Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

Tyranny grows slowly, and asks us to retreat in comparatively tiny steps. But each retreat increases the possibility of the next retreat. Each betrayal of conscience, each act of silence (despite the resentment we feel when silenced), and each rationalization weakens resistance and increases the probability of the next restrictive move forward.

hell tends to arrive step by step, one betrayal after another.

The sovereign individual, awake and attending to his or her conscience, is the force that prevents the group, as the necessary structure guiding normative social relations, from becoming blind and deadly.

Fortify Your Position

If you wish instead to be engaged in a great enterprise—even if you regard yourself as a mere cog—you are required not to do things you hate.

Otherwise, nature hides her face, society stultifies, and you remain a marionette,

and one more thing: it is your fault.

Practicalities

There are few choices in life where there is no risk on either side, and it is often necessary to contemplate the risks of staying as thoroughly as the risks of moving.

And there is no doubt that the road to hell, personally and socially, is paved not so much with good intentions as with the adoption of attitudes and undertaking of actions that inescapably disturb your conscience. Do not do what you hate.

Rule VI ABANDON IDEOLOGY The Wrong Places

It is helpful for everyone to be able to represent explicitly what they already implicitly understand.

the mention of one topic in particular brought every audience (and I mean that without exception) to a dead-quiet halt: responsibility—the

You might even consider the inculcation of responsibility the fundamental purpose of society. But something has gone wrong. We have committed an error, or a series of errors. We have spent too much time, for example (much of the last fifty years), clamoring about rights, and we are no longer asking enough of the young people we are socializing.

the meaning that sustains life in all its tragedy and disappointment is to be found in shouldering a noble burden.

Perhaps He Is Only Sleeping

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously announced “God is dead.”

The great thinker’s opinion stemmed from his fear that all the Judeo-Christian values serving as the foundation of Western civilization had been made dangerously subject to casual rational criticism,

As the purpose of human life became uncertain outside the purposeful structure of monotheistic thought and the meaningful world it proposed, we would experience an existentially devastating rise in nihilism, Nietzsche believed. Alternatively, he suggested, people would turn to identification with rigid, totalitarian ideology: the substitute of human ideas for the transcendent Father of All Creation. The doubt that undermines and the certainty that crushes: Nietzsche’s prognostication for the two alternatives that would arise in the aftermath of the death of God.

in Dostoevsky’s view. He could see that the adoption of a rigid, comprehensive utopian ideology, predicated on a few apparently self-evident axioms, presented a political and spiritual danger with the potential to far exceed in brutality all that had occurred in the religious, monarchical, or even pagan past.

the psychoanalysts Freud and Jung put paid to that notion, demonstrating that we are not sufficiently in possession of ourselves to create values by conscious choice.

only a fool would now dare to claim that we have sufficient mastery of ourselves to create, rather than discover, what we value.

If each of us lives by our own created and projected values, what remains to unite us? This is a philosophical problem of central importance.

What if there are experiences that typically manifest themselves to one person at a time (as seems to be the case with much of revelation), but appear to form a meaningful pattern when considered collectively? That indicates something is occurring that is not merely subjective, even though it cannot be easily pinned down with the existing methods of science.

The psyche—the soul—that produces or is the recipient of such experiences appears incontrovertibly real:

We all axiomatically assume the reality of our individual existences and conscious experiences, and we extend the same courtesy to others (or else).

That structure, accepted as a given by scientists and by the general population in equal measure, appears to manifest religious experience as part of its basic function—and

It may well be, therefore, that the true meaning of life is not to be found in what is objective, but in what is subjective (but still universal).

the fact that religious ideas are capable of uniting vast numbers of people under a single moral umbrella

also indicates something universal calling from within.

The Fatal Attraction of the False Idol

conservatism, socialism, feminism (and all manner of ethnic- and gender-study isms), postmodernism, and environmentalism, among others. They are all monotheists, practically speaking—or polytheistic worshippers of a very small number of gods. These gods are the axioms and foundational beliefs that must be accepted, a priori, rather than proven, before the belief system can be adopted, and when accepted and applied to the world allow

the illusion to prevail that knowledge has been produced.

The ideologue begins by selecting a few abstractions in whose low-resolution representations hide large, undifferentiated chunks of the world. Some examples include “the economy,” “the nation,” “the environment,” “the patriarchy,” “the people,” “the rich,” “the poor,” “the oppressed,” and “the oppressors.” The use of single terms implicitly hypersimplifies what are in fact extraordinarily diverse and complex phenomena

All such problems require careful, particularized analysis, followed by the generation of multiple potential solutions, followed by the careful assessment of those solutions to ensure that they are having their desired effect.

it is much easier and more immediately gratifying to reduce the problem to something simple and accompany it with an evildoer, who can then be morally opposed.

Finally, a school of thought emerges to propagate the methods of this algorithmic reduction (particularly when the thinker is hoping to attain dominance in the conceptual and the real worlds), and those who refuse to adopt the algorithm or who criticize its use are tacitly or explicitly demonized.

This kind of theorizing is particularly attractive to people who are smart but lazy. Cynicism serves as an aid, too, as does arrogance. The new adherents will be taught that mastering such a game constitutes education, and will learn to criticize alternative theories, different methods, and increasingly, even the idea of fact itself.

Freud, as we noted, attempted to reduce motivation to sexuality, to libido. The same can be done quite effectively by anyone sufficiently literate, intelligent, and verbally fluent.

In this manner, the single explanatory principle can be expanded indefinitely, in keeping with the demands placed upon it. Marx did the same thing when he described man in a fundamentally economic, class-based manner, and history as the eternal battleground of bourgeoisie and proletariat. Everything can be explained by running it through a Marxist algorithm.

Ideological reduction of that form is the hallmark of the most dangerous of pseudo-intellectuals. Ideologues are the intellectual equivalent of fundamentalists, unyielding and rigid.

An ideological theory explains everything: all the past, all the present, and all the future. This means that an ideologue can consider him or herself in possession of the complete truth

The moral of the story? Beware of intellectuals who make a monotheism out of their theories of motivation. Beware, in more technical terms, of blanket univariate (single variable) causes for diverse, complex problems.

and, let us not forget, the frequent discovery of a villain, or set of villains, upon which the hidden motivations for the ideology can be vented.

ressentiment

Ressentiment8—hostile resentment—occurs when individual failure or insufficient status is blamed both on the system within which that failure or lowly status occurs and then, most particularly, on the people who have achieved success and high status within ...

all attacks on the successful can be construed as morally justified attempts at establishing justice—rather than, say, manifestations of envy and

There is another typical feature of ideological pursuit: the victims supported by ideologues are always innocent (and it is sometimes true that victims are innocent), and the perpetrators are always evil (evil perpetrators are also not in short supply).

To take the path of ressentiment is to risk tremendous bitterness. This is in no small part a consequence of identifying the enemy without rather than within.

Such division of the world into the devil without and the saint within justifies self-righteous hatred—necessitated by the morality of the ideological system itself.