Beyond Order – Book Notes

Olivier Chabot|January 9, 2022|Advice To Myself, Book Notes, Notes
Reading Time: 25 minutes
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12 More Rules For Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

Buy the book!

Main Takeaways

  1. We mostly think by talking. “We need to talk — both to remember and to forget.” “We outsource the problem of sanity.” “Other people keep you sane. That is partly why it is a good idea to get married.” Couples can balance each other psychologically.
  2. “There is in fact little difference between how you should treat yourself—once you realize that you are a community that extends across time—and how you should treat other people.”
  3. “Do you really want to be anything you could be? Is that not too much? Might it not be better to be something specific (and then, perhaps, to add to that)? Would that not come as a relief even though it is also a sacrifice?” Marriage, Kids/Grand-kids, Career, Time away from family and work are genuine achievements of a life well lived.
  4. “There are three fundamental states of social being: tyranny (you do what I want), slavery (I do what you want), or negotiation.” Negotiation is the only way forward. You better start practicing now.
  5. “And maybe just maybe you will maintain the love of your life and you will have a friend and confidant, and this cold rock we live on at the far end of the cosmos will be a little warmer and more comforting than it would otherwise be. And you are going to need that, because rough times are always on their way, and you better have something to set against them or despair will visit and will not depart.”
  6. “You might argue, contrarily, that the scientific view of the world is more accurate, in some sense, and that the scientific view is not fundamentally a story. But, as far as I can tell, it is still nested inside a story: one that goes something like careful and unbiased pursuit of the truth will make the world a better place for all people, reducing suffering, extending life, and producing wealth.”
  7. “Can you organize the structure of reality so that you find the treasure, the positive aspect of nature smiles upon you, you are ruled by the wise king, and you play the role of hero?”
  8. Lying repetitively strenghtens the pathways in your brain that that grow like Billie Bixbee’s dragon. “Beginning to cease knowingly lying is a major step in the right direction.”
  9. “If you ever encounter someone who is malevolent, they have control over you in precise proportion to the extent that you are unwilling or unable to understand them.”
  10. “That decision seems to me to be courage subsumed to love. If it is resentment and bitterness and the consequent hatred that emerges from that tempting us toward the torment and destruction of everything that lives and suffers, then perhaps it is active love that aims at its betterment. And that seems to me to be the fundamental decision of life, and that it is correct to identify it, at least in a vital part, as an act of voluntary will. The reasons for acrimony, anger, resentment, and malevolence are strong and plentiful. Thus, it must be a leap of faith—a decision about a mode of being not so clearly justified by the evidence, particularly in hard times that Being should be strengthened and supported by your aims and your acts. That is something done in some deep sense despite “Eli Eli lama sabachthani”—something that says “despite it all, no matter what it is, onward and upward”—and that is precisely the impossible moral undertaking that is demanded from each of us for the world to function properly (even for it to avoid degeneration into hell).”

Book Notes

Rule I | Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement

  • We mostly think by talking. “We need to talk — both to remember and to forget.” “We outsource the problem of sanity.”
  • Here a few questions to ask a client to assess where they’re at. If the answer to any three or more of these questions is no, then the person might be insufficiently embedded in the interpersonal world and is in danger of spiraling downward psychologically because of that.
    • Have they been educated to the level of their intellectual ability or ambition?
    • Is their use of free time engaging, meaningful, and productive?
    • Have they formulated solid and well-articulated plans for the future?
    • Are they (and those they are close to) free of any serious physical health or economic problems?
    • Do they have friends and a social life?
    • A stable and satisfying intimate partnership?
    • Close and functional familial relationships?
    • A career—or, at least, a job—that is financially sufficient, stable and, if possible, a source of satisfaction and opportunity?
  • “We outsource the problem of sanity.”
  • “I had read accounts of clinical cases and personal development by 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.”
  • “These stories portray the existential dilemma that eternally characterizes human life: it is necessary to conform, to be disciplined, and to follow the rules—to do humbly what others do; but it is also necessary to use judgment, vision, and the truth that guides conscience to tell what is right, when the rules suggest otherwise. It is the ability to manage this combination that truly characterizes the fully developed personality: the true hero.”

Rule II | Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that

  • “How do you know who you are? After all, you are complex beyond your own understanding; more complex than anything else that exists, excepting other people; complex beyond belief. And your ignorance is further complicated by the intermingling of who you are with who you could be. You are not only something that is. You are something that is becoming—and the potential extent of that becoming also transcends your understanding. Everyone has the sense, I believe, that there is more to them than they have yet allowed to be realized. That potential is often obscured by poor health, misfortune, and the general tragedies and mishaps of life. But it can also be hidden by an unwillingness to take full advantage of the opportunities that life offers—abetted by regrettable errors of all sorts, including failures of discipline, faith, imagination, and commitment. Who are you? And, more importantly, who could you be, if you were everything you could conceivably be?”
    • The Self Authoring Program might help clarify where you’ve been, where and who you are, and where you’re going.
  • “You do not choose what interests you. It chooses you.”
  • “The soul willing to transform, as deeply as necessary, is the most effective enemy of the demonic serpents of ideology and totalitarianism, in their personal and social forms. The healthy, dynamic, and above all else truthful personality will admit to error.”
  • “Aim at something. Pick the best target you can currently conceptualize. Stumble toward it. Notice your errors and misconceptions along the way, face them, and correct them. Get your story straight. Past, present, future—they all matter. You need to map your path. You need to know where you were, so that you do not repeat the mistakes of the past. You need to know where you are, or you will not be able to draw a line from your starting point to your destination. You need to know where you are going, or you will drown in uncertainty, unpredictability, and chaos, and starve for hope and inspiration. For better or worse, you are on a journey. You are having an adventure—and your map better be accurate. Voluntarily confront what stands in your way. The way—that is the path of life, the meaningful path of life, the straight and narrow path that constitutes the very border between order and chaos, and the traversing of which brings them into balance.”
  • “Aim at something profound and noble and lofty. If you can find a better path along the way, once you have started moving forward, then switch course. Be careful, though; it is not easy to discriminate between changing paths and simply giving up. (One hint: if the new path you see forward, after learning what you needed to learn along your current way, appears more challenging, then you can be reasonably sure that you are not deluding or betraying yourself when you change your mind.) In this manner, you will zigzag forward. It is not the most efficient way to travel, but there is no real alternative, given that your goals will inevitably change while you pursue them, as you learn what you need to learn while you are disciplining yourself.”
  • “You will then find yourself turning across time, incrementally and gracefully, to aim ever more accurately at that tiny pinpoint, the X that marks the spot, the bull’s-eye, and the center of the cross; to aim at the highest value of which you can conceive. You will pursue a target that is both moving and receding: moving, because you do not have the wisdom to aim in the proper direction when you first take aim; receding, because no matter how close you come to perfecting what you are currently practicing, new vistas of possible perfection will open up in front of you.”
  • “With will and luck, you will find a story that is meaningful and productive, improves itself with time, and perhaps even provides you with more than a few moments of satisfaction and joy. With will and luck, you will be the hero of that story, the disciplined sojourner, the creative transformer, and the benefactor of your family and broader society.”

Rule III | Do not hide unwanted things in the fog

  • “Life is what repeats, and it is worth getting what repeats right.”
  • “The fog that hides is the refusal to notice—to attend to—emotions and motivational states as they arise, and the refusal to communicate them both to yourself and to the people who are close to you. A bad mood signifies something. A state of anxiety or sadness signifies something, and not likely something that will please you to discover.”

Rule IV | Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated

  • How to beceome invaluable in a workplace/community (Linchpin):
    • “Do the useful things no one else is doing.
    • Arrive earlier and leave later than your compatriots (but do not deny yourself your life).
    • Organize what you can see is dangerously disorganized.
    • Work, when you are working, instead of looking like you are working.
    • And finally, learn more about the business—or your competitors—than you already know. “
  • “How is it possible to gauge the rate at which challenges should be sought?”
    • Listen to your instinct for meaning. You’ll likely experience something akin to Flow when you’re in the Zone of Proximal Development.
    • “Does what you are attempting compel you forward, without being too frightening? Does it grip your interest, without crushing you? Does it eliminate the burden of time passing? Does it serve those you love and, perhaps, even bring some good to your enemies? That is responsibility.”
  • “No one with any sense tells their beloved son or daughter, “Look, kid, just do exactly what feels good in the moment, and to hell with everything else. It does not matter.”
    • “The mere fact that something makes you happy in the moment does not mean that it is in your best interest, everything considered.”
    • “So… a self-centred attitude is the source of the problem.  We have to take care of ourselves without selfishly taking care of ourselves.  If we don’t take care of ourselves, we cannot survive.  We need to do that.  We should have wise selfishness rather than foolish selfishness.  Foolish selfishness means you just think of yourself, don’t care about others, bully others, exploit others.  In fact, taking care of others, helping others ultimately is the way to discover your own joy and to have a happy life.  So that is what I call wise selfishness.” — Dalai Lama in The Book of Joy
    • You are a community of people. “There is the you now, and the you tomorrow, and the you next week, and next year, and in five years, and in a decade—and you are required by harsh necessity to take all of those “yous” into account.”
    • “There is in fact little difference between how you should treat yourself—once you realize that you are a community that extends across time—and how you should treat other people.”
  • 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.”
    • We treat the future and potential as a real thing in the present moment even though it’s not clear that it is.
  • “Happy is a right-now thing.” You are not necessarily a right-now being.
    • “Imagine it is living in accordance with the sense of responsibility, because that sets things right in the future.”
    • “The higher good would be the simultaneous optimization of your function and the function of the people around you, across time.”
  • “What is a truly reliable source of positive emotion?”
    • “The answer is that people experience positive emotion in relationship to the pursuit of a valuable goal.”
  • “Well, what exactly constitutes a valid goal?”
    • Your conscience will tell you if you aiming high enough. You will need to ask and listen carefully.
    • “There is no escaping from the future—and when you are stuck with something and there is no escaping from it, the right attitude is to turn around voluntarily and confront it. That works. And so, instead of your short-term impulsive goal, you lay out a much larger-scale goal, which is to act properly in relationship to the long term for everyone.”

Rule V | Do not do what you hate

  • Applying for jobs is a numbers’ game. You might need 150 appliations to get 3-5 interviews. Set your expectations low. It is not necessarily an indication that something is flawed about you.
    • “That could be a mission of a year or more. That is much less than a lifetime of misery and downward trajectory.”
  • “But it is once again worth realizing that staying where you should not be may be the true worst-case situation: one that drags you out and kills you slowly over decades.”

Rule VI | Abandon ideology

  • We discover what we value instead of create our values.
  • “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 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 (that masked complexity is part of the reason that the terms come to carry so much emotional weight).”
  • “ideologues lay claim to rationality itself. So, they try to justify their claims as logical and thoughtful. At least the fundamentalists admit devotion to something they just believe arbitrarily.”
  • “You are likely to be much more clear minded about what is what and who is who and where blame lies once you contemplate the log in your own eye, rather than the speck in your brothers. It is probable that your own imperfections are evident and plentiful, and could profitably be addressed, as step one in your Redeemer’s quest to improve the world. 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: part of the imitation of the hero, in the most profound of senses. This is a psychological or spiritual rather than a sociological or political issue.”
    • “sophisticated writers put the divide inside the characters they create, so that each person becomes the locus of the eternal struggle between light and darkness.”

Rule VII | Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens

  • “If you aim at nothing, you become plagued by everything. If you aim at nothing, you have nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nothing of high value in your life, as value requires the ranking of options and sacrifice of the lower to the higher. Do you really want to be anything you could be? Is that not too much? Might it not be better to be something specific (and then, perhaps, to add to that)? Would that not come as a relief—even though it is also a sacrifice?”
  • “Is there anything worth committing to? … It has become self-evident to me that many commitments have enduring value: those of character, love, family, friendship, and career foremost among them (and perhaps in that order). Those who remain unable or unwilling to establish a well-tended garden, so to speak, in any or all those domains inevitably suffer because of it. However, commitment requires its pound of flesh.”
    • Disciple = Freedom. The Story of the golden calf. Subtle Art chapter on commitment. … “Not all those who wander are lost.” Sure. But most of them are.
  • “A well-socialized child does not therefore lack aggression. She just becomes extremely good at being aggressive, transmuting what might otherwise be a disruptive drive into the focused perseverance and controlled competitiveness that make for a successful player.”
    • “It is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.”
    • “Do not foolishly confuse nice with good.”

Rule VIII | Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible

  • “Buy a piece of art. Find one that speaks to you and make the purchase. If it is a genuine artistic production, it will invade your life and change it. A real piece of art is a window into the transcendent, and you need that in your life, because you are finite and limited and bounded by your ignorance. Unless you can make a connection to the transcendent, you will not have the strength to prevail when the challenges of life become daunting. You need to establish a link with what is beyond you, like a man overboard in high seas requires a life preserver, and the invitation of beauty into your life is one means by which that may be accomplished.”
  • “Perception has been replaced for me with functional, pragmatic memory. This has made me more efficient, in some ways, but the cost is an impoverished experience of the richness of the world.”
    • You can train yourself to resee the world as it is.
    • “But art is not decoration. … Art is exploration. Artists train people to see.”
    • “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. Many things make life worth living: love, play, courage, gratitude, work, friendship, truth, grace, hope, virtue, and responsibility. But beauty is among the greatest of these.”
  • “We think we border our great paintings with luxurious, elaborate frames to glorify them, but we do it at least as much to insist to ourselves that the glory of the painting itself ends at the frame. That bounding, that bordering, leaves the world we are familiar with comfortably intact and unchanged. We do not want that beauty reaching out past the limitations imposed on it and disturbing everything that is familiar.”
    • “It is fear that entices us to imprison art. And no wonder.”
  • Make your workplace office beautiful. You may devote 30 years of your life in this place.
    • Don’t ask for permission. Just apologize later. Innovation often encounters friction.
    • “What is the moral of the story? Make yourself colorful, stand out, and the lions will take you down. And the lions are always there”. Robert Sapolsky Wildebeest story.

Rule IX | If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely

  • “It is a psychological truism that anything sufficiently threatening or harmful once encountered can never be forgotten if it has never been understood.”
    • “We need to know what happened and why, and we need to know it as simply and practically as possible.”
    • “[Emotions] care about one thing and one thing only: that you do not repeat a mistake.”
  • “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. We face a multitude of prospects—of manifold realities, each almost tangible—and by choosing one pathway rather than another, reduce that multitude to the singular actuality of reality. In doing so, we bring the world from becoming into Being. This is the most profound of mysteries. What is that potential that confronts us? And 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?”
    • “There is something else of perhaps equal import allied with this, impossible as that might seem, given the very unlikeliness of the role we appear to play in the shaping of reality. 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. Actions based upon the desire to take responsibility; to make things better; to avoid temptation and face what we would rather avoid; to act voluntarily, courageously, and truthfully—these make what comes into Being much better, in all ways, for ourselves and for others, than what arises as a consequence of avoidance, resentment, the search for revenge, or the desire for mayhem. 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.”
    • “It is that combination of Truth, Courage, and Love comprising the Ideal, whose active incarnation in each individual does in fact take the potential of the future and make the best of it.”
    • “everything that emerges from the realm of possibility in the act of creation (arguably, either divine or human) is good insofar as the motive for its creation is good. I do not believe there is a more daring argument in all of philosophy or in theology than this: To believe this, to act it out, is the fundamental act of faith.”
  • “Thus, it can be assumed from analysis of our own behavior that we know the difference between the pathway of good and the pathway of evil, and that we believe above all (despite our conscious resistance and prideful argument) in the existence of both.”

Rule X | Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship

There are not many genuine achievements of that magnitude in life; a number as small as four is a reasonable estimate.

Jordan B. Peterson – Beyond Order – Rule X
  1. Marriage
  2. Kids/Grand-kids
  3. Career
  4. Time away from family and work
Negotiation
  • “To negotiate, you and the person you are negotiating with must first know what you each need (and want)—and second, be willing to discuss both forthrightly.”
  • “You are going to have to negotiate in good faith, continually, to come to some sort of peaceful and productive accommodation. And if you do not? You are going to have your hands around each other’s throats for sixty years.”
  • “Life is too difficult to negotiate alone. If you tell your partner the truth, and you strive to act so that you can tell the truth about how you act, then you have someone to rely on when the seas become high and your ship threatens to founder.”
  • “Your life is, after all, mostly composed of what is repeated routinely.”
    • “Does somebody meet you at the door and indicate a certain degree of happiness to see you, or are you ignored because everyone is using their smartphones, or met with a litany of complaints? How would you like to organize that, so you do not dread the moment you arrive at home? There are things you do together that are mundane things; those things you do every day. But they are your whole life. You get those things right and you have established yourself much more effectively than you might realize.”
    • There are 200+ things to negotiate when marriaed to someone. You can expect to fight (hopefully gracefully and poductively). The more explicit the conclusions the better. It avoids resentment in the long haul.
    • Peterson suggest about 90 minutes per week to discuss partical and personal matters with your partner. ramit sethi is a big proponnent of relationship meetings.
    • Romance is play, and play does not take place easily when problems of any sort arise. Play requires peace, and peace requires negotiation.
  • Naivety ==> Cynicism ==> Trust ==> Courage
Finding Someone
  • “But you do not find so much as make, and if you do not know that you are in real trouble.”
    • We much more make/create/build/shape our partners rather than simply finding them in their perfect state.
  • “You just do not have that many chances in life to have an intimate relationship work out properly. Maybe it takes you two or three years to meet the potential Mr. or Ms. Right, and another two or three to determine if they are in fact who you think they are. That is five years. … How many good five-year chances do you therefore have?”
  • It is difficult to meet new people and keep them in your life as an adult.
    • “I have known people I met at that time of my life for a decade or more whom I still seem to consider new acquaintances.”
  • “Unless you are deceiving someone, why would you end up with anyone better than you?”
Marriage
  • “We live a very long time, but it is also all over in a flash, and it should be that you have accomplished what human beings accomplish when they live a full life, and marriage and children and grandchildren and all the trouble and heartbreak that accompanies all of that is far more than half of life. Miss it at your great peril.”
  • “Furthermore, if you have an escape route, there will not be enough heat generated in the chamber you find yourself jointly trapped in to catalyze the change necessary in both of you—the maturation, the development of wisdom—because maturation and the development of wisdom require a certain degree of suffering, and suffering is escapable as long as there is an out.”
  • “The breakup rate among people who are not married but are living together—so, married in everything but the formal sense—is substantially higher than the divorce rate among married couples.”
    • Couples who live together before getting married have higher divorce rates than couples who move in after getting married.
    • “It is of course possible that people who are more likely to get divorced, for reasons of temperament, are also more likely to live together, before or without marriage, rather or in addition to the possibility that living together just does not work. It is no simple matter to disentangle the two causal factors. But it does not matter, practically. Cohabitation without the promise of permanent commitment, socially announced, ceremonially established, seriously considered, does not produce more robust marriages. And there is nothing good about that—particularly for children, who do much worse in single parent (generally male-absent) families.”
  • “Other people keep you sane. That is partly why it is a good idea to get married.” Couples can balance each other psychologically.
  • “Single people have far less sex, on average, than married people, although I suppose that a small percentage are making out like bandits. But I cannot see that even those successful in that manner are doing themselves any favors.”
  • “And maybe—just maybe—you will maintain the love of your life and you will have a friend and confidant, and this cold rock we live on at the far end of the cosmos will be a little warmer and more comforting than it would otherwise be. And you are going to need that, because rough times are always on their way, and you better have something to set against them or despair will visit and will not depart.”
  • “That is what the ceremony of the candle represents: Neither participant rules the other. Instead, both bow to the principle of illumination. In that circumstance, it is not that one must abide by what the other wants (or vice versa). Instead, it is that both should be oriented toward the most positive future possible, and agree that speaking the truth is the best pathway forward.””That ghostly figure, the ideal union of what is best in both personalities, should be constantly regarded as the ruler of the marriage—and, indeed, as something as close to divine as might be practically approached by fallible individuals.”
  • “The entire biological course of our destiny, since reproduction progressed past the mere division of cells, appears driven by the fact that it was better for two dissimilar creatures to come together to produce a comparatively novel version of themselves than to merely clone their current embodiment.”
Divorce
  • “You will be tempted by avoidance, anger, and tears, or enticed to employ the trapdoor of divorce so that you will not have to face what must be faced. But your failure will haunt you while you are enraged, weeping, or in the process of separating, as it will in the next relationship you stumble into, with all your unsolved problems intact and your negotiating skills not improved a whit.”
  • “The part of you that claims to desire freedom (but really wants to avoid any permanent and therefore terrifying responsibility)”
Affairs
  • “If you are married to someone, you often see them at their worst, because you have to share the genuine difficulties of life with them. You save the easy parts for your adulterous partner: no responsibility, just expensive restaurants, exciting nights of rule breaking, careful preparation for romance, and the general absence of reality that accompanies the privilege of making one person pay for the real troubles of existence while the other benefits unrealistically from their absence. You do not have a life with someone when you have an affair with them. You have an endless array of desserts (at least in the beginning), and all you have to do is scoop the whipped cream off the top of each of them and devour it. That is it. You see each other under the best possible conditions, with nothing but sex in your minds and nothing else interfering with your lives. As soon as it transforms from that into a relationship that has any permanency, a huge part of the affair immediately turns right back into whatever it was that was bothering you about your marriage.”
  • “An affair is not helpful, and people end up horribly hurt. Particularly children—and it is to them you owe primary allegiance.”
Romance
  • “My observation has been that the typical adult couple—when they have a job, children, and the domestic economy we just discussed, and all that worry and responsibility and concern—might manage once or twice a week, or even three times a week (not likely), for a reasonable romantic interlude. … If you go to zero, then one of you is going to have an affair—physical, emotional, fantastical, or some combination of the three.”
  • “Maybe there is a list of ten things you will do in a day, and sex is number eleven. It is not that you do not think sex is important, but you do not ever get past number five on the list of ten. You must make space and time, and, as far as I can tell, you have to do it consciously.”
  • Reward your partner for their efforts.
    • “Here is a rule: do not ever punish your partner for doing something you want them to continue doing. Particularly if it took some real courage—some real going above and beyond the call of duty to manage.”

Rule XI | Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant

  • “You might argue, contrarily, that the scientific view of the world is more accurate, in some sense, and that the scientific view is not fundamentally a story. But, as far as I can tell, it is still nested inside a story: one that goes something like careful and unbiased pursuit of the truth will make the world a better place for all people, reducing suffering, extending life, and producing wealth.”
  • “It might even be the story of how the periodic table of the elements was discovered, and the triumphs and difficulties that accompanied the process. It does not matter. If it is well told, it is gripping, and likely to be remembered. If you want to teach a child something and get them to attend, tell them a story. They will repeatedly ask you to do that. They do not grab your pant leg and beg, “Dad, one more line from the periodic table of the elements before bed!” But they are highly motivated to hear a story—sometimes even the same one every night.”
  • “We know that human beings are innately afraid of reptilian predators, for example—and that there is good reason for that. It is not merely that we are prepared to learn fear of them (which we certainly are): the fear itself is innate.”
  • “There is a monster in the dark, Dad!” they insist, at nighttime. And Dad assures his son or daughter that there is no such thing as a monster. Well, the adult is wrong, and the child is exactly right. … That is why it might be of more use to let your child know directly and through your own actions that there is always something sinister and dangerous in the dark, and that it is the job of the well-prepared individual to confront it and take the treasure it archetypally guards. It is something that an adult and child can act out with great results.”
  • “There is nothing but sterility without unpredictability, even though a bit less unpredictability often seems eminently desirable.”
    • “Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
    • “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.” – Victor Frankl
  • Compassion can be taken too far.
    • “This needs to be understood at an embodied level. Excess sentimentality is an illness, a developmental failure, and a curse to children and others who need our care (but not too much of it).”
  • “Now, as far as I am concerned, dreams are statements from nature. It is not so much that we create them. They manifest themselves to us. I have never seen a dream present something I believed to be untrue. … The dream serves as the first cognitive step—in the wake of basic emotional, motivational, and bodily reactions such as fear or curiosity or freezing—in transforming that unknown into actionable and even articulable knowledge. The dream is the birthplace of the thought, and often of the thought that does not come easily to the conscious mind. It is not hiding anything; it is just not very good at being clear (although that certainly does not mean that it cannot be profound).”
  • “How is it possible for us to retain the advantages of simplification, without falling prey to the accompanying blindness? The answer is to be found in the constant dialogue between genuinely different types of people. Much of what people believe politically—ideologically, let us say—is based on their inborn temperament.”
    • “It is of great interest to note that difference in fundamental political belief appears to determine which of the twinned Great Fathers are considered of fundamental reality. The liberal tends strongly to see the world as the Authoritarian Tyrant suppressing the Benevolent Goddess—as the arbitrary strictures of dead culture corrupting and oppressing citizen and foreigner alike, or as the military-industrial structure of modern society threatening Gaia, the living planet, with pollution, mass extinction, or climate change. Such a viewpoint is obviously useful when culture has become truly tyrannical—and that is by no means uncommon. The conservative tends, conversely, to see the world as Wise King—security of place, order, and predictability—bringing to heel, taming and disciplining the Evil Queen—nature as disorder and chaos. That is obviously necessary as well. No matter how beautiful the natural world, we should remember that it is always conspiring to starve, sicken, and kill us, and that if we lacked the protective shield constituted by Culture as Security we would be devoured by wild animals, frozen by blizzards, prostrated by the heat of the desert, and starved by the fact that food does not simply manifest itself for our delectation. So there are two different ideologies—both of which are correct, but each of which tell only half the story.”
    • “So, there exists a hero and an adversary; a wise king and a tyrant; a positive and negative maternal figure; and chaos itself. That is the structure of the world in six characters (with the strange seventh of chaos in some sense the ultimate birthplace of all the others). … If you are wise, your political philosophy encompasses a representation of all seven, even if you could not articulate it in those terms.”
    • “What do you do about that, when you are not blinded by ideology, and you see the world and all its dramatic characters clearly? Well, you do not hope for the infinite perfectibility of humanity and aim your system at some unattainable utopia. You try to design a system that sinners such as you cannot damage too badly—too permanently even when they are half blind and resentful.”
      • “There is no certain path, even with the noblest of actions. The arbitrariness of the world is always at the ready, preparing to manifest itself. There is no reason or excuse to be stupidly naive or optimistic.”
      • “The road to hell was paved with good intentions.”
  • “I think it is reasonable to posit that it is often the people who have had too easy a time—who have been pampered and elevated falsely in their self-esteem—who adopt the role of victim and the mien of resentment. … Thus, resentment does not appear to be an inevitable consequence of suffering itself.”
  • “can you organize the structure of reality so that you find the treasure, the positive aspect of nature smiles upon you, you are ruled by the wise king, and you play the role of hero?”
  • “In the early chapters of Genesis, God creates habitable chaos out of order with the Word, with the Logos: courage, love, and truth.”
  • “When you habitually engage in deceit, you build a structure much like the one that perpetuates addiction, especially if you get away with it, however briefly. … This reinforces the development of the neural mechanism in your brain comprising the structure of the entire system of deception. With continued success, at least in the short term, this mechanism begins to work with increasing automaticity—and comes to act, in its arrogant manner, knowing that it can get away with it. That is more obvious for sins of commission; but it is equally and more dangerously and subtly true for what you could know but refuse to—sins of omission. That is the arrogance of believing that what you know is sufficient (regardless of the evidence that accumulates around you, in the form of suffering, which is all too easily and archetypally, let us say, blamed on the structure of reality and the apparent insufficiency of God)”

Rule XII | Be grateful in spite of your suffering

  • “However, even though I regard the inevitability of suffering and its exaggeration by malevolence as unshakable existential truths, I believe even more deeply that people have the ability to transcend their suffering, psychologically and practically, and to constrain their own malevolence, as well as the evils that characterize the social and the natural worlds.”
    • “Human beings have the capacity to courageously confront their suffering—to transcend it psychologically, as well as to ameliorate it practically. This is the most fundamental twin axiom of psychotherapy, regardless of school of thought, as well as key to the mystery of human success and progress across history itself. If you confront the limitations of life courageously, that provides you with a certain psychological purpose that serves as an antidote to the suffering.”
    • “It is for such reasons and because of such examples—watching people confront the existential catastrophe of life forthrightly and effectively—that I am more optimistic than pessimistic, and that I believe that optimism is, fundamentally, more reliable than pessimism.”
    • “Courage and nobility in the face of tragedy is the reverse of the destructive, nihilistic cynicism apparently justified under just such circumstances.”
    • “That decision seems to me to be courage subsumed to love. If it is resentment and bitterness and the consequent hatred that emerges from that tempting us toward the torment and destruction of everything that lives and suffers, then perhaps it is active love that aims at its betterment. And that seems to me to be the fundamental decision of life, and that it is correct to identify it, at least in a vital part, as an act of voluntary will. The reasons for acrimony, anger, resentment, and malevolence are strong and plentiful. Thus, it must be a leap of faith—a decision about a mode of being not so clearly justified by the evidence, particularly in hard times—that Being should be strengthened and supported by your aims and your acts. That is something done in some deep sense despite “Eli Eli lama sabachthani”—something that says “despite it all, no matter what it is, onward and upward”—and that is precisely the impossible moral undertaking that is demanded from each of us for the world to function properly (even for it to avoid degeneration into hell).”
    • “You cannot properly appreciate what you have unless you have some sense not only of how terrible things could be, but of how terrible it is likely for things to be, given how easy it is for things to be so. This is something that is very much worth knowing. Otherwise you might find yourself tempted to ask, Why would I ever look into the darkness?”
      • We watch scary movies on purpose.
  • “Beginning to cease knowingly lying is a major step in the right direction.”
  • “If you ever encounter someone who is malevolent, they have control over you in precise proportion to the extent that you are unwilling or unable to understand them.”
  • “There is something in all of us that works in counterposition to our voluntarily expressed desires. There are in fact many such somethings—a chorus of demons, so to speak—working at cross-purposes even to each other; many dark and unarticulated motivations and systems of belief, all manifesting themselves as partial personalities (but with all the essential features of personality, despite their partial nature).”
    • Resistance (The War of Art – by Steven Pressfield)
    • Yetzer Hara – TED Talk Enter the cult of extreme productivity | Mark Adams | TEDxHSG
    • “You are you, after all, and you should—virtually by definition—be in control of yourself. But things often do not work that way, and the reason or reasons they do not are deeply mysterious.”
  • “Good can be conceptualized—however vaguely in its initial formulation—as the opposite of whatever constitutes evil, which is usually more readily identifiable in the world than goodness.”
  • “If you truly love someone, it can seem a deep form of betrayal to stay integrated and healthy, in essence, in their absence or sadly waning presence.”
    • “Grief must be a reflection of love. It is perhaps the ultimate proof of love. Grief is an uncontrollable manifestation of your belief that the lost person’s existence, limited and flawed as it might have been, was worthwhile, despite the limitations and flaws even of life itself.
    • “So, you might love people despite their limitations, but you also love them because of their limitations.”
  • “In any familial gathering, there is tension between the warmth you feel and the bonding of memory and shared experience, and the sorrow inevitably accompanying that. You see some relatives who are in a counterproductive stasis, or wandering down a path that is not good for them. You see others aging, losing their vitality and health (and that sight interferes with and disrupts your memories of their more powerful and youthful selves: a dual loss, then, of present and past).”

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