Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

You have what you can learn if you can accept your error.

And then you have your own character and courage, and if those have been beat to a bloody pulp and you are ready to throw in the towel, you have the character and courage of those for whom you care and who care for you.

We respond to sudden and unpredictable change by preparing, physiologically and psychologically, for the worst. And because only God Himself knows what this worst might be, we must in our ignorance prepare for all eventualities.

too much security and control might be profitably avoided. Because what we understand is insufficient (as we discover when things we are striving to control nonetheless go wrong around us),

people depend on constant communication with others to keep their minds organized.

We all need to think to keep things straight, but we mostly think by talking.

Simply put: We outsource the problem of sanity. People remain mentally healthy not merely because of the integrity of their own minds, but because they are constantly being reminded how to think, act, and speak by those around them.

Without the intermediation of the social world, it would be impossible for us to organize our minds, and we would simply be overwhelmed by the world.

To have others attend to what you find important or interesting is to validate, first, the importance of what you are attending to, but second, and more crucially, to validate you as a respected center of conscious experience and contributor to the collective world.

If you are not communicating about anything that engages other people, then the value of your communication—even the value of your very presence—risks falling to zero.

games undertaken voluntarily will outcompete games imposed and played under threat of force, given that some of the energy that could be expended on the game itself, whatever its nature, has to be wasted on enforcement.

But today’s beginner is tomorrow’s master.

And if they do all these things, and happen to be working in a functional institution, they will soon render themselves difficult to replace.

genuine communication can take place only between peers. This is because it is very difficult to move information up a hierarchy.

For this reason, it is very wise to approach your boss, for example, carefully and privately with a problem (and perhaps best to have a solution at hand—and not one proffered too incautiously).

This mutual bonding is vitally important. A child without at least one special, close friend is much more likely to suffer later psychological problems, whether of the depressive/anxious or antisocial sort,

somewhat unsurprisingly, that those who give more tend to receive more).9 Thus, it truly seems that it is better to give than to receive.

A responsible person decides to make a problem his or her problem, and then works diligently—even ambitiously—for its solution, with other people, in the most efficient manner possible (efficient, because there are other problems to solve, and efficiency allows for the conservation of resources that might then be devoted importantly elsewhere).

When people wield authority, by contrast, they do so because of their competence—a competence that is spontaneously recognized and appreciated by others, and generally followed willingly, with a certain relief, and with the sense that justice is being served.

Someone who is sophisticated as a winner wins in a manner that improves the game itself, for all the players.

those who occupy positions of authority in functional hierarchies are generally struck to the core by the responsibility they bear for the people they supervise, employ, and mentor.

decent people take in the ability to provide opportunities to those over whom they currently exercise authority.

There is great intrinsic pleasure in helping already competent and admirable young people become highly skilled, socially valuable, autonomous, responsible professionals.

Such people generally fail to understand or do not care what function the organization they have made their host was designed to fulfill. They extract what they can from the riches that lie before them and leave a trail of wreckage in their wake.

It requires knowing that there is a bright side to the social hierarchies we necessarily inhabit, as well as a dark (and the realization that concentrating on one to the exclusion of the other is dangerously biased).

Limitations, constraints, arbitrary boundaries—rules, dread rules, themselves—therefore not only ensure social harmony and psychological stability, they make the creativity that renews order possible.

Stories provide us with a broad template. They outline a pattern specific enough to be of tremendous value, if we can imitate it, but general enough (unlike a particular rule or set of rules) to apply even to new situations.

In stories, we capture observations of the ideal personality. We tell tales about success and failure in adventure and romance.

He had not benefited from formal education beyond the high school level, and did not have a personality that immediately struck the external observer as markedly creative.

My clients had learned not only to submit properly to the sometimes arbitrary but still necessary demands of the social world, but to offer to that world something it would not have had access to had it not been for their private creative work.

There is a strong implication throughout the series that what is good cannot be simply encapsulated by mindless or rigid rule following, no matter how disciplined that following, or how vital the rules so followed.

Meta-rules (which might be regarded as rules about rules, rather than rules themselves) are not necessarily communicated in the same manner as simple rules themselves.

you are willing to fully shoulder the responsibility of making an exception, because you see that as serving a higher good (and if you are a person with sufficient character to manage that distinction), then you have served the spirit, rather than the mere law, and that is an elevated moral act.

But if you refuse to realize the importance of the rules you are violating and act out of self-centered convenience, then you are appropriately and inevitably damned.

I say “rule-like” because the animals are not following rules. Rules require language. Animals are merely acting out regularities. They cannot formulate, understand, or follow rules.

Every society is already characterized by patterned behavior; otherwise it would be pure conflict and no “society” at all.

playing fair, despite the particularities of any given game, is a higher-order accomplishment than mere victory.

to strive under difficult and frustrating circumstances to play fair. This is what should be chased, so to speak, during any game (even though it is also important to try to obtain victory in the game).

Now, it is possible that he was irritated by something else altogether that day and did not really care about the plates. And in one sense, it is a trivial issue.

But seen another way, it is not trivial at all, for two reasons. First, if something happens every day, it is important, and lunch was happening every day. In consequence, if there was something about it that was chronically bothersome, even in a minor sort of way, it needed to be attended to.

Second, it is very common to allow so-called minor irritations (which are not minor, as I said, if they happen constantly) to continue fo...

My client was not comfortable in her own home. She did not feel there was anything truly of her within the apartment she shared with her husband

It is difficult to win an argument, or even begin one, if you have not carefully articulated what you want (or do not) and need (or do not).

Every trivial but chronic disagreement about cooking, dishes, housecleaning, responsibility for finances, or frequency of intimate contact will be duplicated, over and over, unless you successfully address

This is not a good strategy. Only careful aim and wakeful striving and commitment can eliminate the oft-incremental calamity of willful blindness, stem the entropic tide, and keep catastrophe—familial and social alike—at bay.

Freud believed that much of mental illness was due to repression, which is arguably and reasonably considered a form of self-deception.

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.

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.

It is much more likely that anger, grief, and loneliness have accumulated within you with each rejection, bit by bit, until you are filled to the brim—and, now, overflowing.

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.