Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

The third form of arrogance that underlies deceit has to do with the belief that the deceitful act

will stand on its own powerfully, without being revealed and destroyed as reality itself straightens and reforms, as it inevitably will.

The fourth form of arrogance that justifies deceit has to do with a warped sense of justice, often brought about by resentment.

The arrogance is in believing that the unfair treatment was specifically personal, existentially speaking, rather than being an expected part of existence itself,

Omissions

The first of these is nihilism.

everything is meaningless, or even negative. It is a judgment, a conclusion—and it is a sin of pride,

Another motive for a sin of omission? The claim that it is justifiable to take the easy path. This means living life so that true responsibility for anything important never falls on your shoulders.

If you take your turn at the difficult tasks, people learn to trust you, you learn to trust yourself, and you get better at doing difficult things.

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.

it is not possible to hurt other people with true effectiveness until you know how you can be hurt yourself.

then you understand and are capable of Good and Evil.

The first man’s refusal to take responsibility for his actions is associated with resentment (for his acquisition of painful knowledge), deceit (as he knows he made a free choice, regardless of his wife’s behavior), and arrogance (he dares to blame God and the woman the divinity created).

Like Adam, you know you are naked. You are intimately aware of your flaws and vulnerabilities, and the faith in yourself dissolves.

The Existential Danger of Arrogance and Deceit

If you deceive (particularly yourself), if you lie, then you begin to warp the mechanisms guiding the instinct that orients you. That instinct is an unconscious guide, so it works underneath your cognitive apparatus, especially once it has become habitual.

only to find you have pathologized yourself with deceit and can no longer rely on your own judgment.

There is a sin somewhat mysteriously defined by Christ as unforgivable: “Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come” (Matthew 12:32).

Conscience is no less than the sharing of moral knowledge with the self. Deceit necessitates voluntary refusal to abide by the dictate of conscience, and risks pathologizing that very vital function.

This is true even in a neurological sense.

When you habitually engage in deceit, you build a structure much like the one that perpetuates addiction, especially if you get away with it,

This reinforces the development of the neural mechanism in your brain comprising the structure of the entire system of deception.

That is the arrogance of believing that what you know is sufficient (regardless of the evidence that accumulates around you,

The Place You Should Be

It is in our individual capacity to confront the potential of the future and to transform it into the actuality of the present. The way we determine what it is that the world transforms into is a consequence of our ethical, conscious choices.

The right attitude to the horror of existence—the

is faith in yourself, your fellow man, and the structure of existence itself:

How much better could things become if we all avoided the temptation to actively or passively warp the structure of existence;

Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant.

Rule XII BE GRATEFUL IN SPITE OF YOUR SUFFERING Down Can Define Up

Human beings have the capacity to courageously confront their suffering—to transcend it psychologically, as well as to ameliorate it practically.

If you confront the limitations of life courageously, that provides you with a certain psychological purpose that serves as an antidote to the suffering.

you can work practically and effectively to ameliorate and rectify your own and other people’s misery,

If you fail to understand evil, then you have laid yourself bare to it. You are susceptible to its effects, or to its will.

The Mephistophelian Spirit

We all see within ourselves the emergence of good intentions and the repeated instructions to ourselves to act accordingly, yet we note distressingly often that we leave undone what we know we should do, and do instead what we know we should not.

we were inhabited by spirits that were beyond not only our control but even our conscious knowledge.

If you are not in control of yourself, who or what is?

you should—virtually by definition—be in control of yourself. But things often do not work that way, and the reason or reasons they do not are deeply mysterious.

you are bad—and declared so by your own judgment. That is a very unpleasant realization, but there is no hope of becoming good without it.

You will see, if you are willing to look, the adversarial force at work within you,

“Why would such a spirit exist? Why would it be part of each of us?” The answer appears to be partly associated with the powerful sense that each of us shares of our own intrinsic mortal limitations, our subjugation to the suffering inflicted upon us by ourselves, society, and nature.

With each step you take against yourself or others as a consequence of your unhappiness and resentment, there is more to be ashamed of,

If you conceptually aggregate and unite into a single personality all that opposes you in you, all that opposes your friendships, and all that opposes your wife or husband, the adversary emerges. That is precisely Mephistopheles in Goethe’s play—the devil himself.

In the Christian tradition, even God Himself, in the form of Christ, despairs of the meaning of life and the goodness of His Father

That is certainly what people think when they contemplate suicide.

They have decided not only that life is unbearable and the malevolence of existence is inexcusable, but that everything should be punished for the mere sin of its Being.

And why would you believe, once the eradication or even merely the limitation of life became your guiding star, that you would not continue down that road to its hellish end?

That is Mephistopheles, whose essential viewpoint might be paraphrased as follows: “Life is so terrible, because of its limitations and malevolence, that it would be better if it did not exist at all.”

It does not seem to be a pathway that a conscious creature, with a bit of gratitude, might walk down.