Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

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 ...