentive, loving parents remembers childhood fondly — and conveniently forgets the resentment that came bundled with the dependence. Being cared for that completely also means being controlled that completely, and some part of a child chafes against it even while craving it, sometimes to the point of feeling smothered.2
If the parents weren't kind, the adult version of the story flips — all coldness remembered, no warmth — but the actual childhood experience was more mixed than either the fond memory or the bitter one preserves: children reflexively excuse an uncaring parent, because acknowledging real neglect while still fully dependent on that person for survival would generate more anxiety than a child can hold. So love and resentment coexist under either version of the childhood story; only which one gets remembered as dominant differs.3
The reason strong, pure emotion feels frightening in the first place is that it represents a loss of control — so the mind unconsciously balances it with something contrary, whether or not the two actually resolve into anything coherent.4 Most people never examine this, because their own emotional complexity is more work to face than a simple story about who they love and who they don't.
Transfer the pattern onto adulthood, and leaders become the nearest available parental substitute. Two contradictory needs run at once.5
You genuinely need leadership. A group without someone standing above the competing self-interests inside it can't make hard calls, can't hold a direction, and the resulting disorientation, left unaddressed, tips toward something close to collective hysteria.5
And you resent it just as genuinely. Being led means being subordinate, and subordination chafes at the will regardless of how competent or fair the leader actually is. You suspect, correctly often enough, that power tempts people to serve themselves. You envy what the leader has that you don't.6
This tips negative fast at the first sign of real weakness — abuse, insensitivity, plain incompetence — but the ambivalence was never actually absent even during the good years. It was just quiet.6
Here's the trap that catches almost everyone who acquires real authority: they read the smiles and the applause as the whole story, because that's the only data most subordinates are willing to show them. People defer to whoever controls their fate, and deference is cheap to perform and expensive to withhold — so leaders systematically undersample the resentment sitting underneath the compliance, right up until a mistake or a moment of visible weakness lets it surface all at once.7
When that surface break comes, it tends to look sudden and disproportionate to the leader experiencing it — a swing in public mood that seems to come from nowhere. It isn't from nowhere. It's the accumulated, previously invisible half of an ambivalence that was there the entire time, just never sampled honestly.7
Greene reaches back to James Frazer's The Golden Bough for the deep version of this pattern: across a wide range of early cultures, revered chiefs and kings were ritually killed the moment they showed age, weakness, battle defeat, or bad luck attributed to a failure of the gods' favor — a drought, most commonly. These executions weren't grim, reluctant duties. They were occasions for real celebration, a formal, sanctioned release of all the hostility toward the leader that had been quietly accumulating the whole time they ruled.8
Greene's speculation on why: a population may have unconsciously understood the corrupting effect of prolonged, unchecked power, and preferred cycling leaders regularly to letting any one person accumulate it indefinitely — a fresh, unproven leader being easier to keep in check than an entrenched one.9
We don't execute failed leaders anymore, at least not literally — but Greene's claim is that we still do it symbolically, through elections and through media cycles that take visible pleasure in the ritualistic fall of the powerful.10 We don't blame a leader for failed rainfall anymore; we blame them for a downturn in the economy, even when the actual causal levers were mostly beyond their control — structurally the same move as blaming the king for the drought the gods, not the king, controlled.10
The mechanism hasn't gone anywhere. Only the vocabulary has updated.
You're in a position of some authority — leading a team, running a household, holding any role where people answer to you.
Notice your own read on how you're being received. If your evidence is mostly smiles, nods, and agreement in meetings, treat that as incomplete data rather than the full picture. Deference under dependency looks identical whether or not real resentment sits underneath it.
Build at least one channel where genuine dissent is safe to express — an anonymous mechanism, a trusted person whose job is specifically to tell you what people won't say to your face. The ambivalence doesn't disappear because you've made disagreement comfortable; it just stops accumulating invisibly.
When you're on the other side — subordinate to someone whose leadership you genuinely respect — notice your own private irritation at moments of forced deference, rather than pretending it isn't there. You don't have to act on it. Recognizing it as a normal, near-universal undertone rather than a personal character flaw makes it far easier to keep in proportion.
Watch for the specific moment a leader's public standing collapses suddenly after a single visible mistake, in your own life or in the news. Ask what accumulated underneath the surface, unaddressed, for however long beforehand — the triggering event is rarely proportionate to the reaction it produces, because it's rarely the actual cause of the reaction. It's just the release valve for something that was already there.
Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890) is a landmark work of comparative anthropology, though its specific ethnographic claims about ritual regicide across disparate cultures have faced substantial scholarly revision since publication — later anthropology has often found Frazer's cross-cultural comparisons overgeneralized, drawing overly tight parallels between practices that differed meaningfully in local context and meaning. [POPULAR SOURCE] for Greene's use of it; 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY applies to this page's own citation of Frazer through Greene's summary rather than the primary text, and the underlying anthropological claims themselves deserve [CONTESTED] treatment given the discipline's own subsequent critique of Frazer's comparative method.
Open tension: Greene's modern parallel — elections and media cycles as symbolic regicide — implies the underlying psychological need being served is the same one Frazer documented. But actual regicide served a stated causal belief (the king's failing favor with the gods genuinely caused the drought, in the culture's own understanding); modern electoral removal serves accountability in a system that generally doesn't claim literal magical causation between leader and outcome. The parallel may be real at the level of felt catharsis while being quite different at the level of what the ritual is actually understood, by its participants, to accomplish.
Open question: if the ambivalence toward leaders is genuinely universal and childhood-rooted, does it track with a person's own specific parental relationship in adulthood — do people with more resolved, secure early attachment feel measurably less of this ambivalence toward leaders later, or does the ambivalence appear to run independent of that specific developmental variable?
This chapter's account of ambivalence sits productively against Elizabeth I and the Entitlement Curse. Elizabeth's entire strategy — continuous re-earning of trust, refusal to assume loyalty, visible sacrifice — reads, in light of this chapter, as a decades-long attempt to manage the ambivalence directly rather than simply hope it stays quiet. She couldn't eliminate it; nobody can, per Greene's own account of its childhood roots. But she could keep giving her subjects fresh, current reasons to weight the affectionate half of the ambivalence over the resentful half, which is a different and much harder task than simply being competent.
→ The Bouphónia: Ox-Slaying and Sacrificial Guilt
That page documents an ancient Athenian ritual in which an ox is ceremonially killed, its meat eaten collectively, and the actual blame for the killing displaced onto the knife — put on trial the next day and cast into the sea, so the community that consumed the sacrifice never has to hold the guilt of having caused the death itself. This page's account of symbolic leader-execution cannot be fully understood without that structural parallel: modern electoral and media "punishment" of a failed leader for an economic downturn functions the same way the trial of the knife did — a mechanism for discharging collective anxiety and displaced responsibility onto a single blamable proxy, while the actual, diffuse causes (systemic economic forces, in the modern case; the community's own complicity in the sacrifice, in the ancient one) go unexamined.
The insight neither page produces alone: both rituals require the target to be, in some sense, innocent of the specific causal claim leveled against it — the knife didn't choose to kill any more than a modern leader chose the exact economic conditions they're blamed for — and that gap between actual causation and ritual blame isn't a flaw in either mechanism. It's the mechanism's entire function. A genuinely fair, proportionate accounting of causation wouldn't produce the same cathartic release; the ritual needs a clean, punishable proxy specifically because the real causal picture is too diffuse to discharge anxiety against directly.
That Part I page catalogs the specific techniques skilled demagogues use to manipulate crowd emotion — warming a crowd up, deploying loaded abstractions, sustaining panic, promising noble goals. This page's account of leader-ambivalence cannot be fully understood without that companion mechanism, because it explains why a demagogue's techniques work so efficiently on this specific emotional substrate: a population running a constant, quiet undertone of resentment toward existing authority is primed, in a way a genuinely satisfied population is not, to redirect that resentment toward a new figure who promises to finally punish the leaders who "deserve" it.
The insight the two pages produce together: demagoguery isn't purely a top-down manipulation imposed on a passive audience — it's closer to a supply meeting an existing, chronic demand. The ambivalence this page documents is the standing psychological inventory the demagogue's devices are specifically built to activate and channel. Remove the underlying ambivalence (which this page argues is impossible, being rooted in childhood) and the demagogue's techniques would have far less raw material to work with; the devices are a delivery mechanism for a fuel this page shows is always already present.
Sharpest implication: the ambivalence never actually resolves, in Greene's account, no matter how well a leader performs — which means "earning trust" (Elizabeth's whole strategy) doesn't eliminate the resentment, it only shifts the ratio, keeping the affectionate half slightly ahead of the resentful half for as long as the leader keeps actively working at it. The moment that active work stops — through complacency, age, or simple success breeding entitlement — the ratio doesn't stay put. It drifts back toward the resentful default, because that default was never actually removed, only outweighed.
Generative questions: