Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

This is an invitation to both paranoia and persecution.

To take the world’s sins onto yourself—to assume responsibility for the fact that things have not been set right in your own life and elsewhere—is part of the messianic path:

It is impossible to fight patriarchy, reduce oppression, promote equality, transform capitalism, save the environment, eliminate competitiveness, reduce government, or to run every organization like a business. Such concepts are simply too low-resolution.

The single axioms of the ideologically possessed are gods, served blindly by their proselytizers.

We should conceptualize them at the scale at which we might begin to solve them, not by blaming others, but by trying to address them personally while simultaneously taking responsibility for the outcome.

Rule VII WORK AS HARD AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN ON AT LEAST ONE THING AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS The Value of Heat and Pressure

That which is valuable is pure, properly aligned, and glitters with light—and this is true for the person just as it is for the gem.

We are directionless, confused, and paralyzed by indecision. We are pulled in all directions by temptations, despite our stated will, and we waste time, procrastinate, and feel terrible about it, but we do not change.

The powerful instinctual servants at the bottom, governing thirst, hunger, rage, sadness, elation, and lust, can easily ascend and become our masters, and just as easily wage war with one another.

Without clear, well-defined, and noncontradictory goals, the sense of positive engagement that makes life worthwhile is very difficult to obtain.

The physical consequences of depression, often preceded by excess secretion of the stress hormone cortisol, are essentially indistinguishable from rapid aging (weight gain, cardiovascular problems, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s).

Aim. Point. All this is part of maturation and discipline, and something to be properly valued.

The Worst Decision of All

I typically encouraged my clients to choose the best path currently available to them, even if it was far from their ideal. This sometimes meant tolerating at least a temporary decrease in ambition, or in pride, but had the advantage of substituting something real for something available only in fantasy. Improvements in mental health almost invariably followed.

Sometimes the match between person and choice is so poor that even commitment will not suffice to bring about the desired end. But very often failure is a consequence of insufficient single-mindedness, elaborate but pointless rationalization, and rejection of responsibility.

Those who do not choose a direction are lost. It is far better to become something than to remain anything but become nothing.

the worst decision of all is none.

Discipline and Unity

At a very early age, children begin to order the multiplicity of emotions and motivations that constitute their basic instincts of survival into the strategies of co...

teaching the child to solve the problem himself. When the latter process has been completed with sufficient thoroughness, the child is ready to join the social world. This must happen by the age of four, or it may never happen.

When a child plays a game with others, she is disciplining herself.

the properly functioning and integrated individual tempers the desires of the present with the necessities of the future (including the necessity of playing well with others).

This, it should be noted, is not repression.

But proper discipline organizes rather than destroys.

Instead, she integrates it into her increasingly sophisticated game-playing ability, allowing it to feed her competitiveness and heighten her attention,

By the dawn of adolescence, such a child can organize herself into ever more complex games—joint,

This is all necessary preparation for the more permanent choices that must be made for a successful adulthood.

although it may be possible to argue about which morality is the necessary morality, it is not possible to argue that morality itself is thus unnecessary.

the claim that morality is both necessary and inevitable is not totalitarian. It is merely the observation that basic, primitive unidimensional values must be subsumed under socially organized structures for peace and harmony to exist and be maintained. It was the bringing together of a warring multiplicity under the unifying doctrines of Christianity that civilized Europe.

the rules of Christianity and the rules of Buddhism are by no means arbitrary, by no means nonsensical superstition, any more than the rules of a playable game are merely arbitrary or nonsensically superstitious. To think that peace can exist without the overarching and voluntarily accepted game is to misunderstand the ever-present danger of the fragmented tribalism to which we can so easily and devastatingly regress.

Adherence to this process will make him a socially sophisticated, productive, and psychologically healthy adult, capable of true reciprocity (and, perhaps, the temporary suspension of the demand of reciprocity necessary to raise children).

The master, who is the rightful product of apprenticeship, is, however, no longer the servant of dogma. Instead, he is now himself served by dogma, which he has the responsibility to maintain as well as the right to change, when change is necessary.

The master can allow himself his intuitions, as the knowledge obtained by the discipline he has acquired will enable him to criticize his own ideas and assess their true value.

Dogma and Spirit

Thou Shalt Nots—rules that highlight what is definitely not to be done, while whatever is supposed to be done is taking place.

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

the third means that it is wrong to claim moral inspiration from God while knowingly committing sinful acts;

It is worthwhile thinking of these Commandments as a minimum set of rules for a stable society—an iterable social game.

The core idea is this: subjugate yourself voluntarily to a set of socially determined rules—those with some tradition in their formulation—and a unity that transcends the rules will emerge.

Western culture is “unconsciously” underpinned by a very profound drama, reflecting all this, because of its origin in Judeo-Christian conceptualization.

If you work as hard as you can on one thing, you will change. You will start to also become one thing, instead of the clamoring multitude you once were.

Rule VIII TRY TO MAKE ONE ROOM IN YOUR HOME AS BEAUTIFUL AS POSSIBLE Cleaning Your Room Is Not Enough

Making something beautiful is difficult, but it is amazingly worthwhile. If you learn to make something in your life truly beautiful—even one thing—then you have established a relationship with beauty. From there you can begin to expand that relationship out into other elements of your life and the world. That is an invitation to the divine.

If you study art (and literature and the humanities), you do it so that you can familiarize yourself with the collected wisdom of our civilization.

You will become more your own person, and less a dull and hapless tool of peer pressure, vogue, fad, and ideology.

We live by beauty. We live by literature. We live by art. We cannot live without some connection to the divine—and beauty is divine—because in its absence life is too short, too dismal, and too tragic.

Memory and Vision

When I was a child, I knew the contours and details of all the houses in my immediate neighborhood. I knew the back alleys, the places behind the fences, the location of each crack in the pavement, and the shortcuts that could be taken from one place to another. My geographical locale was not large, but I had explored it thoroughly and my knowledge of it was very detailed.

I am simply not there in my adult neighborhood the same way I was as a child in my hometown. I am separated from the reality of the world. And a very deep feeling of belonging is missing in some important way because of that.

Some, in fact, never lose the glorious vision of childhood. This is particularly true of artists (and, indeed, seems a vital part of what makes them artists). William Blake, the English painter, printmaker, and poet, appears to have been one such person. He inhabited a uniquely visionary world. Blake perceived something closer to what the philosopher Immanuel Kant termed “the thing in itself”