12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

by Jordan B. Peterson

Eh. I feel like many of the "greatest" totalitarians were firmly convinced they were right

Aristotle defined the virtues simply as the ways of behaving that are most conducive to happiness in life.

it is a sign you are embarrassingly unsophisticated or, possibly, dangerous.

Intolerance must be necessary

the foremost rule is that you must take responsibility for your own life. Period.

True

What? How?

It is in this manner that we can and must reduce the suffering that poisons the world.

Each of the twelve rules of this book—and their accompanying essays—therefore provide a guide to being there. “There” is the dividing line between order and chaos.

If you are judged by your peers as of little worth, the counter restricts serotonin availability. That makes you much more physically and psychologically reactive to any circumstance or event that might produce emotion, particularly if it is negative.

get them to see their resentment, first, as anger, and then as an indication that something needs to be said, if not done (not least because honesty demands it). Then I get them to see such action as part of the force that holds tyranny at bay—at the social level,

Emotion is partly bodily expression, and can be amplified (or dampened) by that expression.

is our eternal subjugation to the first two that makes us doubt the validity of existence—that

Order is the place where the behavior of the world matches our expectations and our desires;

This is not true of chaos and order. Those are perceived,

as personalities—and

Order, when pushed too far, when imbalanced, can also manifest itself destructively and terribly. It does so as the forced migration, the concentration camp, and the soul-devouring uniformity of the goose-step.

is symbolically associated with the feminine. This is partly because all the things we have come to know were born, originally, of the unknown, just as all beings we encounter were born of mothers.

This is an exceptionally weak connection. I can forgive Plato for making straw man arguments as he wrote non-literally and 2000 years ago. My biggest problem with Peterson is his insistence of distinguishing masculine and feminine in this way. Not say there are not differences, but making these odd claims is simple reductive.

I think this idea does hold some weight. It is at least a slightly better interpretation of the distinction between male and female from what came before.

Women’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are.

So this line of thinking makes sense when pairing chaos with the feminine, they engineer evolution growth and change through picky sexual selection, however, when it comes to relational stability my personal experience has shown men to often be the inconsistent ones.

The ancient Egyptians represented Osiris, god of the state, and Isis, goddess of the underworld,

Dont think that one is accurate, Osiris is first king of Egypt and then becomes god of the underworld whereas Isis is the goddess of magic? That is how I have understood the mythology.

has proposed quite lucidly and directly that the very hemispheric structure of the cortex reflects the fundamental division between novelty (the unknown, or chaos) and routinization (the known, order).

monkeys do not understand absolute good or evil

It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them.

Maybe God thought His new creation would be able to handle the serpent, and considered its presence the lesser of two evils.

But the capacity of women to shame men and render them self-conscious is still a primal force of nature.

It’s fruit that the snake offers, and fruit is also associated with a transformation of vision, in that our ability to see colour is an adaptation that allows us to rapidly detect the ripe and therefore edible bounty of trees.

Perhaps Heaven is something you must build, and immortality something you must earn.

Only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the best definition of evil I have been able to formulate.

And who could avoid noting that without that guilt—that sense of inbuilt corruption and capacity for wrongdoing—a man is one step from psychopathy?

This is an argumemt i like. Humans selecting for morality (self-consciousness) to prevent evil.

Their goodness was something bestowed, rather than deserved or earned.

The entire Bible is structured so that everything after the Fall—the history of Israel, the prophets, the coming of Christ—is presented as a remedy for that Fall, a way out of evil.

but back as awake beings, exercising the proper choice of awake beings, instead of back to sleep:

And all shall be well and All manner of things shall be well When the tongues of flames are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.

But what if everyone refuses to erect those social obstacles

Any claim that the Golden Rule does not mean “sacrifice yourself for others” might therefore appear dubious.

That means we are supporting tyranny, and allowing ourselves to be treated like slaves. It is not virtuous to be victimized by a bully, even if that bully is oneself.

both are equations, rather than injunctions.

So, we may not exactly be God, but we’re not exactly nothing, either.

Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being.

It is far more likely that a given individual has just decided to reject the path upward, because of its difficulty.

But resentment always means one of two things. Either the resentful person is immature, in which case he or she should shut up, quit whining, and get on with it, or there is tyranny afoot—in which case the person subjugated has a moral obligation to speak up.

Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak.

Ask honestly and with humility.

Maybe you need to say to yourself, “OK. I know we haven’t gotten along very well in the past. I’m sorry about that. I’m trying to improve.

Happily, however, that problem contains within it the seeds of its own solution. Since you’ve ignored so much, there is plenty of possibility left where you have not yet looked.

Beyond Good and Evil,

“What is it that is bothering me?” “Is that something I could fix?” and “Would I actually be willing to fix it?”

Don’t tell yourself, “I shouldn’t need to do that to motivate myself.” What do you know about yourself?

Need to learn more about why our society's structure works

This is what im talking about with the unqualified statements of fact! What the fuck is he talking about? The loberalization of divorce was of huge importnace both for young couples and for women in general.

They want their children’s friendship above all, and are willing to sacrifice respect to get it.