Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

St. George appears, confronts the dragon with the sign of the cross—symbol of the eternal Redeemer, the archetypal hero—and frees the doomed princess. The city’s inhabitants then convert to Christianity.

The cross, for its part, is the burden of life. It is a place of betrayal, torture, and death. It is therefore a fundamental symbol of mortal vulnerability.

By accepting life’s suffering, therefore, evil may be overcome. The alternative is hell, at least in its psychological form: rage, resentment, and the desire for revenge and destruction.

Something similar is portrayed in the first of the recent Avengers movies, in which Iron Man—the man who has transformed himself into a partly golden superhero—defeats the alien dragon worms of the Chitauri (allied with the satanic Loki). He then dies, is reborn, and gets the maiden (in the nonswooning guise of Ms. Pepper Potts). It must be understood: Such stories would not even be comprehensible (not least to children, as well as adults) if our evolutionary history had importantly differed, and if our entire culture had not been shaped, implicitly and explicitly, by these ancient patterns.

All these heroes act out what was perhaps the greatest discovery ever made by man’s primordial ancestors: if you have the vision and the courage (and a good stout stick, when necessary), you can chase away the worst of snakes.

is interesting to note that in The Hobbit, the worst snake is “only” a dragon, but in The Lord of the Rings, the worst snake, so to speak, is the much more abstract evil of the wizard Sauron. As humanity became more sophisticated in its capacity to abstract, we increasingly appreciated the fact that predatory monsters can come in many guises, only some of which are animal in their form.

Now, it is significant that Harry is orphaned: it is an integral part of the heroic pattern. He has his earthly parents, the thick and conventional Dursleys, willfully blind, shortsighted, and terribly overprotective of (and, therefore, tragically dangerous to) Dudley, their unfortunate but predictably self-centered and bullying natural son. But Harry has his heavenly parents, too, his true mother and father—symbolically, Nature and Culture (variants of chaos and order).

Many herbivores, comparatively defenseless, facing imminent and brutal death, freeze in place, paralyzed by fear, depending on camouflage and immobility to render them invisible to the terrible intentions of nearby red-toothed and razor-clawed carnivores. Predatory, reptilian forms still particularly have that effect on human beings (hence our awed fascination, for example, with dinosaurs). But to have no more courage than a rabbit is definitely not to be everything you could be.

After much searching, Harry gains entrance to this underworld labyrinth of pipes and tunnels, and finds the central chamber. He does this, significantly, through the sewer, acting out the ancient alchemical dictum, in sterquilinis invenitur: in filth it will be found.* What does this mean? That which you most need to find will be found where you least wish to look.* There, underground, Ginny (Virgin-ia), his best friend’s sister and Harry’s eventual serious romantic interest, lies unconscious. She is the maiden—or the anima, the soul—forever incarcerated by the dragon, as in the tale of St. George. It is up to Harry, orphaned hero, to wake and rescue her (just as Tolkien’s Bilbo helps take the gold from the terrible Smaug; just as Disney’s Prince Phillip rescues Sleeping Beauty—both rescuing what is most valuable from the clutches of a great dragon).*

And of course, the unknown is a great predator—the basilisk Harry faces—and of course, that predator guards a great treasure, gold beyond measure or the sleeping virgin, because the individual brave enough to voluntarily beard the serpent in his lair is most likely to gain access to the untold riches that exist in potential, awaiting us in the adventure of our life, away from security and what is currently known. Who dares wins*—if he does not perish. And who wins also makes himself irresistibly desirable and attractive, not least because of the development of character that adventure inevitably produces. And this is what makes us forever more than rabbits.

While in the bowels of Hogwarts, Harry comes under attack by the basilisk, which is under the control of Voldemort. Voldemort therefore bears the same relationship to the basilisk in Hogwarts as Satan does, strangely and incomprehensibly, to the vision-granting serpent in the Genesis story of the Garden of Eden.

But another form, more abstract—more psychological, more spiritual—is human evil: the danger we pose to one another. At some point in our evolutionary and cultural history, we began to understand that human evil could rightly be considered the greatest of all snakes.

All such manifestations of serpentine chaos and danger are apparently still first detected, processed, and symbolically interassociated by the ancient brain systems that evolved to protect us from predatory reptiles.

Instead, the danger must be hunted down and destroyed—and even that is too concrete to constitute a permanent solution to the problem of evil itself (rather than a solution to any particular exemplar of evil). Most profoundly and abstractly (paralleling the idea that the greatest predator, the greatest snake, is the evil that lurks within), evil’s destruction manifests as the life of virtue that constrains malevolence in its most abstracted and comprehensive form.

Harry directly confronts the basilisk, down in the Chamber of Secrets, deep below the wizarding castle, but is cornered and in great peril. At that propitious moment, a phoenix kept by the wise headmaster of Hogwarts arrives, provides the young hero with a sword, and then attacks the giant snake, providing Harry with time to regroup. Harry slays the basilisk with the weapon, but is fatally bitten in the process. This is another deep mythological echo: In the story of Genesis, for example, the encounter with the snake proves fatal to man and woman alike, who become aware of their fragility and inevitable death soon after they awaken and gain vision. It is also a harsh truth: predators devour, dragons lay waste, chaos destroys. The threat is real. Even truth, virtue, and courage are not necessarily enough, but they are our best bet. And sometimes a little death is the medication necessary to forestall death itself. Fortunately, the phoenix has magical, revivifying tears, which it cries into Harry’s wounds.

It is with the introduction of the phoenix to the story of St. George that Rowling reveals another element of her intuitive genius. The phoenix is a fowl that can die and be reborn forever. It has, therefore, throughout the ages, been a symbol of Christ, with whom the magical bird shares many features. It is also, equally, that element of the individual human personality that must die and regenerate, as it learns, painfully, through the oft-tragic experience that destroys previous certainty, replacing it first with doubt, and then—when successfully confronted—with new and more complete knowledge.

But this imitation is not mindless, automatized mimicry. It is instead the ability to identify regularities or patterns in the behavior of other people, and then to imitate those patterns.

If you ask the girl what she is doing, she will tell you that she is pretending to be a mother, but if you get her to describe what that means, particularly if she is a young child, her description will be far less complete than her actions would indicate.

This means she can act out more than she can say—just as we all can.

If you were good with words, then perhaps you could describe the essential elements of maternal behavior and transmit them. You might do that best in the form of a story.

It is easier and more direct to represent a behavioral pattern with behavior than with words. Outright mimicry does that directly, action for action. Imitation, which can produce new behaviors akin to those that motivated the mimicry, takes that one step further. Drama—formalized imitation, enacted upon a stage—is precisely behavior portraying behavior, but distilled ever closer to the essence. Literature takes that transmission one more difficult step, portraying action in the imagination of the writer and the reader, in the complete absence of both real actors and a material stage.

If a great and memorable act is one undertaken by a particularly admirable individual, a local hero, then the greatest and most memorable acts possible would be those undertaken by the spirit (embodied in part by particular individuals) who exemplified what all local heroes everywhere have in common. That hero of heroes—that meta-hero—would have to exist, logically, in turn, in a place that was common across all places requiring heroism.

He is both child of and mediator between those twin forces, transforming chaos into habitable order (as well as recasting order into chaos, so that it can be renewed, when it has become anachronistic and corrupt), as well as battling mightily so that good might prevail.

Every story requires a starting place that is not good enough and an ending place that is better. Nothing can be judged in the absence of that end place, that higher value.

Those who break the rules ethically are those who have mastered them first and disciplined themselves to understand the necessity of those rules, and break them in keeping with the spirit rather than the letter of the law.

The second volume of Rowling’s series proposes that predatory evil can be overcome by the soul willing to die and be reborn. The complete series ends with a creatively transformed repetition of the same message. The analogy with Christianity is obvious, and the message, in essence, the same: The soul willing to transform, as deeply as necessary, is the most effective enemy of the demonic serpents of ideology and totalitarianism, in their personal and social forms.

You need to know where you are going, or you will drown in uncertainty, unpredictability, and chaos, and starve for hope and inspiration. For better or worse, you are on a journey. You are having an adventure—and your map better be accurate.

The way—that is the path of life, the meaningful path of life, the straight and narrow path that constitutes the very border between order and chaos, and the traversing of which brings them into balance.

Aim at something profound and noble and lofty. If you can find a better path along the way, once you have started moving forward, then switch course. Be careful, though; it is not easy to discriminate between changing paths and simply giving up. (One hint: if the new path you see forward, after learning what you needed to learn along your current way, appears more challenging, then y...

It is not the most efficient way to travel, but there is no real alternative, given that your goals will inevitably change while you pursue them, as you learn what you nee...

You will pursue a target that is both moving and receding: moving, because you do not have the wisdom to aim in the proper direction when you first take aim; receding, because no matter how close you come to perfecting what you are currently practicing, new vistas of possible perfection will open up in front of you.

Discipline and transformation will nonetheless lead you inexorably forward.

Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that.

Now, it is possible that he was irritated by something else altogether that day and did not really care about the plates. And in one sense, it is a trivial issue. But seen another way, it is not trivial at all, for two reasons. 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.

She was well respected in her profession, and was a competent, kind, and careful person. But she was also very unhappy. I presumed initially that her unhappiness stemmed from anxiety about her career transition. But she managed that move without a hitch during the time we continued our sessions, while other issues rose to the forefront.

Her problem was not her career change. It was her marriage. She described her husband as extraordinarily self-centered and simultaneously overly concerned with how he appeared in the eyes of others.

My client was not comfortable in her own home. She did not feel there was anything truly of her within the apartment she shared with her husband (the couple had no children).

She told me that she did not care about the furnishings and the excess of decorative objects, but that was not really true. What was true was that she did not care for them—not a bit. Neither the showiness nor the furnishings nor the plethora of art works that made up her husband’s collection appealed to her taste.

It is difficult to win an argument, or even begin one, if you have not carefully articulated what you want (or do not) and need (or do not).

Instead, she let him have his way, repeatedly, increment by increment, because she claimed that such trivialities were not worth fighting for. And with each defeat, the next disagreement became more necessary—although less likely, because she understood that a serious discussion, once initiated, risked expanding to include all the things that were troublesome about her marriage, and that a real, no-holds-barred battle would therefore likely ensue.

So, she kept silent. But she was chronically repressed and constantly resentful, and felt that she had wasted much of the opportunity of her life.

Every single object of art was the concrete realization of a victory (Pyrrhic though it may have been) and a defeat (or, at least, a negotiation that did not occur and, therefore, a fight that was over before it started). And there were dozens or perhaps hundreds of these: each a weapon in an unspoken, destructive, and decades-long war.

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.

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. Things fall apart of their own accord, but the sins of men speed their deterioration: that is wisdom from the ages.

Only careful aim and wakeful striving and commitment can eliminate the oft-incremental calamity of willful blindness, stem the entropic tide, and keep catastrophe—familial and social alike—at bay.

Corruption of the form we are discussing is, in my opinion, integrally linked to deception—to lying, more bluntly—and more important, to self-deception.

I can believe one thing today and another tomorrow and very often get away with it, at least in the short term. And on many occasions I have experienced what was very nearly simultaneous belief in one thing and its opposite while reading undergraduate university papers, in which the writer made a claim in one paragraph and a completely contradictory claim in the next. (Sometimes that happened within the span of a single sentence.)

There are many conditions or circumstances under which self-deception can theoretically occur. Psychoanalysts have explored many of these, with Freud leading the way. Freud believed that much of mental illness was due to repression, which is arguably and reasonably considered a form of self-deception.

Freud understood that the human personality was not unitary. Instead, it consists of a loose, fragmented cacophony of spirits, who do not always agree or even communicate.