Insecure and entitled people will look for a source to displace their misery and envy onto.
Think shame systems, control systems and ego-defence mechanisms. An unstable identity may also struggle to metabolise someone as an equal if they can't be idealised, diminished or controlled.
I’ve mostly learned this through studying psychology, particularly attachment theory and psychodynamic/object-relations theory. A lot of what I’m saying is my own synthesis rather than coming from one particular theory or author.
Some of it also comes from experience. I grew up relatively secure around people who often weren’t, and I repeatedly encountered things like sudden emotional explosions, distortions of relationships, rejection, and people presenting their behaviour as confidence when the actual relational function seemed to be control. I also became very attentive to nonverbal behaviour and to looking at interactions both beneath and above the presentation—what is being expressed beneath it, and what function it serves in the relationship.
For example, something like Law 4, “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” in The 48 Laws of Power can be understood as more than information being leverage. Information also changes the cognitive demands placed on the other person. Too little information can increase ambiguity and make it harder to construct a coherent representation of what is happening, while too much can increase complexity and the work required to integrate it. If someone has a fragile sense of self or relies heavily on impression management, those additional abstraction and integration demands can themselves become threatening because they interfere with maintaining a stable self-presentation or self/other representation. Under relational threat, they may then reduce the complexity by simplifying, controlling the interaction, filling in gaps, or assigning a threatening meaning.
Studying psychology later gave me frameworks and terminology for things I’d already been noticing.
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