Enemies Before Friends?

This is somewhat in response to Brandon's comment on my last post, 'Circles Within Circles - How and Where to Draw Them.'

In his comment, Brandon brought up the idea of a person placing their enemies before their friends; later, in conversation, he extended this idea to the concept of a person who placed their enemies first, their friends next, and themselves last.  Depending on what one means by 'place,' I think that some people may actually do this.

That some people place their friends before themselves is, I think, fairly evident.  People who aid their friends in escaping fires at the cost of their own lives, who catch a bullet to prevent it from hitting a friend, or who donate large sums of money to help a friend achieve a goal, stopping themselves from achieving their own goals in the process, are rare but certainly present in the world.  News stories sometimes focus on them.

The second part of the concept, involving enemies, is where the definition of 'place' comes into play.  If one means that, by placing one's enemies before one's friends, one must aid those enemies more readily than one aids one's friends, I am not sure that we can apply this situation to any sane person in the world.  Certainly there are situations in which people save their enemies and sacrifice their friends, but all such situation which I can recall involved other variables - none of the situations depended solely on the status of the people in question as enemies or friends.  However, if placing one's enemies before one's friends means that one places a higher priority on harming one's enemies than helping one's friends, I think that it is much more plausible.  The story of the revenge-obsessed person who ends up losing or sacrificing their friends for the sake of vengeance is classic in literature and mythology.  Such stories often also involve the protagonist disregarding the risk to their own life caused by their quest for revenge, so I think it is reasonable to say that one can consider such a protagonist to be placing their enemies above themselves as well.  Furthermore, I do not think that such scenarios are confined to fiction - they exist in real life as well.  Thus, by using this definition of 'place,' I think that Brandon's scenario of a person placing their enemies first, their friends next, and themselves last does in fact occur in reality.