Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

The social world narrows and specifies the world for us, marking out what is important. But what does “important” mean? How is it determined? The individual is molded by the social world. But social institutions are molded, too, by the requirements of the individuals who compose them. Arrangements must be made for our provisioning with the basic requirements of life. We cannot live without food, water, clean air, and shelter. Less self-evidently, we require companionship, play, touch, and intimacy. These are all biological as well as psychological necessities (and this is by no means a comprehensive list). We must signify and then utilize those elements of the world capable of providing us with these requirements. And the fact that we are deeply social adds another set of constraints to the situation: We must perceive and act in a manner that meets our biological and psychological needs—but, since none of us lives or can live in isolation, we must meet them in a manner approved of by others. This means that the solutions we apply to our fundamental biological problems must also be acceptable and implementable socially.

So, I must take the complexity of the world, reduce it to a single point so that I can act, and take everyone else and their future selves into consideration while I am doing so. How do I manage this? By communicating and negotiating. By outsourcing the terribly complex cognitive problem to the resources of the broader world. The individuals who compose every society cooperate and compete linguistically (although linguistic interaction by no means exhausts the means of cooperation and competition). Words are formulated collectively, and everyone must agree on their use. The verbal framework that helps us delimit the world is a consequence of the landscape of value that is constructed socially—but also bounded by the brute necessity of reality itself. This helps give that landscape shape, and not just any old shape. This is where hierarchies—functional, productive hierarchies—more clearly enter the picture.

The most phylogenetically ancient multicellular organisms (that is far enough for our purposes) tend to be composed of relatively undifferentiated sensorimotor cells.1 These cells map certain facts or features of the environment directly onto the motor output of the same cells, in an essentially one-to-one relationship. Stimulus A means response A, and nothing else, while stimulus B means response B. Among more differentiated and complex creatures—the larger and commonly recognizable denizens of the natural world—the sensory and motor functions separate and specialize, such that cells undertaking the former functions detect patterns in the world and cells in the latter produce patterns of motor output. This differentiation enables a broader range of patterns to be recognized and mapped, as well as a broader range of action and reaction to be undertaken. A third type of cell—neural—emerges sometimes, as well, serving as a computational intermediary between the first two. Among species that have established a neural level of operation, the “same” pattern of input can produce a different pattern of output (depending, for example, on changes in the animal’s environment or internal psychophysical condition). As nervous systems increase in sophistication, and more and more layers of neural intermediation emerge, the relationship between simple fact and motor output becomes increasingly complex, unpredictable, and sophisticated. What is putatively the same thing or situation can ...

The universal rules of fair play include the ability to regulate emotion and motivation while cooperating and competing in pursuit of the goal during the game (that is part and parcel of being able to play at all), as well as the ability and will to establish reciprocally beneficial interactions across time and situation, as we already discussed. And life is not simply a game, but a series of games, each of which has something in common (whatever defines a game) and something unique (or there would be no reason for multiple games). At minimum, there is a starting point (kindergarten, a 0–0 score, a first date, an entry-level job) that needs to be improved upon; a procedure for enacting that improvement; and a desirable goal (graduation from high school, a winning score, a permanent romantic relationship, a prestigious career). Because of that commonality, there is an ethic—or more properly, a meta-ethic—that emerges, from the bottom up, across the set of all games. The best player is therefore not the winner of any given game but, among many other things, he or she who is invited by the largest number of others to play the most extensive series of games. It is for this reason, which you may not understand explicitly at the time, that you tell your children: “It’s not whether you win or lose. It’s how you play the game!”

It is necessary and helpful to be, and in some ways to remain, a beginner. For this reason, the Tarot deck beloved by intuitives, romantics, fortune-tellers, and scoundrels alike contains within it the Fool as a positive card, an illustrated variant of which opens this chapter. The Fool is a young, handsome man, eyes lifted upward, journeying in the mountains, sun shining brightly upon him—about to carelessly step over a cliff (or is he?). His strength, however, is precisely his willingness to risk such a drop; to risk being once again at the bottom. No one unwilling to be a foolish beginner can learn. It was for this reason, among others, that Carl Jung regarded the Fool as the archetypal precursor to the figure of the equally archetypal Redeemer, the perfected individual.

This implies, as well, that the ideal personality cannot remain an unquestioning reflection of the current social state. Under normal conditions, it may be nonetheless said that the ability to conform unquestioningly trumps the inability to conform. However, the refusal to conform when the social surround has become pathological—incomplete, archaic, willfully blind, or corrupt—is something of even higher value, as is the capacity to offer creative, valid alternatives. This leaves all of us with a permanent moral conundrum: When do we simply follow convention, doing what others request or demand; and when do we rely on our own individual judgment, with all its limitations and biases, and reject the requirements of the collective? In other words: How do we establish a balance between reasonable conservatism and revitalizing creativity?

What does this statement mean? It sums up the meaning of Rule I perfectly. If you understand the rules—their necessity, their sacredness, the chaos they keep at bay, how they unite the communities that follow them, the price paid for their establishment, and the danger of breaking them—but you are willing to fully shoulder the responsibility of making an exception, because you see that as serving a higher good (and if you are a person with sufficient character to manage that distinction), then you have served the spirit, rather than the mere law, and that is an elevated moral act. But if you refuse to realize the importance of the rules you are violating and act out of self-centered convenience, then you are appropriately and inevitably damned. The carelessness you exhibit with regard to your own tradition will undo you and perhaps those around you fully and painfully across time.

A certain amount of arbitrary rule-ness must be tolerated—or welcomed, depending on your point of view—to keep the world and its inhabitants together. A certain amount of creativity and rebellion must be tolerated—or welcomed, depending on your point of view—to maintain the process of regeneration. Every rule was once a creative act, breaking other rules. Every creative act, genuine in its creativity, is likely to transform itself, with time, into a useful rule. It is the living interaction between social institutions and creative achievement that keeps the world balanced on the narrow line between too much order and too much chaos. This is a terrible conundrum, a true existential burden. We must support and value the past, and we need to do that with an attitude of gratitude and respect. At the same time, however, we must keep our eyes open—we, the visionary living—and repair the ancient mechanisms that stabilize and support us when they falter. Thus, we need to bear the paradox that is involved in simultaneously respecting the walls that keep us safe and allowing in enough of what is new and changing so that our institutions remain alive and healthy. The very world depends for its stability and its dynamism on the subsuming of all our endeavors under the perfection—the sacredness—of that dual ability. Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.

First, if something happens every day, it is important, and lunch was happening every day. In consequence, if there was something about it that was chronically bothersome, even in a minor sort of way, it needed to be attended to. Second, it is very common to allow so-called minor irritations (which are not minor, as I said, if they happen constantly) to continue for years without comment or resolution. Here is the problem: Collect a hundred, or a thousand, of those, and your life is miserable and your marriage doomed. Do not pretend you are happy with something if you are not, and if a reasonable solution might, in principle, be negotiated. Have the damn fight. Unpleasant as that might be in the moment, it is one less straw on the camel’s back. And that is particularly true for those daily events that everyone is prone to regard as trivial—even the plates on which you eat your lunch. Life is what repeats, and it is worth getting what repeats right.

Here is a thought, a terrifying and dispiriting thought, to motivate improvement in your marriage—to scare you into the appalling difficulties of true negotiation. Every little problem you have every morning, afternoon, or evening with your spouse will be repeated for each of the fifteen thousand days that will make up a forty-year marriage. Every trivial but chronic disagreement about cooking, dishes, housecleaning, responsibility for finances, or frequency of intimate contact will be duplicated, over and over, unless you successfully address it. Perhaps you think (moment to moment, at least) that it is best to avoid confrontation and drift along in apparent but false peace. Make no mistake about it, however: you age as you drift, just as rapidly as you age as you strive. But you have no direction when you drift, and the probability that you will obtain what you need and want by drifting aimlessly is very low.

Imagine that you are afraid. You have reason to be. You are afraid of yourself. You are afraid of other people. You are afraid of the world. You are nostalgic for the innocence of the past; for the time before you learned the terrible things that shattered the trust characterizing your childhood. The knowledge you have gained of yourself, other people, and the world has embittered more than enlightened. You have been betrayed, hurt, and disappointed. You have become distrustful even of hope itself, as your hope has been repeatedly shattered (and that is the very definition of hopelessness). The last thing you want is to know more. Better to leave what is enshrouded in mystery. Better, as well, to avoid thinking too much (or at all) about what could be. When ignorance is bliss, after all, ’tis folly to be wise. Imagine, more precisely, that you are so afraid that you will not allow yourself even to know what you want. Knowing would simultaneously mean hoping, and your hopes have been dashed. You have your reasons for maintaining your ignorance. You are afraid, perhaps, that there is nothing worth wanting; you are afraid that if you specify what you want precisely you will simultaneously discover (and all too clearly) what constitutes failure; you are afraid that failure is the most likely outcome; and, finally, you are afraid that if you define failure and then fail, you will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was you that failed, and that it was your fault. So, you do...

It is for such reasons that trust is vital: but trust of the mature and tragic sort. A naive person trusts because he or she believes that people are essentially or even universally trustworthy. But any person who has truly lived has been—or has—betrayed. Someone with experience knows that people are capable of deception and willing to deceive. That knowledge brings with it an arguably justified pessimism about human nature, personal and otherwise, but it also opens the door to another kind of faith in humanity: one based on courage, rather than naivete. I will trust you—I will extend my hand to you—despite the risk of betrayal, because it is possible, through trust, to bring out the best in you, and perhaps in me. So, I will accept substantial risk to open the door to cooperation and negotiation. And even if you do betray me, in a not-too unforgivable manner (assuming a certain degree, shall we say, of genuine apology and contrition on your part), I will continue to extend my hand. And part of the way I will do that is by telling you what I am feeling.

It is by no means a good thing to be the oldest person at the frat party. It is desperation, masquerading as cool rebelliousness—and there is a touchy despondence and arrogance that goes along with it. It smacks of Neverland. In the same manner, the attractive potential of a directionless but talented twenty-five-year-old starts to look hopeless and pathetic at thirty, and downright past its expiration date at forty. You must sacrifice something of your manifold potential in exchange for something real in life. Aim at something. Discipline yourself. Or suffer the consequence. And what is that consequence? All the suffering of life, with none of the meaning. Is there a better description of hell?

Animals do not seem to consider the future in the same manner as we do. If you visit the African veldt, and you observe a herd of zebras, you will often see lions lazing about around them. And as long as the lions are lying around relaxing, the zebras really do not mind. This attitude seems a little thoughtless, from the human perspective. The zebras should instead be biding their time until the lions go to sleep. Then they should run off to a corner of the field in a herd and conspire a bit. And then several dozen of them should rush the sleeping lions and stomp them to death. That would be the end of the lion problem. But that is not what zebras do. They think, “Ah, look at those relaxed lions! Relaxed lions are never a problem!” Zebras do not seem to have any real sense of time. They cannot conceptualize themselves across the temporal expanse. But human beings not only manage such conceptualization, they cannot shake it. We discovered the future, some long time ago—and now the future is where we each live, in potential. We treat that as reality. It is a reality that only might be—but it is one with a high probability of becoming now, eventually, and we are driven to take that into account.

People want to be happy, and no wonder. I have longed deeply, many times, for the return of happiness—hoping for its current presence—and I am certainly not alone in that. However, I do not believe you should pursue happiness. If you do so, you will run right into the iteration problem, because “happy” is a right-now thing. If you place people in situations where they are feeling a lot of positive emotion, they get present-focused and impulsive.4 This means “make hay while the sun shines”—take your opportunities while things are good and act now. But now is by no means everything, and unfortunately, everything must be considered, at least insofar as you are able. In consequence, it is unlikely that whatever optimizes your life across time is happiness. I am not denying its desirability, by the way. If happiness comes to you, welcome it with gratitude and open arms (but be careful, because it does make you impetuous). What might serve as a more sophisticated alternative to happiness? Imagine it is living in accordance with the sense of responsibility, because that sets things right in the future. Imagine, as well, that you must act reliably, honestly, nobly, and in relationship to a higher good, in order to manifest the sense of responsibility properly. The higher good would be the simultaneous optimization of your function and the function of the people around you, across time, as we have discussed previously. That is the highest good. Imagine that you make that aim consci...

You act and betray yourself, and you feel bad about that. You do not know exactly why. You try to avoid thinking about it, because it is less painful and easier in the short term not to think about it. You try with all your might to ignore it, but all that does is increase your sense of self-betrayal and further divide you against yourself. So, you reconsider, perhaps, and you confront your discomfort. You note your disunity and the chaos that comes with it. You ask yourself—you pray to discover—what you did wrong. And the answer arrives. And it is not what you want. And part of you must therefore die, so that you can change. And the part that must die struggles for its existence, puts forward its rationale, and pleads its case. And it will do so with every trick in its possession—employing the most egregious lies, the bitterest, most resentment-eliciting memories of the past, and the most hopelessly cynical attitudes about the future (indeed, about the value of life itself). But you persevere, and discriminate, judge, and decide exactly why what you did was wrong, and you start to understand, by contrast, what might have been right. And then you determine to start acting in accordance with your conscience. You decide that it is a partner, despite its adversarial form. You put all that you have discovered to be right into action, and you begin your ascent. You start to monitor yourself, ever more careful to ensure you are doing the right thing—listening to what you say, wa...

We have spent too much time, for example (much of the last fifty years), clamoring about rights, and we are no longer asking enough of the young people we are socializing. We have been telling them for decades to demand what they are owed by society. We have been implying that the important meanings of their lives will be given to them because of such demands, when we should have been doing the opposite: letting them know that the meaning that sustains life in all its tragedy and disappointment is to be found in shouldering a noble burden. Because we have not been doing this, they have grown up looking in the wrong places. And this has left them vulnerable: vulnerable to easy answers and susceptible to the deadening force of resentment. What about the unfolding of history has left us in this position? How has this vulnerability, this susceptibility, come about?

Ideological reduction of that form is the hallmark of the most dangerous of pseudo-intellectuals. Ideologues are the intellectual equivalent of fundamentalists, unyielding and rigid. Their self-righteousness and moral claim to social engineering is every bit as deep and dangerous. It might even be worse: ideologues lay claim to rationality itself. So, they try to justify their claims as logical and thoughtful. At least the fundamentalists admit devotion to something they just believe arbitrarily. They are a lot more honest. Furthermore, fundamentalists are bound by a relationship with the transcendent. What this means is that God, the center of their moral universe, remains outside and above complete understanding, according to the fundamentalist’s own creed. Right-wing Jews, Islamic hard-liners, and ultra-conservative Christians must admit, if pushed, that God is essentially mysterious. This concession provides at least some boundary for their claims, as individuals, to righteousness and power (as the genuine fundamentalist at least remains subordinate to Something he cannot claim to totally understand, let alone master). For the ideologue, however, nothing remains outside understanding or mastery. An ideological theory explains everything: all the past, all the present, and all the future. This means that an ideologue can consider him or herself in possession of the complete truth (something forbidden to the self-consistent fundamentalist). There is no claim more totalit...

It is impossible to fight patriarchy, reduce oppression, promote equality, transform capitalism, save the environment, eliminate competitiveness, reduce government, or to run every organization like a business. Such concepts are simply too low-resolution. The Monty Python comedy crew once offered satirical lessons for playing the flute: blow over one end and move your fingers up and down on the holes.10 True. But useless. The necessary detail is simply not there. Similarly, sophisticated large-scale processes and systems do not exist in a manner sufficiently real to render their comprehensive unitary transformation possible. The idea that they do is the product of twentieth-century cults. The beliefs of these cults are simultaneously naive and narcissistic, and the activism they promote is the resentful and lazy person’s substitute for actual accomplishment.

It is possible to be content, or even happy, with one partner or another, or with one group of friends or another, or with one career or another. In some sense, the satisfaction that these arrangements bring could have been generated by different choices. They are also each deeply flawed: romantic partners can be fickle and complex, as can friends, and every career or job is characterized by frustration, disappointment, corruption, arbitrary hierarchy, internal politics, and sheer idiocy of decision making. We could conclude from that lack of specific or ideal value that nothing matters more than anything else—or to draw the even more hopeless allied conclusion that nothing therefore matters at all. But those who draw such conclusions, no matter how well armed they are with rationally coherent arguments, pay a high price. People suffer for it if they quit before completing an undergraduate degree or the study of a trade. And this means “quit,” not fail, although the two can be difficult to distinguish. Sometimes people fail because they just cannot manage the job, despite good intentions and necessary discipline. It takes a certain verbal capacity to operate effectively as a lawyer, and a certain degree of facility with mechanical objects, for example, to become a carpenter. Sometimes the match between person and choice is so poor that even commitment will not suffice to bring about the desired end. But very often failure is a consequence of insufficient single-mindedness,...

The people I knew who finished their undergraduate degrees or trade programs were better for it. Not “good,” necessarily. Not functioning optimally. Not necessarily thrilled with their choices, or devoid of doubt and misgiving. Not even certain to continue in pursuit of what they had studied. But far better than those who withdrew and drifted. The commitments and the sacrifices thereby entailed matured those who endured and made them better people. So, what is the conclusion? There are many things to which we might commit ourselves. A case can be made for the arbitrary and even meaningless nature of any given commitment, given the plethora of alternatives, given the corruption of the systems demanding that commitment. But the same case cannot be made for the fact of commitment itself: Those who do not choose a direction are lost. It is far better to become something than to remain anything but become nothing. This is despite all the genuine limitations and disappointments that becoming something entails. Everywhere, the cynic despairs, are bad decisions. But someone who has transcended that cynicism (or more accurately, replaced it with an even more profound doubt—that is, the doubt that doubt itself is an ultimately reliable guide) objects: the worst decision of all is none.

Likewise, the claim that morality is both necessary and inevitable is not totalitarian. It is merely the observation that basic, primitive unidimensional values must be subsumed under socially organized structures for peace and harmony to exist and be maintained. It was the bringing together of a warring multiplicity under the unifying doctrines of Christianity that civilized Europe. It could, perhaps, have been Buddhism, Confucianism, or Hinduism, insofar as the East is also both broadly civilized and unified. But it could not have been the absence of any doctrine whatsoever. Without a game, there is no peace, only chaos. Furthermore, the game that exists must be playable (as we discussed in Rule IV: Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated). This means that it must be structured by a communally acceptable set of rules—by only those constraints that many people are willing to abide by, for a long time. It is possible that many such games exist, theoretically, but it is at least equally possible that there are only a few. In any case, the rules of Christianity and the rules of Buddhism are by no means arbitrary, by no means nonsensical superstition, any more than the rules of a playable game are merely arbitrary or nonsensically superstitious. To think that peace can exist without the overarching and voluntarily accepted game is to misunderstand the ever-present danger of the fragmented tribalism to which we can so easily and devastatingly regr...

It is worthwhile thinking of these Commandments as a minimum set of rules for a stable society—an iterable social game. The Commandments are rules established in the book of Exodus, and part of that unforgettable story. But they are also pointers to something else—something that simultaneously emerges from and transcends the rules and constitutes their essence. The core idea is this: subjugate yourself voluntarily to a set of socially determined rules—those with some tradition in their formulation—and a unity that transcends the rules will emerge. That unity constitutes what you could be, if you concentrate on a particular goal and see it through.

Making something beautiful is difficult, but it is amazingly worthwhile. If you learn to make something in your life truly beautiful—even one thing—then you have established a relationship with beauty. From there you can begin to expand that relationship out into other elements of your life and the world. That is an invitation to the divine. That is the reconnection with the immortality of childhood, and the true beauty and majesty of the Being you can no longer see. You must be daring to try that.

When I was a child, I knew the contours and details of all the houses in my immediate neighborhood. I knew the back alleys, the places behind the fences, the location of each crack in the pavement, and the shortcuts that could be taken from one place to another. My geographical locale was not large, but I had explored it thoroughly and my knowledge of it was very detailed. Now that I am an adult, the same is not true. I lived in Fairview, the town I grew up in for most of my childhood and adolescence, for only nine years, but I am still able to picture in high resolution the street I lived on. I have lived in Toronto, on the same street, for more than twice as long, but I still have only a vague sense of the houses that surround mine. I do not think that is a good thing. I feel far less at home because of it. It is as if when I walk down the street and glance at a local house, I think of “house” as an icon (because, really, what practical difference does it make to me what particularities characterize each house?), and then my attention is turned to something else. I do not see the house, with its specific shingles, colors, flowers, and architectural details, despite the interest that might have been elicited in me had I paid careful attention. By this point in my life, I have seen so many houses in so many places that I know what a house is likely to do when I walk by it—which is very little. Thus, I ignore the engaging idiosyncrasies and beauties of its details—its uniqu...

All of this is very frightening. It is frightening to perceive the shells of ourselves that we have become. It is frightening to glimpse, even for a moment, the transcendent reality that exists beyond. We think we border our great paintings with luxurious, elaborate frames to glorify them, but we do it at least as much to insist to ourselves that the glory of the painting itself ends at the frame. That bounding, that bordering, leaves the world we are familiar with comfortably intact and unchanged. We do not want that beauty reaching out past the limitations imposed on it and disturbing everything that is familiar. We do the same with museums, those asylums for genius: we isolate everything that is great—everything that could in principle be distributed throughout the world.

Art is exploration. Artists train people to see. Most people with any exposure to art now regard the work of the impressionists, for example, as both self-evidently beautiful and relatively traditional. This is in no small part because we all perceive the world now, at least in part, in the manner that only impressionists could manage in the latter half of the nineteenth century. We cannot help doing so, because the impressionist aesthetic has saturated everything: advertisements, movies, popular posters, comic books, photographs—all forms of visual art. Now we all see the beauty of light that only the impressionists could once apprehend. They taught us this. But when the impressionists first displayed their paintings—in the Salon des Refusés of 1863, as the traditional Paris Salon had rejected them—the pieces were met with laughter and contempt. The idea of perceiving that way (paying particular attention to light, essentially, rather than form) was so radical that it caused people to have emotional fits.

There is something else of perhaps equal import allied with this, impossible as that might seem, given the very unlikeliness of the role we appear to play in the shaping of reality. Not only do our choices play a determining role in transforming the multiplicity of the future into the actuality of the present, but—more specifically—the ethics of our choices play that role. Actions based upon the desire to take responsibility; to make things better; to avoid temptation and face what we would rather avoid; to act voluntarily, courageously, and truthfully—these make what comes into Being much better, in all ways, for ourselves and for others, than what arises as a consequence of avoidance, resentment, the search for revenge, or the desire for mayhem. This means that if we act ethically, in the deepest and most universal of senses, then the tangible reality that emerges from the potential we face will be good instead of dreadful—or at least as good as we can make it.

To negotiate, you and the person you are negotiating with must first know what you each need (and want)—and second, be willing to discuss both forthrightly. There are many serious obstacles both to knowing what you need and want, and to discussing it. If you allow yourself to know what you want, then you will also know precisely when you are failing to get it. You will benefit, of course, because you will also know when you have succeeded. But you might also fail, and you could well be frightened enough by the possibility of not getting what you need (and want) that you keep your desires vague and unspecified. And the chance that you will get what you want if you fail to aim for it is vanishingly small. Aim is likely a problem for you. If you have a partner, the problem may be compounded. The person you have chosen is unlikely to be any smarter about you than you are, except in minor instances (and is in fact likely to be even more in the dark with regard to your innermost desires). Your failure to specify your desires means your unfortunate lover will have to guess what would please and displease you, and is likely to be punished in some manner for getting it wrong. Furthermore, given all the things you could want—and do not want—it is virtually certain that your lover will get it wrong. In consequence, you will be motivated to blame them, at least implicitly, or nonverbally, or unconsciously, for not caring enough to notice what you are unwilling even to notice yourself....

My wife told me a terrible story once, about a couple she observed while volunteering in a palliative care ward. The husband was dying, and his wife was trimming his nails—a little too close. With each clip, there was blood, as she trimmed close enough to damage the quick. You see something like that, and wisdom speaks its terrible truth: “I know exactly what is going on there.” That is the end stage of an unbelievably deceitful and brutal relationship. It is subtle. It does not announce itself loudly as murderous. No one knows, except the couple (even though they are perhaps striving with all their might, under the circumstances, not to know) and the careful observer, who sees a dying man and a wife who has determined, for whatever reasons, to make his death a little worse.

Whatever potential might be, therefore, it does not follow the simple rules of material logic. Objects that play by the rules of the game we consider real (when we assume that what is real is also logical) can only be one thing at a time, and certainly not themselves and their opposite, simultaneously. Potential, however, is not like that. It is not categorizable in that manner. It is tragedy, comedy, good and evil, and everything in between at the same time. It is also not tangible, in the sense that the things we consider must be tangible. It does not even exist—except as what could be exists. Perhaps it is best considered as the structure of reality, before reality manifests itself concretely in the present, where reality appears to most self-evidently exist. But creatures such as us do not contend with the present. It may therefore be that it is not the present that is most real—at least as far as our consciousness is concerned. We have to fight to “be here now,” the advice of the sages. Left to our own devices, we turn our minds instead to investigating the future: What could be? Attempting to answer that question—that is life. That is the true encounter with reality. What is? That is the dead past, already accomplished. What could be? That is the emergence of new being, new adventure, brought about by the conjunction of living consciousness with the great expanse of paradoxical possibility.

We conceptualize what we experience as a story. That story is, roughly speaking, the description of the place we are at right now, as well as the place that we are going to, the strategies and adventures that we implement and experience along the way, and our downfalls and reconstitutions during that journey. You perceive and act inside a structure like that all the time, because you are always somewhere, going somewhere else, and you are always evaluating where you are and what is going on in relation to your goal. Part of this thinking in stories is our tendency to see the world as a selection of characters, each of which represents either where we are or are going, the unexpected occurrences we may encounter, or ourselves as actors. We see animated intent everywhere1—and we certainly present the world that way to our children. That is why Thomas the Tank Engine has a face and a smile, and the sun has a face and a smile. That is why—even among adults—there is a man in the moon, and deities scattered across the stars. Everything is animated. That is a reflection of our proclivity to treat things as if they are personalities with intent, regardless of what they are, regardless of whether they are animate or inanimate. That is why it is okay with you that your car has a face (on the front, where faces belong), which it most certainly does.

They plan a great christening party. It is a fine idea, but they fail to invite Maleficent, the Evil Queen, to the celebrations. And it is not ignorance that prevents them. They know of her existence, and they are well acquainted with her power. It is willful blindness, and it is a bad move. They desire to shield their new and precious daughter from the negative element of the world, instead of determining how to provide her with the strength and wisdom to prevail, despite the reality of the negative. All this does is keep Aurora naive and vulnerable. Maleficent shows up anyway, as she most certainly will, and there is a message in that: invite the Evil Queen to your child’s life. If you fail to do so, your children will grow up weak and in need of protection, and the Evil Queen is going to make herself known no matter what steps you take to stop her. At the christening, in fact, not only does she arrive, well behaved but uninvited, but she offers a present (in the form of a curse): the death of Aurora at the age of sixteen, brought about by the prick of the spindle of a spinning wheel. And all that because she was not invited to celebrate the young princess’s christening. Only because a compassionate and powerful guest intercedes—one of the three aforementioned fairies, representative of the positive feminine—is the curse transmuted from death into profound unconsciousness, a state barely less fatal. That is what happens to those beauties, so to speak, who remain far too ...

So, there exists a hero and an adversary; a wise king and a tyrant; a positive and negative maternal figure; and chaos itself. That is the structure of the world in six characters (with the strange seventh of chaos in some sense the ultimate birthplace of all the others). It is necessary to understand that all seven exist, and that they are all existential permanents—elements of experience with which every soul, rich, poor, blessed, cursed, talented, dull, male, and female must inevitably contend. That is life—they are life. Partial knowledge of the cast, conscious or unconscious, leaves you undefended; leaves you naive, unprepared, and likely to become possessed by deceit, resentment, and arrogance. If you do not know that the treasure is guarded by a dragon, or that nature, beautiful nature, can turn its teeth on you in an instant, or that the peaceful society you take for granted is threatened constantly by authoritarianism and tyranny, or that you contain within yourself the adversary who might wish that all those negative transformations occur, then you are, first, a needy acolyte for an ideology that will provide you with a partial and insufficient representation of reality; and, second, someone blind in a manner dangerous to themselves and others alike. If you are wise, your political philosophy encompasses a representation of all seven, even if you could not articulate it in those terms.

A truthful person can rely on his or her innate sense of meaning and truth as a reliable guide to the choices that must be made through life’s days, weeks, and years. But there is a rule that applies—the same rule that computer programmers well know: “garbage in, garbage out.” If you deceive (particularly yourself), if you lie, then you begin to warp the mechanisms guiding the instinct that orients you. That instinct is an unconscious guide, so it works underneath your cognitive apparatus, especially once it has become habitual. If you rewire the unconscious mechanisms that maintain you with assumptions derived from something you know to be unreal, then your meaningful instinct will take you places you should not go, in proportion to its corruption. There is little more terrifying than the possibility that you could come to a crisis point in your life when you need every faculty you possess, at that moment, to make the decision properly, only to find you have pathologized yourself with deceit and can no longer rely on your own judgment. Good luck to you, because nothing but luck will then serve to save you.