Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

Dissociation of thought and action is necessary for abstract thought even to exist.

It has even been named: to claim one belief and then to act (or speak) in a different or even opposite manner constitutes a performative contradiction, according to certain modern philosophers:1 an implicit lie, in my opinion. The holding of contradictory beliefs also becomes a problem when the holder attempts to act out both simultaneously and discovers, often to his or her great chagrin, the paradox that makes such an attempt impossible.

Freud catalogued an extensive list of phenomena akin to repression—the active rejection of potentially conscious psychological material from awareness—which he termed “defense mechanisms.” These include denial (“the truth is not so bad”), reaction formation (“I really, really, really love my mother”), displacement (“the boss yells at me, I yell at my wife, my wife yells at the baby, the baby bites the cat”), identification (“I am bullied, so I am motivated to be a bully”), rationalization (a self-serving explanation for a low-quality action), intellectualization (a favorite of the early, funny, neurotic Woody Allen), sublimation (“I can always paint nude women”), and projection (“I am not touchy; you are just annoying”).

Nonetheless, his ideas of self-deception suffer, in my opinion, from two major errors.

First error: Freud failed to notice that sins of omission contributed to mental illness as much as, or more than, the sins of commission, listed above, that constitute repression.

Spin doctors call this self-imposed ignorance “plausible deniability,” which is a phrase that indicates intellectualized rationalization of the most pathological order.

Failing to look under the bed when you strongly suspect a monster is lurking there is not an advisable strategy.

Second error: Freud assumed that things experienced are things understood. In accordance with that assumption, he believed that a memory trace existed, somewhere in the mind, that accurately represented the past, like an objective video recording.

is very rarely a matter of perception, followed by conscious understanding and thought, then emotion or motivation derived from that thought, then action. What happens instead is akin to what we discussed at length in Rule I and Rule II: We process the unknown world from the bottom up. We encounter containers of information, so to speak, whose full import is by no means self-evident.

That sudden appearance of negative emotion does not necessarily mean that you are even now fully conscious of its accumulation. You may well (as in the case of my father-in-law, or my client) have experienced the frustration build up gradually enough so that you found yourself more irritable and unhappy, but that does not necessarily mean that you noticed the cause.

Perhaps you are not being ignored at all. Instead, you have been having trouble at work, and that has produced a decrease in your overall confidence. In consequence, you have become sensitized to any signs of rejection, even imaginary, within your marriage. So, what you must determine is not so much why your wife or husband is no longer attentive to you, but what it is about your boss, colleagues, or career that is destabilizing you.

Perhaps you really are being ignored, just as you suspect. Perhaps it is a sign of an impending affair and a manifestation of the trajectory that leads to divorce. Both of those, if true, are serious problems. It is no wonder you are upset. But you may remain stubbornly unwilling to consider that your career or marriage is in trouble. And that is no surprise. But it is not helpful.

Consider the question “What really happened?” say, in a failed marriage, divorce, and child-custody battle. The answer to that query is so complex that settling the disagreements frequently requires court evaluation and multi-party assessment.

Even then, one or even both of the protagonists is unlikely to believe that the truth has been served.

The meaning of what someone’s wife says to him today is dependent on everything both have ever said to each other, everything they have ever done together, and the contents of their mutual imaginations—and that does not exhaust the complexity.

One thing leads to a deeper thing, and that leads deeper yet, until an argument that started over what size plates are best used at lunchtime turns into a no-holds-barred war about whether the marriage in question would be better dissolved. And there is certainly fear of falling down a hole of that size (again, particularly when much has remained unspoken) that motivates the proclivity to keep things to yourself when they would be better, but dangerously, said.

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 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.

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 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...

You are happy, satisfied, and engaged sometimes and unhappy, frustrated, and nihilistic other times, but you will not enquire deeply into why, because then you would know, and then you would encounter yet-again shattered hope and confirmed disappointment.

The fog that hides is the refusal to notice—to attend to—emotions and motivational states as they arise, and the refusal to communicate them both to yourself and to the people who are close to you.

This is partly a test: does the person being insulted care enough about you and your suffering to dig past a few obstacles and unearth the bitter truth? It is also partly, and more obviously, defensive: if you can chase someone away from something you yourself do not want to discover, that makes your life easier in the present.

You must nonetheless still live among other people, and they with you. And you have desires, wants, and needs, however unstated and unclear. And you are still motivated to pursue them, not least because it is impossible to live without desire, want, and need. Your

Show your disappointment whenever someone close to you makes you unhappy; allow yourself the luxury and pleasure of resentment when something does not go your way; ensure that the person who has transgressed against you is frozen out by your disapproval; force them to discover with as much difficulty as possible exactly what they have done to disappoint you; and, finally, let them grope around blindly in the fog that you have generated around yourself until they stumble into and injure themselves on the sharp hidden edges of your unrevealed preferences and dreams.

Everything does not have to be given away for free. But even a little unnecessary mystery goes a long way.

Every ideal is a judge, after all: the judge who says, “You are not manifesting your true potential.” No ideals? No judge. But the price paid for that is purposelessness.

You cannot hit a target that you refuse to see. You cannot hit a target if you do not take aim. And, equally dangerously, in both cases: you will not accrue the advantage of aiming, but missing.

First, noting, much less communicating, feelings of (petty) anger or pain due to lonesomeness, or anxiety about something that might be trivial, or jealousy that is likely unwarranted is embarrassing.

Second, it is unsettling to allow for the possibility that your feelings, however overwhelming and convincing, might be misplaced and, in your ignorance, pointing you in the wrong direction.

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.

I should not say—at least not ideally—“You have been ignoring me lately.” I should say, instead, “I feel isolated and lonely and hurt, and cannot help but feel that you have not been as attentive to me over the last few months as I would have liked or that might have been best for us as a couple. But I am unsure if I am just imagining all this because I am upset or if I am genuinely seeing what is going on.”

And there is always the danger that some of them are real. But it is better to see them than to keep them occluded by the fog, because you can at least sometimes avoid the danger that you are willing to see.

Events, as they lay themselves out in front of us, do not simply inform us of why they occur, and we do not remember the past in order to objectively record bounded, well-defined events and situations.

Extracting useful information from experience is difficult. It requires the purest of motivations (“things should be made better, not worse”) to perform it properly. It requires the willingness to confront error, forthrightly, and to determine at what point and why departure from the proper path occurred. It requires the willingness to change, which is almost always indistinguishable from the decision to leave something (or someone, or some idea) behind. Therefore, the simplest response imaginable is to look away and refuse to think, while simultaneously erecting unsurmountable impediments to genuine communication.

something frightening, or am I afraid? Is something beautiful, or am I imposing the idea of beauty upon it? When I become angry with someone, is it because of something they have done, or my lack of control?

Our own personal motivations begin in hidden form, and remain that way, because we do not want to know what we are up to.

Such omission is the voluntary refusal of expanded consciousness. After all, the pathway to the Holy Grail has its beginnings in the darkest part of the forest, and what you need remains hidden where you least want to look.

If you pile up enough junk in your closet, one day, when you are least prepared, the door will spring open, and all of what has been packed inside, growing inexorably in the darkness, will bury you, and you may not have enough time or energy left in your life to confront it, sort through it, keep what you need, and discard the rest.

Impaling yourself on sharp branches, stumbling over boulders, and rushing by places of sanctuary, you will finally refuse to admit you could have burned away the haze with the bright light of your consciousness, had you not hidden it under a bushel.

With careful searching, with careful attention, you might tip the balance toward opportunity and against obstacle sufficiently so that life is clearly worth living, despite its fragility and suffering.

instead of hiding away from a truth so terrible that the only thing worse is the falsehood you long to replace it with.

Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.

NOTICE THAT OPPORTUNITY LURKS WHERE RESPONSIBILITY HAS BEEN ABDICATED

In my dual role as clinical psychologist and professor, I have coached many people in the development of their careers. Sometimes those I am coaching consult me because their coworkers, subordinates, or bosses will not do their jobs properly.

If you want to become invaluable in a workplace—in any community—just do the useful things no one else is doing. Arrive earlier and leave later than your compatriots (but do not deny yourself your life).

You might object, “Well, I just could not manage to take on something that important.” What if you began to build yourself into a person who could? You could start by trying to solve a small problem—something that is bothering you, that you think you could fix.

A tiny serpent might not have had the time to hoard a lot of gold, but there might still be some treasure to be won, along with a reasonable probability of succeeding in such a quest (and not too much chance of a fiery or toothsome death).

When people look back on what they have accomplished, they think, if they are fortunate: “Well, I did that, and it was valuable. It was not easy. But it was worth it.” It is a strange and paradoxical fact that there is a reciprocal relationship between the worth of something and the difficulty of accomplishing it.

It is for this reason that we voluntarily and happily place limitations on ourselves. Every time we play a game, for example, we accept a set of arbitrary restrictions. We narrow and limit ourselves, and explore the possibilities thereby revealed. That is what makes the game. But it does not work without the arbitrary rules. You take them on voluntarily, absurdly, as in chess: “I can only move this knight in an L. How ridiculous. But how fun!”