Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

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.