Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

On the fifth of February 2020, I awoke in an intensive care ward in, of all places, Moscow. I had six-inch tethers attaching me to the sides of the bed because, in my unconscious state, I had been agitated enough to try to remove the catheters from my arm and leave the ICU.

company helped me stay motivated to

the order we strive to impose on the world can rigidify as a consequence of ill-advised attempts to eradicate from consideration all that is unknown. When such attempts go too far, totalitarianism threatens, driven by the desire to exercise full control where such control is not possible, even in principle. This means risking a dangerous restriction of all the psychological and social changes necessary to maintain adaptation to the ever-changing world. And so we find ourselves inescapably faced with the need to move beyond order, into its opposite: chaos. If order is where what we want makes itself known—when we act in accordance with our hard-won wisdom—chaos

DO NOT CARELESSLY DENIGRATE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS OR CREATIVE ACHIEVEMENT

He was, in consequence, abrupt, irritable, and somewhat volatile if he felt misunderstood or was unexpectedly interrupted during a conversation. Such reactions helped ensure that his targeting by bullies continued into his adult life, particularly in his place of work.

It is for this reason, which you may not understand explicitly at the time, that you tell your children: “It’s not whether you win or lose. It’s how you play the game!”* How should you play, to be that most desirable of players? What structure must take form within you so that such play is possible?

It is useful to take your place at the bottom of a hierarchy. It can aid in the development of gratitude and humility. Gratitude: There are people whose expertise exceeds your own, and you should be wisely pleased about that. There are many valuable niches to fill, given the many complex and serious problems we must solve. The fact that there are people who fill those niches with trustworthy skill and experience is something for which to be truly thankful. Humility: It is better to presume ignorance and invite learning than to assume sufficient knowledge and risk the consequent blindness. It is much better to make friends with what you do not know than with what you do know, as there is an infinite supply of the former but a finite stock of the latter. When you are tightly boxed in or cornered—all too often by your own stubborn and fixed adherence to some unconsciously worshipped assumptions—all there is to help you is what you have not yet learned.

The Fool is a young, handsome man, eyes lifted upward, journeying in the mountains, sun shining brightly upon him—about to carelessly step over a cliff (or is he?). His strength, however, is precisely his willingness to risk such a drop; to risk being once again at the bottom. No one unwilling to be a foolish beginner can learn. It was for this reason, among others, that Carl Jung regarded the Fool as the archetypal precursor to the figure of the equally archetypal Redeemer, the perfected individual. The beginner, the fool, is continually required to be patient and tolerant—with himself and, equally, with others. His displays

Under normal conditions, it may be nonetheless said that the ability to conform unquestioningly trumps the inability to conform. However, the refusal to conform when the social surround has become pathological—incomplete, archaic, willfully blind, or corrupt—is something of even higher value, as is the capacity to offer creative, valid alternatives.

community, and much to His own peril. He leads His disciples through a cornfield, for example, plucking and eating the grains (Luke 6:1).

A certain amount of arbitrary rule-ness must be tolerated—or welcomed, depending on your point of view—to keep the world and its inhabitants together. A certain amount of creativity and rebellion must be tolerated—or welcomed, depending on your point of view—to maintain the process of regeneration. Every rule was once a creative act, breaking other rules. 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. This is a terrible conundrum, a true existential burden. We must support and value the past, and we need to do that with an attitude of gratitude and respect. At the same time, however, we must keep our eyes open—we, the visionary living—and repair the ancient mechanisms that stabilize and support us when they falter.

Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.

IMAGINE WHO YOU COULD BE, AND THEN AIM SINGLE-MINDEDLY AT THAT

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates believed that all learning was a form of remembering. Socrates posited that the soul, immortal in its essence, knew everything before it was born anew as an infant. However, at the point of birth all previous knowledge was forgotten and had to be recalled through the experiences of life. There is much to be said for this hypothesis, strange as it might now appear. 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.1 This is perhaps the most basic manner in which our bodies retain past wisdom and draw upon it when necessary. It is in this way, although not only in this way, that human possibility exists. Thus, there is something profound to be said for the concept of learning as remembering.

Aim at something. Pick the best target you can currently conceptualize. Stumble toward it. Notice your errors and misconceptions along the way, face them, and correct them. Get your story straight. Past, present, future—they all matter. You need to map your path. You need to know where you were, so that you do not repeat the mistakes of the past. You need to know where you are, or you will not be able to draw a line from your starting point to your destination. 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.

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 you can be reasonably sure that you are not deluding or betraying yourself when you change your mind.)

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. For him, memories of traumatically troubling events were unconsciously banished to perdition in the unconscious, where they rattled around and caused trouble, like poltergeists in a dungeon. 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. The truth of this claim is self-evident, at least in one simple manner: we can think about things—we can simulate potential or alternative actions or events—without immediately having to act them out. Dissociation of thought and action is necessary for abstract thought even to exist. Thus, we can clearly think or say one thing and do another. This is fine when merely thinking, prior to acting, but perhaps not so good when we promise or claim to believe something and then act in a manner indicating that we truly have faith in something else. This is a form of deception, a disjunction in character, a contradiction between modes of being. 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 philoso...

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. In doing so, he merely thought in the typical manner. People generally believe that actively doing something bad (that is the sin of commission) is, on average, worse than passively not doing something good (that is the sin of omission). Perhaps this is because there are always good things we are not doing; some sins of omission are therefore inevitable. In any case, there are still times when willful blindness nonetheless produces more serious catastrophes, more easily rationalized away, than the active or the unconscious repression of something terrible but understood (the latter being a sin of commission, because it is known). The former problem—willful blindness—occurs when you could come to know something but cease exploring so that you fail to discover something that might cause you substantial discomfort.

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 knowledge you have gained of yourself, other people, and the world has embittered more than enlightened. You have been betrayed, hurt, and disappointed. You have become distrustful even of hope itself, as your hope has been repeatedly shattered (and that is the very definition of hopelessness). 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. When ignorance is bliss, after all, ’tis folly to be wise.

The most probable outcome of successfully articulating an emotion that has accrued without expression over time is tears—an admission of vulnerability and pain (which are also feelings that people do not like to allow, particularly when they are feeling distrustful and angry). Who wants to dig down into the depths of pain and grief and guilt until the tears emerge? And voluntary refusal to take notice of our emotional states is not the only impediment to dealing with them. If your wife or husband (or whomever else you are tangled up with, unhappily, at the moment) says something that comes too close to the painful truth, for example, then a sharp and insulting remark will often shut them up—and is therefore very likely to be offered.

I do not encourage people to martyr themselves. It is a bad idea to sacrifice yourself uncomplainingly so that someone else can take the credit. Nonetheless, under such circumstances—if you are a wise and attentive person—you might still notice that your unproductive coworkers are leaving a plethora of valuable tasks undone. You might then ask yourself, “What would happen if I took responsibility for doing them?”

Greek term hamartia, which is frequently translated as “sin,” in the context of Christian thought. Hamartia was originally an archery term, and it meant to miss the mark or target. 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.

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. It smacks of Neverland. In the same manner, the attractive potential of a directionless but talented twenty-five-year-old starts to look hopeless and pathetic at thirty, and downright past its expiration date at forty. You must sacrifice something of your manifold potential in exchange for something real in life. Aim at something. Discipline yourself. Or suffer the consequence. And what is that consequence? All the suffering of life, with none of the meaning. Is there a better description of hell?

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.

Even if you are called by God Himself to venture out into the world, as Abraham was, life is going to be exceptionally difficult. Even under the best of all conceivable circumstances, almost insuperable obstacles will emerge and obstruct your path. The encouragement? You will have the opportunity to reveal yourself as much stronger and more competent than you might imagine.

Isis scours the countryside, searching for the vital essence of Osiris. She finds it in the form of his dismembered phallus—vessel of the seminal idea, the spermatic word, the fructifying principle—and makes herself pregnant.

What is the upper limit to that? We do not know. Our religious structures hint at it. What would a human being who was completely turned on, so to speak, be like? How would someone who determined to take full responsibility for the tragedy and malevolence of the world manifest himself? The ultimate question of Man is not who we are, but who we could be.

I do not believe you should pursue happiness. If you do so, you will run right into the iteration problem, because “happy” is a right-now thing. If you place people in situations where they are feeling a lot of positive emotion, they get present-focused and impulsive.4 This means “make hay while the sun shines”—take your opportunities while things are good and act now. But now is by no means everything, and unfortunately, everything must be considered, at least insofar as you are able. In consequence, it is unlikely that whatever optimizes your life across time is happiness. I am not denying its desirability, by the way. If happiness comes to you, welcome it with gratitude and open arms (but be careful, because it does make you impetuous).

There are many reasons, for example, why people are poor. Lack of money is the obvious cause—but that hypothetical obviousness is part of the problem with ideology. Lack of education, broken families, crime-ridden neighborhoods, alcoholism, drug abuse, criminality and corruption (and the political and economic exploitation that accompanies it), mental illness, lack of a life plan (or even failure to realize that formulating such a plan is possible or necessary), low conscientiousness, unfortunate geographical locale, shift in the economic landscape and the consequent disappearance of entire fields of endeavor, the marked proclivity for those who are rich to get richer still and the poor to get poorer, low creativity/entrepreneurial interest, lack of encouragement—these are but a few of the manifold problems that generate poverty, and the solution to each (assuming that a solution exists) is by no means obviously the same. Nor are the villains hiding behind each putative and differentiable cause the same villains (assuming that there are even villains to be found).

An ideological theory explains everything: all the past, all the present, and all the future. This means that an ideologue can consider him or herself in possession of the complete truth (something forbidden to the self-consistent fundamentalist). There is no claim more totalitarian and no situation in which the worst excesses of pride are more likely to manifest themselves (and not only pride, but then deceit, once the ideology has failed to explain the world or predict its future).

Have some humility. Clean up your bedroom. Take care of your family. Follow your conscience. Straighten up your life. Find something productive and interesting to do and commit to it. When you can do all that, find a bigger problem and try to solve that if you dare. If that works, too, move on to even more ambitious projects. And, as the necessary beginning to that process . . . abandon ideology.

Everywhere, the cynic despairs, are bad decisions. But someone who has transcended that cynicism (or more accurately, replaced it with an even more profound doubt—that is, the doubt that doubt itself is an ultimately reliable guide) objects: the worst decision of all is none.

so many parents afraid of damaging their children by disciplining them. But proper discipline organizes rather than destroys. A child terrified into obedience or shielded from every possible chance of misbehavior is not disciplined, but abused. A child who has been disciplined properly, by contrast—by parents, other adults, and most significantly, by other children—does not battle with, defeat, and then permanently inhibit her aggression. Such a child does not even sublimate that aggression, or transform it into something different. Instead, she integrates it into her increasingly sophisticated game-playing ability, allowing it to feed her competitiveness and heighten her attention, and making it serve the higher purposes of her developing psyche.

the claim that morality is both necessary and inevitable is not totalitarian. It is merely the observation that basic, primitive unidimensional values must be subsumed under socially organized structures for peace and harmony to exist and be maintained.

The commandments follow: Though shalt have no other gods before me. Though shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Honor thy father and thy mother. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Thou shalt not covet.

I have seen people who were in custody battles who would seriously have preferred cancer. It is no joke to have your arm caught in the dangerous machinery of the courts. You spend much of the time truly wishing you were dead. So that is your “affair,” for God’s sake. It is even more delusional than that, because, of course, if you are married to someone, you often see them at their worst, because you have to share the genuine difficulties of life with them. You save the easy parts for your adulterous partner: no responsibility, just expensive restaurants, exciting nights of rule breaking, careful preparation for romance, and the general absence of reality that accompanies the privilege of making one person pay for the real troubles of existence while the other benefits unrealistically from their absence. You do not have a life with someone when you have an affair with them. You have an endless array of desserts (at least in the beginning), and all you have to do is scoop the whipped cream off the top of each of them and devour it.

But what exactly does it mean, when you invite someone to live with you, instead of committing yourself to each other? And let us be appropriately harsh and realistic about our appraisal, instead of pretending we are taking a used car for a test jaunt. Here is what it means: “You will do, for now, and I presume you feel the same way about me. Otherwise we would just get married. But in the name of a common sense that neither of us possesses we are going to reserve the right to swap each other out for a better option at any point.” And if you do not think that is what living together means—as a fully articulated ethical statement—see if you can formulate something more plausible.

I have camped where the grizzly bears were plentiful. It is nice that they are on the planet and all that, but I prefer my grizzlies shy, not too hungry, and far enough away to be picturesque.)

concerned, dreams are statements from nature. It is not so much that we create them. They manifest themselves to us. I have never seen a dream present something I believed to be untrue. I also do not believe—contra Freud—that dreams attempt to disguise what they mean. They are, instead, an earlier part of the process by which fully developed thoughts come to be born, as they certainly do not just appear magically out of nowhere. We must confront the unknown, as such—the great Dragon of Chaos or the Terrible Queen—and we do not know how to do it, to begin with. The dream serves as the first cognitive step—in the wake of basic emotional, motivational, and bodily reactions such as fear or curiosity or freezing—in transforming that unknown into actionable and even articulable knowledge. The dream is the birthplace of the thought, and often of the thought that does not come easily to the conscious mind. It is not hiding anything; it is just not very good at being clear (although that certainly does not mean that it cannot be profound).

Conservatives are necessary for maintaining things the way they are when everything is working and change might be dangerous. Liberals, by contrast, are necessary for changing things when they are no longer working. It is no easy task, however, to determine when something needs to be preserved or when it needs to be transformed. That is why we have politics, if we are fortunate, and the dialogue that accompanies it, instead of war, tyranny, or submission. It is necessary for us to argue vociferously and passionately about the relative value of stability versus change, so that we can determine when each is appropriate and in what doses.

Those with a conservative bent, drawn temperamentally to regard the status quo as protective, must to come to understand that mere order is insufficient. Because the future and the present differ from the past, what worked before will not necessarily work now, and it is necessary to understand that the line between the stability bequeathed to us by our ancestors and the tyranny that can so easily become shifts and moves with the transformations of existence. Equally, however, the more liberal types, prone to see the Authoritarian Tyrant everywhere, must work to develop gratitude for the social and psychological structures of interpretation that continually shield us from the terrors of nature and the absolute unknown. It is difficult for any of us to see what we are blinded to by the nature of our personalities. It is for this reason that we must continually listen to people who differ from us, and who, because of that difference, have the ability to see and to react appropriately to what we cannot detect.

The fourth form of arrogance that justifies deceit has to do with a warped sense of justice, often brought about by resentment. People employ deception in this fourth set of circumstances because they are resentful and angry about their victimized positions in the hell and tragedy of the world. This response is entirely understandable, although no less dangerous because of that. The logic is simple and even compelling, particularly in the case of people who have been truly hurt: “I can do what I want because I have been unfairly treated.” This reasoning can be seen as simple justice, although it is seldom the case that the people who are now being lied to or deceived are the same individuals who produced the unfair treatment used to justify the falsehood. The arrogance is in believing that the unfair treatment was specifically personal, existentially speaking, rather than being an expected part of existence itself, given its unknown natural, social, and individual dangers. If you have been the victim of what appears to be some malevolent cosmic joke, then why should not you do whatever is in your power to set things a little bit right for yourself? All that line of reasoning does, however, is make life worse. If your justification for misbehaving was that life was bad, then the rationale for continuing to misbehave cannot reasonably be that you should embark on a pattern of action that does nothing but make it more so.

The final form of sins of omission is associated with lack of faith in yourself—perhaps in humanity in general—because of the fundamental nature of human vulnerability. There is a scene in the book of Genesis in which the scales fall from the eyes of Adam and Eve, and they realize they are vulnerable and naked—both part and parcel of self-consciousness. At the same time, they develop the knowledge of good and evil. These two developments coincide because it is not possible to hurt other people with true effectiveness until you know how you can be hurt yourself. And you do not know that you can be hurt until you are, more or less, fully self-conscious; until you know that you can suffer excruciating pain; until you know that you can be killed; until you realize the limits of your being. And as soon as you know all that, you have knowledge of your own nakedness, and you can apply knowledge of that vulnerability with malevolent intent to other people. And then you understand and are capable of Good and Evil.

To collapse in the aftermath of a tragic loss is therefore more accurately a betrayal of the person who has died, instead of a tribute, as it multiplies the effect of that mortal catastrophe. It takes a dying person of narcissistic selfishness to wish endless grief on their loved ones. Strength in the face of death is better for the person who is dying and for those who remain living alike. There are family members who are suffering because of their loss who need taking care of, and who may be too old and infirm and otherwise troubled to cope with the situation properly. And so someone strong has to step in and exercise the terrible authority that makes even of death something to face and overcome. To understand clearly that you are morally obliged under such circumstances to manifest strength in the face of adversity is to indicate to yourself—and, perhaps, to other people—that there is something in you of sufficient grandeur and power to face the worst forthrightly and to yet prevail. That is certainly what people need to encounter at a funeral. There is little to say, explicitly, in the face of death. Everyone is rendered speechless when they encounter the infinite expanse of emptiness surrounding our too-brief existence. But uprightness and courage in such a situation is truly heartening and sustaining.

Thus, in the core of your Being, you have decided that the person’s life was valuable, despite whatever trouble they caused you—and themselves. In my experience, that happens even when people die who were quite monstrous. It is a rare person whose life has gone so catastrophically wrong that their death brings no sorrow.