Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

How, then, is the personality that balances respect for social institutions and, equally, creative transformation to be understood? It is not so easy to determine, given the complexity of the problem. For that reason, we turn to stories. Stories provide us with a broad template. They outline a pattern specific enough to be of tremendous value, if we can imitate it, but general enough (unlike a particular rule or set of rules) to apply even to new situations.

Sometimes we can draw compelling narratives directly from our personal experience with individual people; sometimes we create amalgams of multiple personalities, often in concert with those who compose our social groups.

He first developed his eye for form, symmetry, novelty, and beauty as a photographer. The social advantages of this pursuit were manifold: he joined a club that had its members attend biweekly photography walks, where they would sojourn as a group of twenty or so to parts of the city that were visually interesting, either for their natural beauty or uniqueness or for the attraction they held as industrial landscapes. He learned a fair bit about photographic equipment, technically, because of doing so. The group members also critiqued one another’s work—and they did this constructively, which meant that all of them appeared to indicate what errors had been made but also what of value had been managed.

My granddaughter, Scarlett, also came to exhibit behaviors that were indicative of, if not her creative ability, then at least her appreciation for creative ability, in addition to her socialization as an agent of socially valued pointing. When people discuss a story—presented as a movie, or a play, or a book—they commonly attempt to come to a sophisticated consensus about its point (sophisticated because a group of people can generally offer more viewpoints than a single individual; consensus because the discussion usually continues until some broad agreement is reached as to the topic at hand). Now, the idea that a story is a form of communication—and entertainment—is one of those facts that appears self-evident upon first consideration, but that becomes more mysterious the longer it is pondered.

A paradox emerges, however, as the entirety of the Gospel accounts are considered—one closely associated with the tension between respect for tradition and the necessity for creative transformation. Despite the evidence of His thorough and even precocious understanding and appreciation of the rules, the adult Christ repeatedly and scandalously violates the Sabbath traditions—at least from the standpoint of the traditionalists in His community, and much to His own peril.

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.

Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.

Who are you? And, more importantly, who could you be, if you were everything you could conceivably be?

Those creative people write and act out the dramas and tell us the stories that capture our imagination, and they fill our dreams with visions of what might be. The deepest and most profound of these are remembered, discussed, and otherwise honed collectively, and made the focus of rituals that unite us across the centuries, forming the very basis of our cultures. These are the stories upon which the ritual, religious, and philosophical edifices characterizing sophisticated, populous, successful societies are built.

The stories we can neither ignore nor forget are unforgettable for this reason (among others): They speak to something we know, but do not know that we know.

There is much that we could do—much that our bodies and minds are capable of doing—that remains dormant, right down to the genetic level. Exposure to new experience activates this dormant potential, releasing abilities built into us over the vast span of our evolutionary history.

Even complex and intelligent mammals such as chimpanzees and dolphins tend to repeat their species-typical behaviors generation after generation, with very little change. Humans, by contrast, can and continually do seek out and encounter what is new, investigate and adapt to it, and make it part of themselves.

Stories become unforgettable when they communicate sophisticated modes of being—complex problems and equally complex solutions—that we perceive, consciously, in pieces, but cannot fully articulate. It was for this reason, for example, that the biblical story of Moses and the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt became such a powerful touchstone for black slaves seeking emancipation in the United States:

The biblical story of Exodus is properly regarded as archetypal (or paradigmatic or foundational) by psychoanalytic and religious thinkers alike, because it presents an example of psychological and social transformation that cannot be improved upon.

We can observe ourselves acting, as a scientist might—more accurately, as a storyteller might. Then we can tell the stories to each other. The stories are already distillations of observed behavior (if they are not distillations, they will not be interesting; relating a sequence of everyday actions does not make for a good story).

We all react judgmentally when a child or adult—or, indeed, a society—is acting improperly, unfairly, or badly. The error strikes us emotionally. We intuit that a pattern upon which individual and social adaptation depends has been disrupted and violated.

This does not mean that each of us, reacting emotionally, has been successful at articulating a comprehensive philosophy of good and evil. We may never put our finger on what has gone wrong. However, like children unfamiliar with a new game but still able to play it, we know that the rules are being broken.

Moses, who leads the escaping people, is continually called upon by his followers to draw very fine moral distinctions when they struggle with one another and seek his advice. In consequence, he spends a very long time observing and contemplating their behavior.

Every society is already characterized by patterned behavior; otherwise it would be pure conflict and no “society” at all. But the mere fact that social order reigns to some degree does not mean that a given society has come to explicitly understand its own behavior, its own moral code.

We are dormant adventurers, lovers, leaders, artists, and rebels, but need to discover that we are all those things by seeing the reflection of such patterns in dramatic and literary form.

Question: Who are you—or, at least, who could you be? Answer: Part of the eternal force that constantly confronts the terrible unknown, voluntarily; part of the eternal force that transcends naivete and becomes dangerous enough, in a controlled manner, to understand evil and beard it in its lair; and part of the eternal force that faces chaos and turns it into productive order, or that takes order that has become too restrictive, reduces it to chaos, and renders it productive once again.

The ancient alchemist* who produced the picture was dreaming, in a very real sense, while doing so—dreaming about what a person could be, and how that might come about.

The alchemists regarded the materia prima as the fundamental substance from which everything else—matter and spirit included, equally—emerged, or was derived. You can profitably consider that primal element the potential we face when we confront the future, including our future selves—or the potential we cannot help upbraiding ourselves and others for wasting.

Each interpretation—potential and information—has its advantages.

Consider, as well, what that mail is “made of.” Materially speaking, it is merely paper and ink. But that material substrate is essentially irrelevant. It would not matter if the message was delivered by email or voice—or in Morse code, for that matter. What is relevant is the content. And that means that each piece of mail is a container of content—of potential or information, positive, neutral, or negative.

And now you will have to decide: are you going to open the letter and face what is “inside”? And, having done so, are you going to think your way through the problem, terrible as that might be, and begin to address it? Or are you going to ignore what you now know, pretend that everything is all right (even though you know, emotionally—as a consequence of your anxiety—that it is not), and pay the inevitable psychological and physical price?

A winged sphere, inscribed with a square, a triangle, and the numerals 3 and 4 occupies the bottom third of the image in question.* This singular entity or object was known by the alchemists as the “round chaos.”3 It is a container—the initial container of the primordial element—the container of what the world, and the psyche, consists of before it becomes differentiated. This is the potential, or information.

The Seekers of the Snitch must ignore the details of the game of Quidditch, of which they are still a part, while attempting to find and seize the Snitch, just as the player of a real-world game must ignore the particularities of that game while attending to what constitutes truly ethical play, regardless of what is happening on the playing field.

Imagine that those processes that distinguish value are alive, which is certainly the case, and that they are complex and integrated enough to be conceptualized as a personality. That is Mercury. The draw he exerts on our attention reveals itself in a sense of significance—in the sense that something happening around you is worth attending to, or contains something of value.

There is nothing more important than learning to strive under difficult and frustrating circumstances to play fair.

Each of us, when fortunate, is compelled forward by something that grips our attention—love of a person; a sport; a political, sociological, or economic problem, or a scientific question; a passion for art, literature, or drama—something that calls to us for reasons we can neither control nor understand (try to make yourself interested in something you just do not care about and see how well that works).

Atop the round chaos perches a dragon. This is because what is interesting and meaningful (and novel and unexpected, as those all go together) manifests itself in a form that is both dangerous and promising, particularly when its grip is intense and irresistible. The danger is, of course, signified by the presence of the immortal, predatory reptile; the promise is hinted at, as a dragon archetypally guards a great treasure. Thus, the drawing represents a psychological progression.

There is some numerological indication of this on the spherical body of the round chaos itself: the number 3, accompanied by a triangle, which is traditionally associated with spirit (because of its association with the Holy Trinity), and the number 4, associated with the world of matter (because of its association with the four traditional elements: earth, water, wind, and fire). The dragon, in turn, perched on top of the round chaos, represents the danger and possibility of the information within.

Out of the unknown—the potential that makes up the world—comes the terrible but promising form of the dragon, peril and promise united. It is an eternal dichotomy echoed by the presence of the two remaining symbols to the right and above the dragon’s tail: Jupiter, representing the positive, and Saturn, the negative. Out of the confrontation with peril and promise emerges the masculine and feminine aspects of the psyche, working together in harmony. Guiding the process is the spirit Mercurius, manifesting itself as meaning in the world, working through unconscious means to attract exploration to what will unite the various discordant and warring elements of the personality. This can all be read, appropriately, as a story of the development of the ideal personality—an attempt, in image, to describe what each of us could be.

Now we are going to attempt a description of “who you could be” from another perspective, taken from one of the earliest stories we have been fortunate enough to rediscover. In the ancient Mesopotamian Enuma Elish (translation: When on High) we have the oldest near-complete hero myth known, estimated at four thousand years of age in its written form and, no doubt, far older as an oral tradition. The story begins when the primordial goddess Tiamat, embodiment of salt water (as well as a monstrous aquatic dragon), enters into sexual union with her equally primordial male consort, Apsu, the embodiment of fresh water. This union gives rise to the initial realm of being, inhabited by the elder gods, the first children of Tiamat and Apsu.

That which we experience can be distinguished, conceptually, from reality as objective world—pure physical being—by its more comprehensive contents, which include subjective experiences such as emotions, dreams, visions, and motivational states such as hunger, thirst, and pain.

It is because our own experience is genuinely literary, narrative, embodied, and storylike that we are so attracted to fictional representations.

Engaging with the first part of the Enuma Elish requires us to understand a second fundamental realization of the ancients: the fundamentally social nature of our cognitive categories. That is why everything is personified in children’s books: the Sun, the Moon, toys, animals—even machines. We see nothing strange in this, because it so profoundly mirrors our perceptual tendencies. We expect children to view and understand the world in this manner, and we can easily fall back into doing so ourselves.

It is the case, instead (and this is a genuine reversal of the presumption in question), that we directly and naturally perceive reality as personified, and then must work very diligently to strip that personification away, so that we can detect “objective reality.”*

We understand reality, therefore, as if it is constructed of personalities.

While Tiamat busily arranges her army, the elder gods continue their activity, pairing off, producing children, and then grandchildren, of their own. One of the latter, Marduk, appears particularly talented, powerful, and promising. He is born with eyes encircling his head. He can see everywhere. He can speak magic words. He is something entirely new—and this is noted early by his progenitors.

The Enuma Elish appears to be a dramatized account of the psychological or spiritual processes comprising this transformation. The ancient Mesopotamian civilization faced the necessity of incorporating and unifying many diverse tribes and peoples, each of whom had their own gods. The god who arose out of the conflict between all those gods (“Whose god is supreme?”) was, therefore, a meta-god—a god composed of what was most important about all gods. It was for such a reason, for example, that fifty different names characterized Marduk.

It is the psychological counterpart, in the world of imagination, to the genuine struggle of concepts of divinity and value on earth. Tribes unite. Each has its gods.

If and when the gods come to an agreement about their relative positions—more particularly, if they arrange themselves into a hierarchy—it means that peace has genuinely been established, because peace is the establishment of a shared hierarchy of divinity, of value.

The Mesopotamians brilliantly intuited that the highest god—the highest good—involved careful attention (the multiple, head-circling eyes of Marduk) and effective language (the magic words of Marduk, capable of generating a cosmos), in addition to the courage and strength to voluntarily confront and overcome chaos, the unknown. It could be argued that these are the defining features of the great central spirit of mankind, at least insofar as that spirit is noble and admirable.

Marduk simultaneously defeats his grandmother’s monstrous army, including the leader, Kingu, from whom he takes the Tablet of Destinies, confirming his place as supreme leader of the cosmos.

The basic story is this: when order (Apsu) is carelessly threatened or destroyed, the terrible forces of chaos from which the world was originally derived appear once again in their most destructive, monstrous, predatory guise.

What the hero represents is the most important of the great forces that make up the human psyche. To think of it another way: the hero is the embodied principle of action and perception that must rule over all the primordial psychological elements of lust, rage, hunger, thirst, terror, and joy.

It is in this way that the spirit of Marduk still possesses each individual who engages courageously in the processes of encounter and confrontation that eternally create and renew society.

In slightly altered form, this is the story of St. George: The inhabitants of an ancient city must obtain water from a well beside the nest of a dragon. To do so, however, they have to offer the dragon some sacrifice—a sheep, under most circumstances, but a maiden, if no sheep can be found. The young women of the city draw lots when the supply of sheep is exhausted.