Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

Make yourself colorful, stand out, and the lions will take you down. And the lions are always there.

Beauty leads you back to what you have lost. Beauty reminds you of what remains forever immune to cynicism. Beauty beckons in a manner that straightens your aim. Beauty reminds you that there is lesser and greater value. Many things make life worth living: love, play, courage, gratitude, work, friendship, truth, grace, hope, virtue, and responsibility. But beauty is among the greatest of these.

If you do not know what roads you have traversed, it is difficult to calculate where you are.

We must recollect our experiences and derive from them their moral. Otherwise, we remain in the past, plagued by reminiscences, tormented by conscience, cynical for the loss of what might have been, unforgiving of ourselves, and unable to accept the challenges and tragedies facing us.

The humility required to clamber out of such hell exists in precise proportion to the magnitude of the unrequited errors of the past.

The Word—the tool God uses to transform the depths of potential—is truthful speech. It appears necessarily allied, however, with the courage to confront unrealized possibility in all its awful potential, so that reality itself may be brought forth. Perhaps both this Truth and Courage must finally be subsumed, in turn, under the broader principle of Love—love for Being itself, despite its fragility, tyranny, and betrayal; love that has as its aim what is best for the best in everything. It is that combination of Truth, Courage, and Love comprising the Ideal, whose active incarnation in each individual does in fact take the potential of the future and make the best of it.

But there is yet more: the insistence of God on the goodness of creation reflected the fact that Truth, Courage, and Love were united in His creative action. Thus, there is an ethical claim deeply embedded in the Genesis account of creation: everything that emerges from the realm of possibility in the act of creation (arguably, either divine or human) is good insofar as the motive for its creation is good. I do not believe there is a more daring argument in all of philosophy or in theology than this: To believe this, to act it out, is the fundamental act of faith.

God is no granter of casual wishes.* It is a matter, first, of truly Asking. This means being willing to let go of anything and everything that is not in keeping with the desire. Otherwise there is no Asking. There is only an immature and too-often resentful whim and wish: “Oh, that I could have what I want, without doing what is necessary.” That will not suffice. So, to ask, seek, and knock is to do everything required to gather what has been left unfinished and to complete it, now. And to ask, seek, and knock is, as well, to determine what must be asked for. And that has to be something that is worthy of God. Why else would it be granted? How else could it possibly be granted?

An unsolved problem seldom sits there, in stasis. It grows new heads, like a hydra. One lie—one act of avoidance—breeds the necessity for more. One act of self-deception generates the requirement to buttress that self-deceptive belief with new delusions. One devastated relationship, unaddressed, damages your reputation—damages your faith in yourself, equally—and decreases the probability of a new and better relationship. Thus, your refusal or even inability to come to terms with the errors of the past expands the source of such error—expands the unknown that surrounds you, transforms that unknown into something increasingly predatory.

And what you failed to face is now larger.

It is our destiny to transform chaos into order. If the past has not been ordered, the chaos it still constitutes haunts us. There is information—vital information—resting in the memories that affect us negatively. It is as if part of the personality is still lying latent, out in the world, making itself manifest only in emotional disruption. What is traumatic but remains inexplicable indicates that the map of the world that guides our navigation is insufficient in some vital manner. It is necessary to understand the negative well enough so that it can be circumvented as we move into the future if we do not wish to remain tormented by the past.

For each person is in truth an unfathomable enigma. With care, you might keep rediscovering, in the person you have chosen, enough residual mystery to maintain the spirit that first brought you together. With care, you can avoid stowing each other away in a conveniently sized box, punishment at hand should either of you dare to emerge, and contempt for the consequent predictability you both now face lurking not so far beneath the surface. If you are fortunate, you might rekindle that glimpse you had when you first were attracted to each other, of what your life could be like if you were better people than you are. That is what happens two people fall under the spell of love. For a while, both become better than they were, and see that, but then that magic fades away. Both receive that experience as a gift. Both have their eyes open and can see what is visible to no one else. Such love is a glimpse of what could be, if the relationship remained true. It is delivered as a gift initially, from fate, but requires tremendous effort to realize and maintain. And once that is understood, the goal is clear.

Regardless of what that strategy might be, its success is going to depend on your ability to negotiate.

Trust in turn trumps cynicism, and true trust is not naivete. Trust between people who are not naive is a form of courage, because betrayal is always a possibility, and because this is consciously understood. This applies with particular force within the confines of an intimate relationship. To trust is to invite the best in your partner to manifest itself, with yourself and your freely given trust as the enticement. This is a risky business, but the alternative is the impossibility of true intimacy, and the sacrifice of what could have been two minds in dialogue working in tandem to address the difficult problems of life for a single mind striving in solitude.

Romance requires trust—and the deeper the trust, the deeper the possibility for romance. But trust has its requirements, as well, apart from the courage required of the individuals wise enough to distrust but brave enough to risk putting their faith in a partner. The first of those requirements is truth. You cannot maintain trust in yourself if you lie. You cannot maintain trust in yourself, likewise, if you act in a manner that would require a lie if it was discovered. Similarly, you cannot maintain trust in your partner if he or she lies, or betrays you in action or in silence. So, the vow that makes a marriage capable of preserving its romantic component is first and foremost the decision not to lie to your partner.

Life is too difficult to negotiate alone.

In a relationship where romance remains intact, truth must be king.

Woman from man: this presents something of a mystery, reversing, as it does, the normative biological sequence, where males emerge from females at birth.

But you do not find so much as make, and if you do not know that you are in real trouble.

But it is an uncommon woman, in my clinical and general professional experience, regardless of brilliance or talent, training, discipline, parental desire, youthful delusion, or cultural brainwashing who would not perform whatever sacrifice necessary to bring a child into the world by the time she is twenty-nine, or thirty-five, or worse, forty.

but up to 30 percent of couples experience trouble becoming pregnant.

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. That is it. You see each other under the best possible conditions, with nothing but sex in your minds and nothing else interfering with your lives. As soon as it transforms from that into a relationship that has any permanency, a huge part of the affair immediately turns right back into whatever it was that was bothering you about your marriage. An affair is not helpful, and people end up horribly hurt. Particularly children—and it is to them you...

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.

Cohabitation without the promise of permanent commitment, socially announced, ceremonially established, seriously considered, does not produce more robust marriages. And there is nothing good about that—particularly for children, who do much worse in single parent (generally male-absent) families.9 Period.

The next thing you have to do—I know this from both my clinical and marital experience (thirty years of each)—is actually talk to your partner for about ninety minutes a week, purely about practical and personal matters.

What matters, however, is not whether you fight (because you have to fight), but whether you make peace as a consequence.

Romance is play, and play does not take place easily when problems of any sort arise. Play requires peace, and peace requires negotiation. And you are lucky even then if you get to play.

If you go to zero, then one of you is tyrannizing the other, and the other is submitting. If you go to zero, then one of you is going to have an affair—physical, emotional, fantastical, or some combination of the three.

am not recommending the affair, but that is what you are setting yourself up for if your sex life vanishes.

What will happen is that the absolute necessities of life will inexorably start to take priority over the desirable necessities.

To do so—to understand your own personality and its temptation by darkness—you need to know what you are up against.

The fact that they are gripped by fairy tales and stories like Pinocchio is an indication of just how much depth children perceive in those stories, even if you, as an adult observer, do not notice it anymore.

You cannot properly appreciate what you have unless you have some sense not only of how terrible things could be, but of how terrible it is likely for things to be, given how easy it is for things to be so. This is something that is very much worth knowing.