Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

Barriers exist to the flow of genuine information down a hierarchy, as well.

Peers, by contrast, must in the main be convinced. Their attention must be carefully reciprocated.

This is partly why friendships are so important, and why they form so early in life.

By three years of age, however, most children are capable of truly sharing.

They start to form friendships upon repeated exposure to children with whom they have successfully negotiated reciprocal play relationships.

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,7 while children with fewer friends are also more likely to be unemployed and unmarried as adults.8 There is no evidence that the importance of friendship declines in any manner with age.

there is some evidence that it is the provision of social support, as much or more than its receipt, that provides these protective benefits

Through friendship and collegial relationships we modify our selfish proclivities, learning not to always put ourselves first.

Top Dog

If there is a problem to be solved, and many people involve themselves in the solution, then a hierarchy must and will arise, as those who can do, and those who cannot follow as best they can, often learning to be competent in the process.

That is not power. It is the authority that properly accompanies ability.

This might be regarded as a philosophy of responsibility.

Ambition is often—and often purposefully—misidentified with the desire for power,

Authority is not mere power, and it is extremely unhelpful, even dangerous, to confuse the two.

When people wield authority, by contrast, they do so because of their competence—a

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

genuine authority constrains the arbitrary exercise of power.

arrogance bars the path to learning.

There is great intrinsic pleasure in helping already competent and admirable young people become highly skilled, socially valuable, autonomous, responsible professionals. It is not unlike the pleasure taken in raising children,

Social Institutions Are Necessary—but Insufficient

Thoughtless repetition of what sufficed in the past—or,

means the introduction of great danger when changes in the broader world makes local change necessary.

Highly social creatures such as we are must abide by the rules, to remain sane and minimize unnecessary uncertainty, suffering, and strife.

This leaves all of us with a permanent moral conundrum:

How do we establish a balance between reasonable conservatism and revitalizing creativity?

there are relatively permanent niches in the human environment to which different modes of temperament have adapted to fill.

is critically important to distinguish between a hierarchy that is functional and productive (and the people who make it so) and the degenerate shell of a once-great institution.

Part of the danger is that very tendency of those who think more liberally to see only the negative in well-founded institutions.

These individuals tend to be profoundly ignorant of the complex realities of the status quo, unconscious of their own ignorance, and ungrateful for what the past has bequeathed to them.

It is this corruption of creative transformation that renders the conservative—and not only the conservative—appropriately cautious of change.

It has taken since time immemorial for us to organize ourselves, biologically and socially, into the functional hierarchies that both specify our perceptions and actions, and define our interactions with the natural and social world. Profound gratitude for that gift is the only proper response.

The Necessity of Balance

The balance between conservatism and originality might therefore be properly struck, socially, by bringing the two types of persons together.

it is difficult to find a single person who has balanced both properly, who is therefore comfortable working with each type,

To manage complex affairs properly, it is necessary to be cold enough in vision to separate the power hungry and self-serving pseudoadvocate of the status quo from the genuine conservative; and the self-deceptive, irresponsible rebel without a cause from the truly creative.

these two modes of being are integrally interdependent.

subordination to the status quo, in one form or another—needs to be understood as a necessary precursor to creative transformation,

What lurks, therefore, under the explicitly stated desire for complete freedom—as

is instead a negative desire—a desire for the complete absence of responsibility, which is simply not commensurate with genuine freedom.

Personality as Hierarchy—and Capacity for Transformation

In stories, we capture observations of the ideal personality.

Across our narrative universes, success moves us forward to what is better, to the promised land; failure dooms us,

It is for this reason that a story, which is a description of the action of a personality, has a hero

The hero is the individual at the peak,

the speaker of truth under perilous circumstances, and more.

Carl Jung, who noted that the production of increasingly ordered and complex geometrical figures—often circles within squares, or the reverse—regularly accompanied an increase in organization of the personality.

This is a lesson that seems more easily taught by representations of the behaviors that embody it than transmitted by, say, rote learning or a variant rule.

follow the rules until you are capable of being a shining exemplar of what they represent, but break them when those very rules now constitute the most dire impediment to the embodiment of their central virtues.

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. The carelessness you exhibit with regard to your own tradition will undo you and perhaps those around you fully and painfully across time.

It is the living interaction between social institutions and creative achievement that keeps the world balanced on the narrow line between too much order and too much chaos. This is a terrible conundrum, a true existential burden.