12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

by Jordan B. Peterson

This kind of oversimplification and falsification is particularly typical of ideologues. They adopt a single axiom: government is bad, immigration is bad, capitalism is bad, patriarchy is bad. Then they filter and screen their experiences and insist ever more narrowly that everything can be explained by that axiom. They believe, narcissistically, underneath all that bad theory, that the world could be put right, if only they held the controls.

A sin of commission occurs when you do something you know to be wrong. A sin of omission occurs when you let something bad happen when you could do something to stop it.

Vitality requires original contribution.

And hiding from others also means suppressing and hiding the potentialities of the unrealized self.

If you will not reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself.

It means that so much of what you could be will never be forced by necessity to come forward.

When you explore boldly, when you voluntarily confront the unknown, you gather information and build your renew...

However, researchers have recently discovered that new genes in the central nervous system turn themselves on when an organism is placed ...

This means that a lot of you is still nascent, in the most physical of senses, and will not be called forth by stasis.

You have to say something, go somewhere and do things to get turned on.

If you say no to your boss, or your spouse, or your mother, when it needs to be said, then you transform yourself into someone who can say no when it needs to be said.

If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character.

Only the most cynical, hopeless philosophy insists that reality could be improved through falsification.

A vision of the future, the desirable future, is necessary.

Such a vision links action taken now with important, long-term, foundational values. It lends actions in the present significance and importance. It provides a frame limiting uncertainty and anxiety.

It is instead willful blindness. It’s the worst sort of...

Willful blindness is the refusal to know something th...

The first of these rules is that the game is important. If it wasn’t important, you wouldn’t be playing it. Playing a game defines it as important. The second is that moves undertaken during the game are valid if they help you win. If you make a move and it isn’t helping you win, then, by definition, it’s a bad move. You need to try something different.

You remember the old joke: insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

An inauthentic person continues to perceive and act in ways his own experience has demonstrated false. He does not speak with his own voice.

“Did what I want happen? No. Then my aim or my methods were wrong. I still have something to learn.” That is the voice of authenticity.

And the sins of the inauthentic individual compound and corrupt the state.

For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? (Mark 8:36)

Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Nazi concentration camp survivor who wrote the classic Man’s Search for Meaning, drew a similar social-psychological conclusion: deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism.

All these thinkers, all centrally concerned with pathology both individual and cultural, came to the same conclusion: lies warp the structure of Being.

Untruth corrupts the soul and the state alike, and one form of corruption feeds the other.

Any natural weakness or existential challenge, no matter how minor, can be magnified into a serious crisis with enough deceit in the individual, family or culture.

The capacity of the rational mind to deceive, manipulate, scheme, trick, falsify, minimize, mislead, betray, prevaricate, deny, omit, rationalize, bias, exaggerate and obscure is so endless, so remarkable, that centuries of pre-scientific thought, concentrating on clarifying the nature of moral endeavour, regarded it as positively demonic.

Reason is something alive. It lives in all of us. It’s older than any of us. It’s best understood as a personality, not a faculty.

To say it again: it is the greatest temptation of the rational faculty to glorify its own capacity and its own productions and to claim that in the face of its theories nothing transcendent or outside its domain need exist.

What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don’t know.

That is faith in the possibility of human transformation. That is faith in the sacrifice of the current self for the self that could be.

That is what totalitarian means: Everything that needs to be discovered has been discovered. Everything will unfold precisely as planned. All problems will vanish, forever, once the perfect system is accepted.

It is deceit that fills human souls with resentment and vengefulness.

It is deceit that produces the terrible suffering of mankind: the death camps of the Nazis; the torture chambers and genocides of Stalin and that even greater monster, Mao.

An aim, an ambition, provides the structure necessary for action. An aim provides a destination, a point of contrast against the present, and a framework, within which all things can be evaluated. An aim defines progress and makes such progress exciting. An aim reduces anxiety, because if you have no aim everything can mean anything or nothing, and neither of those two options makes for a tranquil spirit.

It was for this reason that Nietzsche said that a man’s worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate.

You are by no means only what you already know. You are also all that which you could know, if you only would.

you should never sacrifice what you could be f...

You should never give up the better that resides within for the security you already have—and certainly not when you have already caught a glimpse, a...

Set your ambitions, even if you are uncertain about what they should be.

The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power.

Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to ...

And, while you are doing this, do not lie. Especially to yourself.

If you pay attention to what you do and say, you can learn to feel a state of internal division and weakness when you are misbehaving and misspeaking.

I experience an internal sensation of sinking and division, rather than solidity and strength, when I am inc...

If you pay attention, when you are seeking something, you will move towards your goal.

More importantly, however, you will acquire the information that allows your goal itself to transform.

All people serve their ambition. In that matter, there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don’t know, what God they serve.

Live in truth, or live in deceit, face the consequences, and draw your conclusions.