Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

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.

you can at least sometimes avoid the danger that you are willing to see.

But there will be times in your life when it will take everything you have to face what is in front of you, 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.

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 queen of the underworld, the goddess of chaos, is also the force that eternally renews. All the potential constrained by the previous system of apprehension, of category, of assumption—all the invisible limitation imposed upon the inhabitants of that orderly state—is released, for better and worse, when that system breaks into pieces. 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.

That is responsibility. Constrain evil. Reduce suffering. Confront the possibility that manifests in front of you every second of your life with the desire to make things better, regardless of the burden you bear, regardless of life’s often apparently arbitrary unfairness and cruelty.

When you face a challenge, you grapple with the world and inform yourself. This makes you more than you are. It makes you increasingly into who you could be. Who could you be? You could be all that a man or woman might be. You could be the newest avatar, in your own unique manner, of the great ancestral heroes of the past. 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.

In consequence, it is unlikely that whatever optimizes your life across time is happiness.

And there is no doubt that the road to hell, personally and socially, is paved not so much with good intentions as with the adoption of attitudes and undertaking of actions that inescapably disturb your conscience. Do not do what you hate.

ressentiment

Good word

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.

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.

You might be tempted to conclude: “Well, how about we live together, instead of getting married? We will try each other out. It is the sensible thing to do.” 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.

Courage, we might say, is the willingness of God to confront the nothingness that preceded Being, which is perhaps of the same form we manage when we rise up from poverty and nothingness to thrive, or rebuild our lives when they have been reduced to chaos by disaster and catastrophe.

Love is the ultimate aim—the desire to create the very best that can be created.

That is something done in some deep sense despite “Eli Eli lama sabachthani”—something that says “despite it all, no matter what it is, onward and upward”—and that is precisely the impossible moral undertaking that is demanded from each of us for the world to function properly (even for it to avoid degeneration into hell).

You are going to work to make things better for yourself, as if you are someone you are responsible for helping. You are going to do the same thing for your family and the broader community. You are going to strive toward the harmony that could manifest itself at all those levels, despite the fact that you can see the flawed and damaged substructure of things, and have had your vision damaged in consequence. That is the proper and courageous pathway forward. Maybe that is the definition of gratitude, of thankfulness, and I cannot see how that is separate from courage and love.