Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

It is the unfathomable totality of the world, past, present, and future bound up together: every level connected to every other level, nothing existing in isolation, everything implying something vital but beyond our comprehension, and all of it speaking of the overwhelming mystery of Being.

so that we can remember how awe inspiring and miraculous the world really is, under the mundane familiarity to which we have reduced it.

It is frightening to perceive the shells of ourselves that we have become. It is frightening to glimpse, even for a moment, the transcendent reality that exists beyond.

The Land You Know, the Land You Do Not Know, and the Land You Cannot Even Imagine

The unknown manifests itself to you in the midst of the known.

Knowledge must pass through many stages of analysis—a multitude of transformations—before it becomes, let us say, commonplace.

The world of possibility begins to actualize itself with such instinctual, embodied action, unconscious and uncontrollable.

Artists are the people who stand on the frontier of the transformation of the unknown into knowledge. They make their voluntary foray out into the unknown, and they take a piece of it and transform it into an image.

That edge, where artists are always transforming chaos into order, can be a very rough and dangerous place.

Art bears the same relationship to society that the dream bears to mental life. You are very creative when you are dreaming.

It is a miracle: nature’s voice manifesting itself in your psyche. And it happens every night. Like art, the dream mediates between order and chaos.

Those who actualize those half-born visions into artistic productions are those who begin to transform what we do not understand into what we can at least start to see.

That is a great sin, harnessing the higher for the purposes of the lower. It is a totalitarian tactic, the subordination of art and literature to politics

Artists must be contending with something they do not understand, or they are not artists.

One Room

Everything changes. Pure traditionalism is doomed for that very reason. We need the new, merely to maintain our position. And we need to see what we have become blinded to, by our very expertise and specialization, so that we do not lose touch with the Kingdom of God and die in our boredom, ennui, arrogance, blindness to beauty, and soul-deadening cynicism.

Not Decoration

there is little doubt that many who merely disdain tradition mask the sentiment with artistic pretension.

It is easy to make the opposite error, as well: that art should be pretty and easily appreciated,

Beauty leads you back to what you have lost. Beauty reminds you of what remains forever immune to cynicism. Beauty beckons in a manner that straightens your aim. Beauty reminds you that there is lesser and greater value.

Rule IX IF OLD MEMORIES STILL UPSET YOU, WRITE THEM DOWN CAREFULLY AND COMPLETELY But Is Yesterday Finished with You?

But at one level of analysis, whether you fell or were pushed makes little difference—not to the emotional systems that have emerged over the course of evolution and now serve to protect you. They care about one thing and one thing only: that you do not repeat a mistake.

A part of reality, and a perilous part, has remained unmapped, low resolution, lacking sufficient detail—and so has a part of you.

Learn from the past. Or repeat its horrors, in imagination, endlessly.

It is a psychological truism that anything sufficiently threatening or harmful once encountered can never be forgotten if it has never been understood.1

We must recollect our experiences and derive from them their moral. Otherwise, we remain in the past, plagued by reminiscences, tormented by conscience, cynical for the loss of what might have been, unforgiving of ourselves, and unable to accept the challenges and tragedies facing us.

And cynicism about the future rationalizes the avoidance and deception. That is hell, and there is no limit to its depth. The humility required to clamber out of such hell exists in precise proportion to the magnitude of the unrequited errors of the past.

We have all been petrified by the unknown, even though that seems a contradiction in terms. But the body knows what the mind does not yet grasp. And it remembers. And it demands that understanding be established.

Do Not Fall Twice into the Same Pit

And which memory is more accurate: the partial picture of adult motivation we have as children, or the revised recollections made possible by maturity?

Possessed by Ghosts

When you are dreaming, the same brain areas that govern active movement when you are awake are often stimulated (you experience this as the sense of moving while in your dream). You do not move around in sync with that brain activation because your voluntary musculature is switched off, physiologically, by a specialized neurochemical mechanism that has exactly that function.2 Otherwise you would get out of bed and act out your dream and get yourself into trouble very quickly.

someone who “somatized,” or physically represented their psychological symptoms. Freud noted that such somatization was often symbolic—that the manner in which the physical disability or oddity manifested had some meaningful relationship with the trauma that had precipitated it.

hypnosis had been used with some success (albeit many years ago) with somatization disorders.

Uncomprehended Malevolence

Potential into Actuality

It is far from uncommon for people to worry, sometimes unbearably, about what lies ahead of them. That worry is a both a consequence of and an investigation into the multiple pathways extending from now into the future.

To decide, by contrast, voluntarily and freely, is difficult and demanding.

when we decide, we actively confront the future. We seem destined to face something akin to unformed potential and to determine what will emerge as the present—and then the past.

We literally make the world what it is, from the many things we perceive it could be. Doing so is perhaps the primary fact of our being, and perhaps of Being itself.

what constitutes our strange ability to shape that possibility, and to make what is real and concrete from what begins, in some sense, as the merely imaginary?

Not only do our choices play a determining role in transforming the multiplicity of the future into the actuality of the present, but—more specifically—the ethics of our choices play that role.

This means that if we act ethically, in the deepest and most universal of senses, then the tangible reality that emerges from the potential we face will be good instead of dreadful—or at least as good as we can make it.

Everyone seems to know this. We are universally tormented by our consciences for what we know we should have done yet did not do. We are tormented equally by what we did but know we should not have done.

And what is the source for that inescapable conscience? If we were the source of our own values and masters of our own houses, then we could act or fail to act as we choose and not suffer the pangs of regret, sorrow, and shame.

If we fail to hold ourselves to that standard of responsibility, then other people regard us as lacking in ethics and integrity.

we believe each person should justly receive the fruit of their honest and voluntary labor.

it is practically impossible to establish a positive relationship with any other (or even our private selves) without that attribution of personal agency, free will, and responsibility.

The Word as Savior

The twin ideas that we all are, as sovereign individuals, first, voluntarily participating in the act of creation itself and, second, determining the quality of that creation with the ethics of our choices finds reflection in...