Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

It appears that the meaning that most effectively sustains life is to be found in the adoption of responsibility.

People need meaning, but problems also need solving.

By taking responsibility, we can find a meaningful path, improve our personal lot psychologically, and make what is intolerably wrong genuinely better.

Responsibility and Meaning

people did not get what they needed (or, equally importantly perhaps, what they wanted) because they never made it clear to themselves or others what that was.

Wendy, the great love of Pan’s life, chooses to grow up, despite her admiration for her friend Peter. She takes a husband, facing—even welcoming—her maturation, and its lurking hints of mortality and death. She consciously chooses to sacrifice her childhood for the realities of adulthood, but gains real life in return. Peter remains a child: magical, to be sure, but still a child—and life, limited, finite, and unique, passes him by.

You must sacrifice something of your manifold potential in exchange for something real in life. Aim at something. Discipline yourself. Or suffer the consequence. And what is that consequence? All the suffering of life, with none of the meaning. Is there a better description of hell?

Even if you are called by God Himself to venture out into the world, as Abraham was, life is going to be exceptionally difficult. Even under the best of all conceivable circumstances, almost insuperable obstacles will emerge and obstruct your path. The encouragement? You will have the opportunity to reveal yourself as much stronger and more competent than you might imagine.

Rescue Your Father: Osiris and Horus

Osiris, god of order, falls apart. This happens all the time, in people’s individual lives, and equally in the history of families, cities, and states. Things fall apart when love affairs collapse, careers deteriorate, or cherished dreams die; when despair, anxiety, uncertainty, and hopelessness manifest themselves in the place of habitable order; and when nihilism and the abyss make their dread appearance, destroying the desirable and stable values of current life. Under such circumstances, chaos emerges.

Thus, when the center will no longer hold—even at the darkest hour—new possibility makes itself manifest. It is for this reason that the archetypal Hero is born when things are at their worst.

voluntary confrontation with a feared, hated, or despised obstacle is curative. We become stronger by voluntarily facing what impedes our necessary progress.

We are well advised to take on challenges at precisely the rate that engages and compels alertness, and forces the development of courage, skill, and talent, and to avoid foolhardy confrontation with that which lies beyond current comprehension.

That is responsibility. Constrain evil. Reduce suffering. Confront the possibility that manifests in front of you every second of your life with the desire to make things better, regardless of the burden you bear, regardless of life’s often apparently arbitrary unfairness and cruelty.

But for a time evil can be overcome, banished, and defeated. Then peace and harmony can prevail for as long as people do not forget what brought them both about.

The ultimate question of Man is not who we are, but who we could be.

And Who Might That Be?

Let us agree, to begin with, that you have a minimum moral obligation to take care of yourself. Maybe you are just selfishly interested in taking care of yourself. But then the questions arise: What do you mean by “care”? Which “yourself” are you talking about?

The mere fact that something makes you happy in the moment does not mean that it is in your best interest, everything considered.

That is the curse associated with the human discovery of the future and, with it, the necessity of work—because to work means to sacrifice the hypothetical delights of the present for the potential improvement of what lies ahead.

Here is what the future means: If you are going to take care of yourself, you are already burdened (or privileged) with a social responsibility. The you for whom you are caring is a community that exists across time. The necessity for considering this society of the individual, so to speak, is a burden and an opportunity that seems uniquely characteristic of human beings.

We discovered the future, some long time ago—and now the future is where we each live, in potential. We treat that as reality. It is a reality that only might be—but it is one with a high probability of becoming now, eventually, and we are driven to take that into account.

Happiness and Responsibility

it is unlikely that whatever optimizes your life across time is happiness.

What might serve as a more sophisticated alternative to happiness? Imagine it is living in accordance with the sense of responsibility, because that sets things right in the future. Imagine, as well, that you must act reliably, honestly, nobly, and in relationship to a higher good, in order to manifest the sense of responsibility properly.

people experience positive emotion in relationship to the pursuit of a valuable goal.

No matter how much we wish to discount the future completely, it is part of the price we paid for being acutely self-conscious and able to conceptualize ourselves across the entire span of our lives.

Pick Up the Extra Weight

There is a proper way to behave—an ethic—and you are destined to contend with it. You cannot help but calculate yourself across time, and everyone else across time, and you are reporting back to yourself, inevitably, on your own behavior and misbehavior.

The playing field selects the players on the basis of their ethical behavior. And we are therefore biologically prepared to respond positively to and to imitate the Great Player—and to disapprove, even violently, of the deceiver, the cheat, and the fraud.

If the cost of betraying yourself, in the deepest sense, is guilt, shame, and anxiety, the benefit of not betraying yourself is meaning—the meaning that sustains. That is the most valuable of opportunities that lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.

You ask yourself—you pray to discover—what you did wrong. And the answer arrives. And it is not what you want. And part of you must therefore die, so that you can change. And the part that must die struggles for its existence, puts forward its rationale, and pleads its case. And it will do so with every trick in its possession—employing

And then you determine to start acting in accordance with your conscience. You decide that it is a partner, despite its adversarial form. You put all that you have discovered to be right into action, and you begin your ascent.

necessary to lift your eyes above the horizon, to establish a transcendent goal, if you wish to cease being a puppet, under the control of things you do not understand and perhaps do not want to understand.

That is the emergence of the higher self that might be the true servant of God,

What is the antidote to the suffering and malevolence of life? The highest possible goal. What is the prerequisite to pursuit of the highest possible goal? Willingness to adopt the maximum degree of responsibility—and

The most profound and reliable instinct for meaning—if not perverted by self-deceit and sin (there is no other way to state it)—manifests itself when you are on the path of maximum virtue.

You are possessed of an instinct—a spirit—that orients you toward the highest good. It calls your soul away from hell and toward heaven. And because it is there, you find yourself frequently disillusioned.

What calls you out into the world, however—to your destiny—is not ease. It is struggle and strife. It is bitter contention and the deadly play of the opposites.

Rule V DO NOT DO WHAT YOU HATE Pathological Order in Its Day-to-Day Guise

When do you stop participating in a worrisome process that you see, or think you see, unfolding in front of you?

When and where do we stop? If a tiny minority of people even hypothetically finds some words offensive, then what? Do we continue to ban words endlessly?”

Those events seemed to form a coherent pattern, associated with an ideology that was directional in its intent, explicitly and implicitly.

It is, of course, the case that being required to do stupid, hateful things is demoralizing.

When we are called upon to do things that we find hateful and stupid, we are simultaneously forced to act contrary to the structure of values motivating us to move forward stalwartly and protecting us from dissolution into confusion and terror.

those jealous of genuine competence and productivity have every reason to undermine and denigrate even the concept of both).

The problem with the learning styles theory? Most basically: there is simply no evidence whatsoever for its validity.

delivering it in that form does not improve their academic performance.

there is no evidence that teachers can accurately assess the “learning style” of their students.

We are each more responsible for the state of the world than we believe, or would feel comfortable believing. Without careful attention, culture itself tilts toward corruption.