Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

We act out the belief that we can strike a bargain with the structure of reality. Strangely enough, we often can. If you are sensible, you do that all the time. You prepare for the worst.

It is no easy matter to balance the fragility of life and the necessity for procreation (and all the uncertainty of pregnancy and birth and child-rearing) with the desire for certainty, predictability, and order.

invite the Evil Queen to your child’s life. If you fail to do so, your children will grow up weak and in need of protection,

Excess sentimentality is an illness, a developmental failure, and a curse to children and others who need our care (but not too much of it).

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).

Culture: Security and Tyranny

We interpret the present through the lens of culture. We plan for the future by attempting to bring into being what we have been taught and what we have determined, personally, to value. All of that seems good, but a too-rigid approach to understanding what is currently in front of us and what we should pursue can blind us to the value of novelty, creativity, and change.

Imagine, further, that the beach on which you stand is the shore of an island. The island is culture. People live there—perhaps in harmony and peace, under a benevolent ruler; perhaps in a war-torn hell of oppression, hunger, and privation. And that is culture: Wise King or Authoritarian Tyrant. It is of vital necessity to become acquainted with both characters,

Ideologies take on the structure of a story that is essentially religious, but they do so incompletely, including certain elements of experience or eternal characters while ignoring others.

its expression, is biased in a way that restricts its utility. That bias is desirable subjectively, as it simplifies what would otherwise be too complex to understand, but dangerous because of its one-sidedness.

Much of what people believe politically—ideologically, let us say—is based on their inborn temperament. If their emotions or motivations tend to tilt one way (and much of that is a consequence of biology), then they tend to adopt, say, a conservative or liberal tendency. It is not a matter of opinion.

Liberals, for example, are positively enthralled by new ideas. The advantages to being attracted by new ideas are obvious. Sometimes problems require new solutions, and it is people who take pleasure in novel conceptions who find them. Such people also tend not to be particularly orderly.

If you are a conservative, you have the opposite advantage and problem. You are wary of new ideas, and not particularly attracted to them, and that is in part because you are less sensitive to their possibilities and more concerned about their unpredicted consequences.

to determine when something needs to be preserved or when it needs to be transformed. That is why we have politics,

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.

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 Individual: Hero and Adversary

The positive element is the heroic aspect: the person who can sacrifice properly to nature and strike a bargain with fate such that benevolence reigns; the person who is awake, alert, attentive, communicative, and bears responsibility, so that the tyrannical part of the state remains at bay; and the person who is aware of his or her own faults and proclivity for malevolence and deceit, so that proper orientation is maintained.

So, there exists a hero and an adversary; a wise king and a tyrant; a positive and negative maternal figure; and chaos itself.

they are all existential permanents—elements of experience with which every soul, rich, poor, blessed, cursed, talented, dull, male, and female must inevitably contend. That is life—they are life.

Partial knowledge of the cast, conscious or unconscious, leaves you undefended; leaves you naive, unprepared, and likely to become possessed by deceit, resentment, and arrogance.

If you do n...

then you are, first, a needy acolyte for an ideology that will provide you with a partial and insufficient representation of reality; and, second, someone blind in a manner dangerous to themselves and others alike.

Nature is doing her best to kill us, and that we have every reason to erect the structures we do, despite their often unfortunate environmental costs.* Something similar applies to culture. We all have reason to be grateful, in the main, for the wisdom and the structure that our forebears bequeathed to us, to their great cost. That does not mean that those benefits are distributed equally,

What do you do about that, when you are not blinded by ideology, and you see the world and all its dramatic characters clearly? Well, you do not hope for the infinite perfectibility of humanity and aim your system at some unattainable utopia. You try to design a system that sinners such as you cannot damage too badly—too

Resentment

You are resentful because of the absolute unknown and its terrors, because nature conspires against you, because you are a victim of the tyrannical element of culture, and because of the malevolence of yourself and other individuals.

We are the focus of unbelievably powerful and often malevolent transpersonal forces.

There were many things you could have been. Maybe some of them were more than you have become. But you were lessened and reduced by the demand for social existence. And you are stuck with yourself, too, and that is no picnic.

There is a problem with this logic, however, inexorable though it may seem. The first is that not everyone does in fact construe him or herself as a victim and fall prey, in consequence, to resentment—and

Thus, resentment does not appear to be an inevitable consequence of suffering itself.

The question “Why did this have to happen to me?” frequently contains a reproachful element, based on a sense of injustice:

The fact that unfortunate things are happening or are going to happen to you is built into the structure of reality itself. There is no doubt that awful things happen, but there is an element of true randomness about them.

each of the negatives that characterize human existence are balanced, in principle, by their positive counterpart.

Encouragement prepared them to confront their problems head-on, and that voluntary confrontation dispelled some of their fear.

the more voluntary confrontation is practiced, the more can be borne.

the benevolent element of nature, the security and shelter provided by society and culture, and the strength of the individual. Those are your weapons in times of trouble.

Deceit and Arrogance

two broad forms of deceit: sins of commission,

and sins of o...

We try to tip the world in our own personal favor. We try to gain an edge. We endeavor to avoid a just punishment that is coming our way—often

we need to bring arrogance into the conversation, along with resentment, to truly understand why we practice to deceive.

Commissions

The first conspiracy between deceit and arrogance might be regarded as a denial or rejection of the relationship between divinity, truth, and goodness.

Love is the ultimate aim—the desire to create the very best that can be created. It provides the same kind of superstructure for Being, perhaps, as the desire for a peaceful and harmonious home provides when such desire allows the truth to be spoken.

The Word God uses to confront the nothingness we spoke of is the Truth, and that truth creates. But it does not just create: it appears to create the Good—the very best that love would demand.

The second form of arrogance that enables deceit has something to do with the assumption of the power of divinity itself.

the deceitful individual has taken it upon him or herself to alter the very structure of reality.

First, the transgressor himself is going to know that he is not to be trusted in word or action,

Second, for the liar to genuinely believe that he is “going to get away with it,” carries with it the belief that he is smarter than everyone else—that