Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

Accept some limitations, however, and the game begins. Accept them, more broadly speaking, as a necessary part of Being and a desirable part of life. Assume you can transcend them by accepting them. And then you can play the limited game properly.

But the suffering and malevolence that characterize life are real, with the terrible consequences of the real—and our ability to solve problems, by confronting them and taking them on, is also real.

The idea that life is suffering is a relatively universal truism of religious thinking.

The ride is likely to be very bumpy, otherwise—with the bumps directly proportional in magnitude to the degree of offset. This is quite reminiscent, to me, of the Greek term hamartia, which is frequently translated as “sin,” in the context of Christian thought.

There are many ways that a target can be missed. Frequently, in my clinical practice—and in my personal life—I observed that people did not get what they needed (or, equally importantly perhaps, what they wanted) because they never made it clear to themselves or others what that was. It is impossible to hit a target, after all, unless you aim at it. In keeping with this: People are more commonly upset by what they did not even try to do than by the errors they actively committed while engaging with the world.

Better to remain king of the Lost Boys. Better to remain lost in fantasy with Tinkerbell, who provides everything a female partner can provide—except that she does not exist.

But the psychologically insightful unseen narrator objects: “To live would be an awfully big adventure” (truly, a statement about what might have happened had the Boy King chosen Wendy), noting, immediately afterward, “but he can never quite get the hang of it.”*

It is by no means a good thing to be the oldest person at the frat party. It is desperation, masquerading as cool rebelliousness—and there is a touchy despondence and arrogance that goes along with it.

The biblical account insists that Abraham stayed safely ensconced within his father’s tent until he was seventy-five years old (a late start, even by today’s standards). Then, called by God—inspired by the voice within, let us say, to leave family and country—he journeys forward into life. And what does he encounter, after heeding the divine call to adventure? First, famine. Then tyranny in Egypt; the potential loss of his beautiful wife to more powerful men; exile from his adopted country; conflicts over territory with his kinsmen; war, and the kidnapping of his nephew; extended childlessness (despite God’s promise to make him the progenitor of a great nation); and finally, terrible conflict between his spouses.

The pessimism? Even if you are called by God Himself to venture out into the world, as Abraham was, life is going to be exceptionally difficult.

He who speaks magic words, sees what others cannot (or refuse to see), overcomes the giant, leads his people, slays the dragon, finds the treasure hard to attain, and rescues the virgin. These are all variants of the same perceptual and behavioral pattern, which is an outline of the universally adaptive pattern of being.

Osiris stopped paying attention to how his kingdom was being run. That was willful blindness, and there is no blaming that on mere age. It is a terrible temptation, as it allows for the sequestration into the future the trouble we could face today. That would be fine if trouble did not compound, like interest—but we all know that it does.

By turning a blind eye to his evil brother’s machinations—by refusing to see—Osiris allowed Set to gain strength. This proved fatal (or as fatal as an error can be to an immortal). Set bided his time, until he caught Osiris in a moment of weakness. Then he dismembered him and scattered the pieces over the Egyptian countryside.

Osiris, god of order, falls apart. This happens all the time, in people’s individual lives, and equally in the history of families, cities, and states. Things fall apart when love affairs collapse, careers deteriorate, or cherished dreams die; when despair, anxiety, uncertainty, and hopelessness manifest themselves in the place of habitable order; and when nihilism and the abyss make their dread appearance, destroying the desirable and stable values of current life.

Thus, when the center will no longer hold—even at the darkest hour—new possibility makes itself manifest. It is for this reason that the archetypal Hero is born when things are at their worst.

His primary attribute is the eye—the famous Egyptian single eye—while his avatar is the falcon, a bird that takes precise aim at its prey, strikes the target with deadly accuracy, and possesses an acuity of vision unparalleled in the kingdom of living things.

This is represented by Horus’s initial partial defeat: During their confrontation, Set tears out one of his courageous nephew’s eyes.

This does not mean “bite off more than you can chew” (any more than “voluntarily enter battle” means “seek conflict carelessly”).

Does what you are attempting compel you forward, without being too frightening? Does it grip your interest, without crushing you? Does it eliminate the burden of time passing? Does it serve those you love and, perhaps, even bring some good to your enemies? That is responsibility.

Horus takes his eye back from the defeated Set and banishes him beyond the borders of the kingdom. There is no killing Set. He is eternal as Osiris, eternal as Isis and Horus. The evil that threatens at all levels of experience is something—or someone—that everyone has to contend with always, psychologically and socially.

The Egyptians insisted that it was this combination of vision, courage, and regenerated tradition that constituted the proper sovereign of the kingdom. It was this juxtaposition of wisdom and youth that comprised the essence of the power of the Pharaoh, his immortal soul, the source of his authority.

When you face a challenge, you grapple with the world and inform yourself.

That is certainly a dragon—perhaps even the dragon of evil itself. The conceptualization of the monster in the abyss is the eternal predator lurking in the night, ready and able to devour its unsuspecting prey.

Let us agree, to begin with, that you have a minimum moral obligation to take care of yourself. Maybe you are just selfishly interested in taking care of yourself. But then the questions arise: What do you mean by “care”? Which “yourself” are you talking about?

The mere fact that something makes you happy in the moment does not mean that it is in your best interest, everything considered.

Now, there is some utility in discounting the importance of the “yous” who exist far enough into the future, because the future is uncertain.

If you visit the African veldt, and you observe a herd of zebras, you will often see lions lazing about around them. And as long as the lions are lying around relaxing, the zebras really do not mind. This attitude seems a little thoughtless, from the human perspective. The zebras should instead be biding their time until the lions go to sleep. Then they should run off to a corner of the field in a herd and conspire a bit. And then several dozen of them should rush the sleeping lions and stomp them to death. That would be the end of the lion problem. But that is not what zebras do. They think, “Ah, look at those relaxed lions! Relaxed lions are never a problem!”

You are destined to play a game with yourself today that must not interfere with the game you play tomorrow, next month, next year, and so on.

You can treat your husband or wife any old way right now, this moment, no matter how horrid and thoughtless that way might be, but you are going to wake up with him or her tomorrow, and next month, and a decade from now (and, if not that person, then someone else equally unfortunate).

If you place people in situations where they are feeling a lot of positive emotion, they get present-focused and impulsive.

What might serve as a more sophisticated alternative to happiness? Imagine it is living in accordance with the sense of responsibility, because that sets things right in the future. Imagine, as well, that you must act reliably, honestly, nobly, and in relationship to a higher good, in order to manifest the sense of responsibility properly.

Imagine, for example, that you graduate from grade 12. Graduation Day marks the event. It is a celebration. But the next day that is over, and you immediately face a new set of problems (just as you are hungry again only a few hours after a satisfying meal). You are no longer king of the high school: you are bottom dog in the work force, or a freshman at a postsecondary institution.

There is a near-instantaneous transformation that comes as a consequence of attainment. Like impulsive pleasure, attainment will produce positive emotion. But, also like pleasure, attainment is unreliable.

Imagine you have a goal. You aim at something. You develop a strategy in relationship to that aim, and then you implement it. And then, as you implement the strategy, you observe that it is working. That is what produces the most reliable positive emotion.

This implies something crucial: no happiness in the absence of responsibility.

You are fooling yourself, however, especially at the deeper levels of your being, if you believe such avoidance will prove successful.

We know that we are continually and inescapably playing an iterated game from which we cannot easily hide. No matter how much we wish to discount the future completely, it is part of the price we paid for being acutely self-conscious and able to conceptualize ourselves across the entire span of our lives.

There is a proper way to behave—an ethic—and you are destined to contend with it. You cannot help but calculate yourself across time, and everyone else across time, and you are reporting back to yourself, inevitably, on your own behavior and misbehavior.

The playing field selects the players on the basis of their ethical behavior. And we are therefore biologically prepared to respond positively to and to imitate the Great Player—and to disapprove, even violently, of the deceiver, the cheat, and the fraud.

If you do not follow the right path, you will wander off a cliff and suffer miserably—and there is simply no way that the most profound parts of yourself are going to allow that without protest.

If the cost of betraying yourself, in the deepest sense, is guilt, shame, and anxiety, the benefit of not betraying yourself is meaning—the meaning that sustains.

A sense of right can therefore be developed and honed through careful attention to what is wrong. You act and betray yourself, and you feel bad about that. You do not know exactly why.

So, you reconsider, perhaps, and you confront your discomfort. You note your disunity and the chaos that comes with it. You ask yourself—you pray to discover—what you did wrong. And the answer arrives. And it is not what you want. And part of you must therefore die, so that you can change.

“I am going to live my life properly. I am going to aim at the good. I am going to aim at the highest good I can possible manage.”

It is necessary to lift your eyes above the horizon, to establish a transcendent goal, if you wish to cease being a puppet, under the control of things you do not understand and perhaps do not want to understand.

You might object: “Why should I shoulder all that burden? It is nothing but sacrifice, hardship, and trouble.” But what makes you so sure you do not want something heavy to carry? You positively need to be occupied with something weighty, deep, profound, and difficult. Then, when you wake up in the middle of the night and the doubts crowd in, you have some defense: “For all my flaws, which are manifold, at least I am doing this. At least I am taking care of myself. At least I am of use to my family, and to the other people around me. At least I am moving, stumbling upward, under the load I have determined to carry.”

Your life becomes meaningful in precise proportion to the depths of the responsibility you are willing to shoulder.

The sense of meaning is an indicator that you are on that path. It is an indication that all the complexity that composes you is lined up within you, and aimed at something worth pursuing—something that balances the world, something that produces harmony.

And the lyrics are destructive and nihilistic and cynical and bitter and hopeless but it does not matter, because the music beckons and calls to your spirit, and fills it with the intimation of meaning, and moves you, so that you align yourself with the patterns, and you nod your head and tap your feet to the beat, participating despite yourself.

That very disenchantment, however, can serve as the indicator of destiny. It speaks of abdicated responsibility—of things left undone, of things that still need to be done.