Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life – N Δ T H Δ N S Δ M U E L

By Jordan B. Peterson ,

Rating:
4.5 Stars

The sequel to 12 Rules for Life offers further guidance on the periolus path of modern life.

In 12 Rules for Life, clinical psychologist and celebrated professor at Harvard and the University of Toronto Dr. Jordan B. Peterson helped millions of readers impose order on the chaos of their lives. Now, in this bold sequel, Peterson delivers twelve more lifesaving principles for resisting the exhausting toll that our desire to order the world inevitably takes.

In a time when the human will increasingly imposes itself over every sphere of life—from our social structures to our emotional states—Peterson warns that too much security is dangerous. What’s more, he offers strategies for overcoming the cultural, scientific, and psychological forces causing us to tend toward tyranny, and teaches us how to rely instead on our instinct to find meaning and purpose, even—and especially—when we find ourselves powerless.

While chaos, in excess, threatens us with instability and anxiety, unchecked order can petrify us into submission. Beyond Order provides a call to balance these two fundamental principles of reality itself, and guides us along the straight and narrow path that divides them.

1. “Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.”
2. “Imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that.”
3. “Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.”
4. “Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.”
5. “Do not do what you hate.”
6. “Abandon ideology.”
7. “Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens.”
8. “Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible.”
9. “If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely.”
10. “Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship.”
11. “Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant.”
12. “Be grateful in spite of your suffering.”

Quotes & Personal Highlights:

Why Beyond Order? It is simple, in some regard. Order is explored territory. We are in order when the actions we deem appropriate produce the results we aim at.

specifically? Rule I describes the relationship between stable, predictable social structures and individual psychological health, and makes the case that such structures need to be updated by creative people if they are to retain their vitality. Rule II analyzes a centuries-old alchemical image, relying on several stories—ancient and modern—to illuminate the nature and development of the integrated human personality. Rule III warns of the dangers of avoiding the information (vital to the continual rejuvenation of the psyche) signaled by the emergence of negative emotions such as pain, anxiety, and fear. Rule IV argues that the meaning that sustains people through difficult times is to be found not so much in happiness, which is fleeting, but in in the voluntary adoption of mature responsibility for the self and others. Rule V uses a single example, drawn from my experience as a clinical psychologist, to illustrate the personal and social necessity of attending to the dictates of conscience. Rule VI describes the danger of attributing the cause of complex individual and social problems to single variables such as sex, class, or power. Rule VII outlines the crucial relationship between disciplined striving in a single direction and forging of the individual character capable of resilience in the face of adversity. Rule VIII focuses on the vital importance of aesthetic experience as a guide to what is true, good, and sustaining in the human world of experience. Rule IX makes the case that past experiences, whose current recall remains laden with pain and fear, can be stripped of their horror by voluntary verbal exploration and reconsideration. Rule X notes the importance of explicit negotiation to maintenance of the good will, mutual regard, and heartfelt cooperation without which no true romance can be sustained. Rule XI opens by describing the world of human experience in a manner that explains what motivates three common but direly dangerous patterns of psychological response, delineates the catastrophic consequences of falling prey to any or all of them, and lays out an alternative route. Rule XII makes the case that thankfulness in the face of the inevitable tragedies of life should be regarded as a primary manifestation of the admirable

We all need to think to keep things straight, but we mostly think by talking. We need to talk about the past, so we can distinguish the trivial, overblown concerns that otherwise plague our thoughts from the experiences that are truly important. We need to talk about the nature of the present and our plans for the future, so we know where we are, where we are going, and why we are going there.

dependent on the social world when I first start working with them: 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? If the answer to any three or more of these questions is no, I consider that my new client is insufficiently embedded in the interpersonal world and is in danger of spiraling downward psychologically because of that.

To have others attend to what you find important or interesting is to validate, first, the importance of what you are attending to, but second, and more crucially, to validate you as a respected center of conscious experience and contributor to the collective world.

because there are unlimited problems and there are hypothetically unlimited potential solutions, but there are a comparatively limited number of solutions that work practically, psychologically, and socially simultaneously.

The verbal framework that helps us delimit the world is a consequence of the landscape of value that is constructed socially—but also bounded by the brute necessity of reality itself.

As nervous systems increase in sophistication, and more and more layers of neural intermediation emerge, the relationship between simple fact and motor output

Humility: It is better to presume ignorance and invite learning than to assume sufficient knowledge and risk the consequent blindness.

arrogance bars the path to learning.

SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS ARE NECESSARY—BUT INSUFFICIENT Sanity is knowing the rules of the social game, internalizing them, and following them. Differences in status are therefore inevitable, as all worthwhile endeavors have a goal, and those who pursue them have different abilities in relationship to that goal. Accepting the fact of this disequilibrium and striving forward nonetheless—whether presently at the bottom, middle, or top—is an important element of mental health.

“Follow rules except when doing so undermines the purpose of those selfsame rules—in which case take the risk of acting in a manner contrary to what has been agreed upon as moral.”

follow the rules until you are capable of being a shining exemplar of what they represent, but break them when those very rules now constitute the most dire impediment to the embodiment of their central virtues.

“On that same day, observing one working on the Sabbath, [Jesus] said to him O Man, if indeed thou knowest what thou doest, thou art blest; but if thou knowest not, thou art accursed, and a transgressor of the Law.”12 What does this statement mean? It sums up the meaning of Rule I perfectly. If you understand the rules—their necessity, their sacredness, the chaos they keep at bay, how they unite the communities that follow them, the price paid for their establishment, and the danger of breaking them—but you are willing to fully shoulder the responsibility of making an exception, because you see that as serving a higher good (and if you are a person with sufficient character to manage that distinction), then you have served the spirit, rather than the mere law, and that is an elevated moral act. But if you refuse to realize the importance of the rules you are violating and act out of self-centered convenience, then you are appropriately and inevitably damned. The carelessness you exhibit with regard to your own tradition will undo you and perhaps those around you fully and painfully across time.

would say that if someone benefits from your help, then it’s not wrong. Part of your reason for helping is that you’re reaching out because you need help too, so you’re helping each other. When we help others, it’s sometimes the connection we crave, and it’s the connection that creates happiness.

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,

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates believed that all learning was a form of remembering. Socrates posited that the soul, immortal in its essence, knew everything before it was born anew as an infant. However, at the point of birth all previous knowledge was forgotten and had to be recalled through the experiences of life.

We can also observe someone act or something occur and write down what we see, translating action into language that outlasts its utterance—and then communicate it later in the absence of what or whom is being described.

for example, that the biblical story of Moses and the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt became such a powerful touchstone for black slaves seeking emancipation in the United States: Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land Tell old Pharaoh To let my people go.2

information? Think about what happens, for example, when you stop by the mailbox and pick up your mail. Consider, as well, what that mail is “made of.” Materially speaking, it is merely paper and ink. But that material substrate is essentially irrelevant. It would not matter if the message was delivered by email or voice—or in Morse code, for that matter. What is relevant is the content. And that means that each piece of mail is a container of content—of potential or information, positive, neutral, or negative. Maybe, for example, it is a notification of investigation from your country’s tax department. This means that, despite its apparently harmless presence in your hand, the letter is tightly and inextricably connected to a gigantic, complex and oft-arbitrary structure that may well not have your best interests in mind. Alternatively, perhaps it is something joyful, such as an unexpected letter from someone loved or a long-awaited check. From such a perspective, an envelope is a container—a mysterious container, at least in potential—from which an entire new world might emerge.

such potential for horror simultaneously adds vital interest to life. Strangely, the round chaos may be familiar to modern audiences (again, even if they do not know it), because of the Harry Potter series of books and films. J. K. Rowling, the series author, takes some pains to describe a sporting event, Quidditch, which helps to define and unify Hogwarts. The point of Quidditch is to drive a ball (the Quaffle) through one of the three hoops guarded by the opposing team, while flying about the playing pitch on enchanted brooms. Success in doing so gains the scorer’s team 10 points. Simultaneously, two separate players (one from each team) play another game—a game within the game. Chosen for their exceptional skill in attention and flight, these two competitors—known as Seekers—attempt to locate, chase, and capture a winged ball, the Snitch, which is identical in appearance to the round chaos that sits at the bottom of the alchemist’s image. The Snitch is golden—indicating its exceptional value and purity*—and zips around chaotically, at a very fast rate, darting, weaving, bobbing, and racing the Seekers as they pursue it astride their brooms. If a Seeker captures the Snitch, his or her team gains 150 points (typically enough to ensure victory) and the entire game comes to an end. This indicates that chasing and capturing whatever is represented by the Snitch—and, by implication, the round chaos—is a goal whose importance supersedes any other.* Why is Rowling’s game, conjured up for us by her deep imagination, structured in that manner? What does her narrative idea signify? There are two ways of answering these questions (although both answers relate importantly to each other): First: In Rule I, we discussed the idea that the true winner of any game is the person who plays fair. This is because playing fair, despite the particularities of any given game, is a higher-order accomplishment than mere victory.

First: In Rule I, we discussed the idea that the true winner of any game is the person who plays fair. This is because playing fair, despite the particularities of any given game, is a higher-order accomplishment than mere victory. Striving to play fair, in the ultimate sense—following the spirit of the rules, as well as the letter—is an indication of true personality development, predicated as it is on concern for true reciprocity.

Each of us, when fortunate, is compelled forward by something that grips our attention—love of a person; a sport; a political, sociological, or economic problem, or a scientific question; a passion for art, literature, or drama—something that calls to us for reasons we can neither control nor understand (try to make yourself interested in something you just do not care about and see how well that works). The phenomena that grip us (phenomena: from the Greek word phainesthai, “to appear, or to be brought to light”) are like lamps along a dark path: they are part of the unconscious processes devoted to integrating and furthering the development of our spirits, the furtherance of our psychological development. You do not choose what interests you. It chooses you. Something manifests itself out of the darkness as compelling, as worth living for; following that, something moves us further down the road, to the next meaningful manifestation—and so it goes, as we continue to seek, develop, grow, and thrive. It is a perilous journey, but it is also the adventure of our lives. Think of pursuing someone you love: catch them or not, you change in the process. Think, as well, of the traveling you have done, or of the work you have undertaken, whether for pleasure or necessity. In all these cases you experience what is new. Sometimes that is painful; sometimes it is better than anything else that has ever happened to you. Either way, it is deeply informative. It is all part of the potential of the world, calling you into Being, changing you forever—for better or worse—in consequence of your pursuit.

First, you find yourself interested in something. That something (the round chaos) contains or is composed of potential, or information. If it is pursued and caught, it releases that information. Out of that information we build the world we perceive, and we build ourselves as perceivers. Thus, the round chaos is the container from which both matter (the world) and spirit (our psyches) emerge.

Movies, plays, operas, TV dramas—even the lyrics of songs—help us deal with our lived experiences, which are something different and broader than the mere material from which our experience hypothetically rises.

This emergence of one from many is a very common process, described by the scholar of myth Mircea Eliade as the war of the gods in heaven, a typical mythological motif, as well as alluded to earlier.

Harry gains entrance to this underworld labyrinth of pipes and tunnels, and finds the central chamber. He does this, significantly, through the sewer, acting out the ancient alchemical dictum, in sterquilinis invenitur: in filth it will be found.* What does this mean? That which you most need to find will be found where you least wish to look.

The undying pattern that hero embodies, in turn—upon whose actions the individual and society both depend—is the highest of all Gods. He is both child of and mediator between those twin forces, transforming chaos into habitable order (as well as recasting order into chaos, so that it can be renewed, when it has become anachronistic and corrupt), as well as battling mightily so that good might prevail.

Every little problem you have every morning, afternoon, or evening with your spouse will be repeated for each of the fifteen thousand days that will make up a forty-year marriage. Every trivial but chronic disagreement about cooking, dishes, housecleaning, responsibility for finances, or frequency of intimate contact will be duplicated, over and over, unless you successfully address it.

the easiest of matters, particularly in the short term, to ignore the prick of conscience and let the small defeats slide, day after day. This is not a good strategy. Only careful aim and wakeful striving and commitment can eliminate the oft-incremental calamity of willful blindness, stem the entropic tide, and keep catastrophe—familial and social alike—at bay.

(“I am not touchy; you are just annoying”).

People generally believe that actively doing something bad (that is the sin of commission) is, on average, worse than passively not doing something good (that is the sin of omission).

“What really happened?”

The meaning of what someone’s wife says to him today is dependent on everything both have ever said to each other, everything they have ever done together, and the contents of their mutual imaginations—and that does not exhaust the complexity. Such meaning may even be importantly dependent on how, for example, the wife’s mother treated her father (or her grandmother treated her grandfather), as well as the relationship between men and women in the broader culture.

You are afraid, perhaps, that there is nothing worth wanting; you are afraid that if you specify what you want precisely you will simultaneously discover (and all too clearly) what constitutes failure; you are afraid that failure is the most likely outcome; and, finally, you are afraid that if you define failure and then fail, you will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was you that failed, and that it was your fault. So, you do not allow yourself to know what you want. You manage this by refusing to think it through.

Is something frightening, or am I afraid? Is something beautiful, or am I imposing the idea of beauty upon it? When I become angry with someone, is it because of something they have done, or my lack of control? Such questions define the state of confusion you occupy chronically when the bottom has fallen out of your world. That state can have an objective element, because a fall is often caused by something real, such as a death, a serious illness, or a bout of unemployment; but it is also subjective, associated with a state composed of pain, doubt, confusion, and the inability to choose—or even perceive—a path forward. The ground of Being is subject and object simultaneously—motivation, emotion, and material thing all at once—before perception is clarified, before the world is articulated. The wife remains uncomprehended. The context of her speech remains unexplored, for fear of what that exploration might reveal. The situation cannot be described because the word is left vague and unformed. Our own personal motivations begin in hidden form, and remain that way, because we do not want to know what we are up to. The wheat remains unseparated from the chaff. The gold remains in the clutches of the dragon, as does the virgin. The philosopher’s stone remains undiscovered in the gutter; and the information hidden in the round chaos, beckoning, remains unexplored. Such omission is the voluntary refusal of expanded consciousness. After all, the pathway to the Holy Grail has its beginnings in the darkest part of the forest, and what you need remains hidden where you least want to look. If you pile up enough junk in your closet, one day, when you are least prepared, the door will spring open, and all of what has been packed inside, growing inexorably in the darkness, will bury you, and you may not have enough time or energy left in your life to confront it, sort through it, keep what you need, and discard the rest. This is what it means to be crushed under excess baggage. This is the return of Tiamat, the great Mesopotamian Goddess of Chaos, destroyer of those who act improperly. The world is full of hidden dangers and obstacles—and opportunities. Leaving everything hidden in the fog because you are afraid of the danger you may find there will be of little help when fate forces you to run headlong toward what you have refused to

If you want to become invaluable in a workplace—in any community—just do the useful things no one else is doing. Arrive earlier and leave later than your compatriots (but do not deny yourself your life).

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

It is a strange and paradoxical fact that there is a reciprocal relationship between the worth of something and the difficulty of accomplishing it. Imagine the following conversation: “Do you want difficulty?”

“Do you want difficulty?” “No, I want ease.” “In your experience, has doing something easy been worthwhile?” “Well, no, not very often.” “Then perhaps you really want something difficult.” I think that is the secret to the reason for Being itself: difficult is necessary.

It is impossible to hit a target, after all, unless you aim at it.

This is the colossal blunder made, for example, by the fictional Peter Pan. “Pan”—a name echoing the Greek god of the wilds—means “encompassing everything.” Peter Pan, the magical boy, is capable of everything. He is potential itself, like every child, and that makes him magical, in the same way that every child is magical. But time whittles that magic away, transforming the fascinating potentiality of childhood into the oft-apparently more mundane but genuine actuality of adulthood. The trick, so to speak, is to trade that early possibility for something meaningful, productive, long term, and sustainable. Peter Pan refuses to do so. This is at least in part because his major role model is Captain Hook. Captain Hook is the archetypal Tyrannical King, the pathology of order—a parasite and a tyrant, terrified of death. He has his reasons. Death stalks Hook in the form of a crocodile with a clock in his stomach. That is time: ticktock, ticktock. That is life vanishing, as the seconds march by. The crocodile has had a taste of Hook, too, and liked it. That is life, as well. It is not only cowards who are terrified by what lurks down in the chaotic depths. It is a rare person who has not suffered through disappointment, disease, and the death of a loved one by the time childhood ends. Such experiences can leave those who have had them bitter, resentful, predatory, and tyrannical—just like Hook. With a role model like the captain, it is no wonder Peter Pan does not want to grow up. Better to remain king of the Lost Boys. Better to remain lost in fantasy with Tinkerbell, who provides everything a female partner can provide—except that she does not exist. 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. In the J. M. Barrie play Peter Pan or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up, Pan is portrayed as unafraid of death, which he faces on Marooners’ Rock. His attitude might be misunderstood by inattentive viewers as courage. After all, Pan says, “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”* But the psychologically insightful unseen narrator objects: “To live would be an awfully big adventure” (truly, a statement about what might have happened had the Boy King chosen Wendy), noting, immediately afterward, “but he can never quite get the hang of it.”* Pan’s hypothetical lack of fear of death is not courage, but the manifestation of his basically suicidal nature, the sickness of life (which he is constantly manifesting by his very refusal to mature). It is by no means a good thing to be the oldest person at the frat party. It is desperation, masquerading as cool rebelliousness—and there is a touchy despondence and arrogance that goes along with it. It smacks of Neverland. In the same manner, the attractive potential of a directionless but talented twenty-five-year-old starts to look hopeless and pathetic at thirty, and downright past its expiration date at forty. 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?

responsibility and meaning

That would be fine if trouble did not compound, like interest—but we all know that it does.

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.

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. 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.

If you visit the African veldt, and you observe a herd of zebras, you will often see lions lazing about around them. And as long as the lions are lying around relaxing, the zebras really do not mind. This attitude seems a little thoughtless, from the human perspective. The zebras should instead be biding their time until the lions go to sleep. Then they should run off to a corner of the field in a herd and conspire a bit. And then several dozen of them should rush the sleeping lions and stomp them to death. That would be the end of the lion problem. But that is not what zebras do. They think, “Ah, look at those relaxed lions! Relaxed lions are never a problem!” Zebras do not seem to have any real sense of time. They cannot conceptualize themselves across the temporal expanse.

First, consider that most of the positive emotion people experience does not come from attaining something. There is the simple pleasure (more accurately, the satisfaction) that comes from having a good meal when hungry, and there is the more complex but similar satisfaction that is associated with accomplishing something difficult and worthwhile. Imagine, for example, that you graduate from grade 12. Graduation Day marks the event. It is a celebration. But the next day that is over, and you immediately face a new set of problems (just as you are hungry again only a few hours after a satisfying meal). You are no longer king of the high school: you are bottom dog in the work force, or a freshman at a postsecondary institution. You are in the position of Sisyphus. You strove and struggled to push your boulder to the pinnacle, and you find yourself, instead, at the foot of the mountain. There is a near-instantaneous transformation that comes as a consequence of attainment. Like impulsive pleasure, attainment will produce positive emotion. But, also like pleasure, attainment is unreliable. Another question thus emerges: “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. Imagine you have a goal. You aim at something. You develop a strategy in relationship to that aim, and then you implement it. And then, as you implement the strategy, you observe that it is working. That is what produces the most reliable positive emotion.5 Imagine over time that the attitudes and actions that manage this most effectively (in a competition that is very Darwinian) come, eventually, to dominate over all others.

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 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. You start to monitor yourself, ever more careful to ensure you are doing the right thing—listening to what you say, watching yourself act, trying not to deviate from the straight and narrow path. That becomes your goal. An idea begins to take shape: “I am going to live my life properly. I am going to aim at the good. I am going to aim at the highest good I can possible manage.” Now, all the parts of you taking care of your future self are on board. You are all aimed in one direction. You are no longer a house divided against itself. You are standing solidly on a firm foundation. You are no longer so easy to dissuade or discourage. Your resolution trumps your nihilism and despair. The struggle you have had with your own tendency to doubt and dissimulate protects you against the unwarranted and cynical criticisms of others. There is a high goal, a mountain peak, a star that shines in the darkness, beckoning above the horizon. Its mere existence gives you hope—and that is the meaning without which you cannot live.

monotonously, one after another. But perhaps he is not merely laying bricks. Maybe he is building a wall. And the wall is part of a building. And the building is a cathedral. And the purpose of the cathedral is the glorification of the Highest Good. And under such circumstances, every brick laid is an act that partakes of the divine. And if what you are doing in your day-to-day activity is not enough, then you are not aiming at the construction of a proper cathedral. And that is because you are not aiming high enough. Because if you were, then you would experience the sense of meaning in relationship to your sufficiently high goal, and it would justify the misery and limitations of your life. If you have something meaningful to pursue, then you are engrossed in life. You are on a meaningful path.

A bricklayer may question the utility of laying his bricks, monotonously, one after another. But perhaps he is not merely laying bricks. Maybe he is building a wall. And the wall is part of a building. And the building is a cathedral. And the purpose of the cathedral is the glorification of the Highest Good. And under such circumstances, every brick laid is an act that partakes of the divine. And if what you are doing in your day-to-day activity is not enough, then you are not aiming at the construction of a proper cathedral. And that is because you are not aiming high enough. Because if you were, then you would experience the sense of meaning in relationship to your sufficiently high goal, and it would justify the misery and limitations of your life. If you have something meaningful to pursue, then you are engrossed in life. You are on a meaningful path.

abdicated responsibility—of things left undone, of things that still need to be done.

abdicated responsibility is the indication of destiny and meaning. The part of you that is oriented toward the highest good is pointing out the disjunction between the ideal you can imagine—the ideal that is possessing you—and the reality you are experiencing.

adopting the responsibility of autonomy and the burden of adventure.

My client tried to make sense of what she was witnessing: “Such discussions give people the superficial sense of being good, noble, compassionate, openhearted, and wise. So, if for the sake of argument anyone disagrees, how could that person join the discussion without being considered anticompassionate, narrow minded, racist and wicked?”

We do the things we do because we think those things important, compared to all the other things that could be important. We regard what we value as worthy of sacrifice and pursuit.

“To thine own self be true,”1 as Polonius has it, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

We are each more responsible for the state of the world than we believe, or would feel comfortable believing.

betrayal of conscience,

Better to stand forward, awake, when the costs are relatively low—and, perhaps, when the potential rewards have not yet vanished. Better to stand forward before the ability to do so has been irretrievably compromised.

If you decide to stand up and refuse a command, if you do something of which others disapprove but you firmly believe to be correct, you must be in a position to trust yourself. This means that you must have attempted to live an honest, meaningful, productive life (of precisely the sort that might characterize someone else you would tend to trust).

cog—you are required not to do things you hate.

confront the organizational mendacity undermining your spirit, face the chaos that ensues, rescue your near-dead father from the depths, and live a genuine and truthful life. Otherwise, nature hides her face, society stultifies, and you remain a marionette, with your strings pulled by demonic forces operating behind the scenes—and one more thing: it is your fault. No one is destined in the deterministic sense to remain a puppet.

If you are at work, and called upon to do what makes you contemptuous of yourself—weak and ashamed, likely to lash out at those you love, unwilling to perform productively, and sick of your life—it is possible that it is time to meditate, consider, strategize, and place yourself in a position where you are capable of saying no.

If you are willing to conceptualize yourself as someone who could—and, perhaps more importantly, should—stand

“This occupation is deadening my soul, and that is truly not for me.

I am afraid to move. Well, of course you are, but afraid compared to what? Afraid in comparison to continuing in a job where the center of your being is at stake; where you become weaker, more contemptible, more bitter, and more prone to pressure and tyranny over the years? 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. I have seen many people move, sometimes after several years of strategizing, and end up in better shape, psychologically and pragmatically, after their time in the desert.

Perhaps no one else would want me. Well, the rejection rate for new job applications is extraordinarily high. I tell my clients to assume 50:1, so their expectations are set properly. You are going to be passed over, in many cases, for many positions for which you are qualified. But that is rarely personal. It is, instead, a condition of existence, an inevitable consequence of somewhat arbitrary subjection to the ambivalent conditions of worth characterizing society. It is the consequence of the fact that CVs are easy to disseminate and difficult to process; that many jobs have unannounced internal candidates (and so are just going through the motions); and that some companies keep a rolling stock of applicants, in case they need to hire quickly. That is an actuarial problem, a statistical problem, a baseline problem—and not necessarily an indication that there is something specifically flawed about you. You must incorporate all that sustainingly pessimistic realism into your expectations, so that you do not become unreasonably downhearted. One hundred and fifty applications, carefully chosen; three to five interviews thereby acquired. 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 not nothing. You need to fortify yourself for it, plan, and garner support from people who understand what you are up to and are realistically appraised of the difficulty and the options.

You cannot effectively pronounce “no”

If you must cut off a cat’s tail, do not do it half an inch at a time. You may well be in for a few painful years of belated recognition of insufficiency, and required to send out four or five or ten job applications a week, knowing full well that the majority will be rejected with less than a second look. But you need to win the lottery only once, and a few years of difficulty with hope beat an entire dejected lifetime of a degenerating and oppressed career.

That rejection—that betrayal of soul—is truly the requirement to perform demonstrably counterproductive, absurd, or pointless work; to treat others unjustly and to lie about it; to engage in deceit, to betray your future self; to put up with unnecessary torture and abuse (and to silently watch others suffer the same treatment). That rejection is the turning of a blind eye, and the agreement to say and do things that betray your deepest values and make you a cheat at your own game. 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.

“I knew you could do it”

people also tell me that they enjoy my lectures and what I have written because what I say and write provides them with the words they need to express things they already know, but are unable to articulate. It is helpful for everyone to be able to represent explicitly what they already implicitly understand.

Helping people bridge the gap between what they profoundly intuit but cannot articulate seems to be a reasonable and valuable function for a public intellectual.

However, 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.

If each of us lives by our own created and projected values, what remains to unite us?

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. It could be, instead, that the value of something is sufficiently idiosyncratic—sufficiently dependent on the particularities of time, place, and the individual experiencing that thing—that it cannot be fixed and replicated in the manner required for it to exist as a scientific object. This does not mean, however, that value is not real: It means only that it is so complex that it cannot yet and may never fit itself within the scientific worldview. The world is a very strange place, and there are times when the metaphorical or narrative description characteristic of culture and the material representation so integral to science appear to touch, when everything comes together—when life and art reflect each other equally.

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 Nazis were trying to create a post-Christian, postreligious perfect man, the ideal Aryan, and certainly formulated that ideal in a manner not in accordance with the dictates of either Judaism or Christianity. Thus, the perfect Aryan could be and certainly was conceptualized by the Nazis as a “higher man.”

conservatism, socialism, feminism (and all manner of ethnic- and gender-study isms), postmodernism, and environmentalism, among others. They are all monotheists, practically speaking—or

hypersimplifies what are in fact extraordinarily diverse and complex phenomena

“the oppressors.” The use of single terms implicitly hypersimplifies what are in fact extraordinarily diverse and complex phenomena

why people are poor. Lack of money is the obvious cause—but that hypothetical obviousness is part of the problem with ideology. Lack of education, broken families, crime-ridden neighborhoods, alcoholism, drug abuse, criminality and corruption (and the political and economic exploitation that accompanies it), mental illness, lack of a life plan (or even failure to realize that formulating such a plan is possible or necessary), low conscientiousness, unfortunate geographical locale, shift in the economic landscape and the consequent disappearance of entire fields of endeavor, the marked proclivity for those who are rich to get richer still and the poor to get poorer, low creativity/entrepreneurial interest, lack of encouragement—these are but a few of the manifold problems that generate poverty, and the solution to each (assuming that a solution exists) is by no means obviously the same. Nor are the villains hiding behind each putative and differentiable cause the same villains (assuming that there are even villains to be found). All

It is uncommon to see any serious social problem addressed so methodically. It is also rare that the solutions generated, even by methodical process, produce the intended outcome. The great difficulty of assessing problems in sufficient detail to understand what is causing them, followed by the equally great difficulty of generating and testing particularized solutions, is sufficient to deter even the stouthearted, let us say, from daring to tackle a true plague of mankind. Since the ideologue can place him or herself on the morally correct side of the equation without the genuine effort necessary to do so validly, 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.

Next, the faux theorist spins a post-hoc theory about how every phenomenon, no matter how complex, can be considered a secondary consequence of the new, totalizing system.

After breaking the world into large, undifferentiated pieces, describing the problem(s) that characterize each division, and identifying the appropriate villains, the ism theorist then generates a small number of explanatory principles or forces (which may indeed contribute in some part to the understanding or existence of those abstracted entities). Then he or she grants to that small number primary causal power, while ignoring others of equal or greater importance. It is most effective to utilize a major motivational system or large-scale sociological fact or conjecture for such purposes. It is also good to select those explanatory principles for an unstated negative, resentful, and destructive reason, and then make discussion of the latter and the reason for their existence taboo for the ideologue and his or her followers (to say nothing of the critics). Next, the faux theorist spins a post-hoc theory about how every phenomenon, no matter how complex, can be considered a secondary consequence of the new, totalizing system.

Finally, a school of thought emerges to propagate the methods of

After breaking the world into large, undifferentiated pieces, describing the problem(s) that characterize each division, and identifying the appropriate villains, the ism theorist then generates a small number of explanatory principles or forces (which may indeed contribute in some part to the understanding or existence of those abstracted entities). Then he or she grants to that small number primary causal power, while ignoring others of equal or greater importance. It is most effective to utilize a major motivational system or large-scale sociological fact or conjecture for such purposes. It is also good to select those explanatory principles for an unstated negative, resentful, and destructive reason, and then make discussion of the latter and the reason for their existence taboo for the ideologue and his or her followers (to say nothing of the critics). Next, the faux theorist spins a post-hoc

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.

The first players of a given game of this sort are generally the brightest of the participants. They weave a story around their causal principle of choice, demonstrating how that hypothetically primary motivational force profoundly contributed to any given domain of human activity.

And there is a conspiratorial aspect that rapidly comes to pervade the school where such “education” occurs, and where such activity is increasingly all that is permitted: Do not criticize the theory—and do not get singled out. Do not become unpopular. Even: Do not receive a bad grade, or a poor review, for expressing a taboo opinion (and even when this does not occur in practice, the fear that it might keeps many students and professors, or employees and employers, in check).

The same can be done quite effectively by anyone sufficiently literate, intelligent, and verbally fluent.

Everything can be explained by running it through a Marxist algorithm. The wealthy are wealthy because they exploit the poor. The poor are poor because they are exploited by the wealthy. All economic inequality is undesirable, unproductive, and a consequence of fundamental unfairness and corruption. There is, of course—as in the case of Freud—some value in Marx’s observations. Class is an important element of social hierarchies, and tends to maintain itself with a certain stability across time. Economic well-being, or the lack thereof, is of crucial significance. And the damnable fact of the Pareto distribution6—the tendency of those who have more to get more (which seems to apply in any economic system)—does mean that wealth accumulates in the hands of a minority of people. The people who make up that minority do change substantively, regardless of the aforementioned class stability,7 and that is a crucial point, but the fact that the comparatively rich are always a minority—and a small one, at that—seems dismally immutable.

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. Their self-righteousness and moral claim to social engineering is every bit as deep and dangerous. It might even be worse: 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. They are a lot more honest. Furthermore, fundamentalists are bound by a relationship with the transcendent. What this means is that God, the center of their moral universe, remains outside and above complete understanding, according to the fundamentalist’s own creed. Right-wing Jews, Islamic hard-liners, and ultra-conservative Christians must admit, if pushed, that God is essentially mysterious. This concession provides at least some boundary for their claims, as individuals, to righteousness and power (as the genuine fundamentalist at least remains subordinate to Something he cannot claim to totally understand, let alone master). For the ideologue, however, nothing remains outside understanding or mastery. 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 (something forbidden to the self-consistent fundamentalist). There is no claim more totalitarian and no situation in which the worst excesses of pride are more likely to manifest themselves (and not only pride, but then deceit, once the ideology has failed to explain the world or predict its future).

Beware, in more technical terms, of blanket univariate (single variable) causes for diverse, complex problems. Of course, power plays a role in history, as does economics. But the same can be said of jealousy, love, hunger, sex, cooperation, revelation, anger, disgust, sadness, anxiety, religion, compassion, disease, technology, hatred, and chance—none of which can definitively be reduced to another. The attraction of doing so is, however, obvious: simplicity, ease, and the illusion of mastery (which can have exceptionally useful psychological and social consequences, particularly in the short term)—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.

It is much safer morally to look to yourself for the errors of the world, at least to the degree to which someone honest and free of willful blindness might consider. 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 brother’s.

Consider the characters fabricated by second-rate crafters of fiction: they are simply divided into those who are good and those who are evil. By contrast, 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. It is much more psychologically appropriate (and much less dangerous socially) to assume that you are the enemy—that it is your weaknesses and insufficiencies that are damaging the world—than to assume saintlike goodness on the part of you and your party, and to pursue the enemy you will then be inclined to see everywhere.

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 Monty Python comedy crew once offered satirical lessons for playing the flute: blow over one end and move your fingers up and down on the holes.10 True. But useless. The necessary detail is simply not there. Similarly, sophisticated large-scale processes and systems do not exist in a manner sufficiently real to render their comprehensive unitary transformation possible. The idea that they do is the product of twentieth-century cults. The beliefs of these cults are simultaneously naive and narcissistic, and the activism they promote is the resentful and lazy person’s substitute for actual accomplishment. The single axioms of the ideologically possessed are gods, served blindly by their proselytizers.

Like God, however, ideology is dead. The bloody excesses of the twentieth century killed it. We should let it go, and begin to address and consider smaller, more precisely defined problems. 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. Have some humility. Clean up your bedroom. Take care of your family. Follow your conscience. Straighten up your life. Find something productive and interesting to do and commit to it. When you can do all that, find a bigger problem and try to solve that if you dare. If that works, too, move on to even more ambitious projects. And, as the necessary beginning to that process . . . abandon ideology.

It was for such reasons that archaic people found it easy to believe that the human soul was haunted by ghosts—possessed by ancestral spirits, demons, and gods—none of whom necessarily had the best interests of the person at heart. Since the time of the psychoanalysts, these contrary forces, these obsessive and sometimes malevolent spirits, have been conceptualized psychologically as impulses, emotions, or motivational states—or as complexes, which act like partial personalities united within the person by memory but not by intent. Our neurological structure is indeed hierarchical. 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. The resilience and strength of a united spirit is not easy to attain.

Clear goals limit and simplify the world, as well, reducing uncertainty, anxiety, shame, and the self-devouring physiological forces unleashed by stress. The poorly integrated person is thus volatile and directionless—and this is only the beginning. Sufficient volatility and lack of direction can rapidly conspire to produce the helplessness and depression characteristic of prolonged futility. This is not merely a psychological state. 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).

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.

every career or job is characterized by frustration, disappointment, corruption, arbitrary hierarchy, internal politics, and sheer idiocy of decision making. We could conclude from that lack of specific or ideal value that nothing matters more than anything else—or to draw the even more hopeless allied conclusion that nothing therefore matters at all. But those who draw such conclusions, no matter how well armed they are with rationally coherent arguments, pay a high price. People suffer for it if they quit before completing an undergraduate degree or the study of a trade. And this means “quit,” not fail,

People who do not choose a job or a career commonly become unmoored and drift. They may attempt to justify that drifting with a facade of romantic rebelliousness or prematurely world-weary cynicism. They may turn to casual identification with avant-garde artistic exploration or treat the attendant despair and aimlessness with the pursuit of hard-core alcohol and drug use and their instant gratifications. But none of that makes for a successful thirty-year-old (let alone someone a decade older). The same holds true for people who cannot choose and then commit to a single romantic partner, or are unable or unwilling to be loyal to their friends. They become lonely, isolated, and miserable, and all that merely adds the additional depth of bitterness to the cynicism that spurred the isolation in the first place. That is not the sort of vicious circle that you want to characterize your life.

It is far better to become something than to remain anything but become nothing.

the worst decision of all is none.

But proper discipline organizes rather than destroys.

It was the bringing together of a warring multiplicity under the unifying doctrines of Christianity that civilized Europe. It could, perhaps, have been Buddhism, Confucianism, or Hinduism, insofar as the East is also both broadly civilized and unified. But it could not have been the absence of any doctrine whatsoever.

formulated—the Mosaic Ten Commandments (and, even more broadly, a commentary on rules themselves). The commandments follow: Though shalt have no other gods before me. Though shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Honor thy father and thy mother. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Thou shalt not covet. The first speaks to the necessity of aiming at the highest possible unity; the second to the danger of worshipping false idols (by confusing the representation, or the image, with the ineffable it is supposed to represent); the third means that it is wrong to claim moral inspiration from God while knowingly committing sinful acts; the fourth means that it is necessary to leave time to regularly consider what is truly valuable or sacred; the fifth keeps families together, mandating honor, respect, and gratitude from children as just reward for the sacrifices made by parents; the sixth prevents murder (obviously) but, by doing so, also protects the community from potential descent into constant and potentially multigenerational feuding; the seventh mandates the sacredness of the marriage vow, predicated on the assumption (like the fifth) that the stability and value of the family is of paramount importance; the eighth allows for honest, hardworking people to reap the benefits of their efforts without fear that what they have produced will be taken from them arbitrarily (and, thereby, makes civilized society a possibility); the ninth maintains the integrity of the law, reducing or eliminating its use as a weapon; and the tenth is a reminder that envy and the resentment it breeds is a destructive force of the highest power.

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. That unity constitutes what you could be, if you concentrate on a particular goal and see it through.

If you learn to make something in your life truly beautiful—even one thing—then you have established a relationship with beauty.

That is the reconnection with the immortality of childhood, and the true beauty and majesty of the Being you can no longer see. You must be daring to try that.

MEMORY AND VISION The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God. The nakedness of woman is the work of God. Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps. The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man. —WILLIAM BLAKE, FROM “PROVERBS OF HELL,” The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

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. Now that I am an adult, the same is not true. I lived in Fairview, the town I grew up in for most of my childhood and adolescence, for only nine years, but I am still able to picture in high resolution the street I lived on. I have lived in Toronto, on the same street, for more than twice as long, but I still have only a vague sense of the houses that surround mine. I do not think that is a good thing. I feel far less at home because of it. It is as if when I walk down the street and glance at a local house, I think of “house” as an icon (because, really, what practical difference does it make to me what particularities characterize each house?), and then my attention is turned to something else. I do not see the house, with its specific shingles, colors, flowers, and architectural details, despite the interest that might have been elicited in me had I paid careful attention. By this point in my life, I have seen so many houses in so many places that I know what a house is likely to do when I walk by it—which is very little. Thus, I ignore the engaging idiosyncrasies and beauties of its details—its unique character, for better or worse—and see just enough to stay oriented as I walk past and continue to think and be elsewhere as I do so. There is real loss in that. 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.

I knew perfectly well that I was missing out on beauty and meaning and engagement, regardless of whatever advantages in efficiency my impatience brought. I was narrow, sharp, and focused, and did not waste time, but the price I paid for that was the blindness demanded by efficiency, accomplishment, and order. I was no longer seeing the world. I was seeing only the little I needed to navigate it with maximum speed and lowest cost. None of that was surprising. I had the responsibilities of an adult. I had a demanding job. I had to take care of my family, and that meant sacrificing the present and attending to the future. But having little children around and noticing their intense preoccupation with the present, and their fascination with what was directly around them, made me very conscious of the loss that accompanied maturity. Great poets are expressly aware of this, and they do what they can to remind the rest of us:

To perceive Van Gogh’s painting Irises—from which the illustration that begins this chapter is derived—is, for example, to gaze through a window back into the eternity that our perceptions once revealed, so that we can remember how awe inspiring and miraculous the world really is, under the mundane familiarity to which we have reduced it. To share in the artist’s perception reunites us with the source of inspiration that can rekindle our delight in the world, even if the drudgery and repetition of daily life has reduced what we see to the narrowest and most pragmatic of visions.

You inhabit the land you know, pragmatically and conceptually. But imagine what lies just outside of that. There exists an immense space of things you do not know, but which other people might comprehend, at least in part. Then, outside of what anyone knows, there is the space of things that no one at all knows. Your world is known territory, surrounded by the relatively unknown, surrounded by the absolutely unknown—surrounded, even more distantly, by the absolutely unknowable.

The unknown manifests itself to you in the midst of the known. That revelation—sometimes exciting, but often quite painful—is the source of new knowledge. But a fundamental question remains: How is that knowledge generated?

It is very strange and incomprehensible that something can happen in your head, and you have no idea how it got there or what it means. It is a miracle: nature’s voice manifesting itself in your psyche. And it happens every night.

“The poppy that grows higher than the rest is the first one to have its head removed by the scythe.” In Japan: “The nail that sticks up above the rest is the first to get hit by the hammer.”

Many things make life worth living: love, play, courage, gratitude, work, friendship, truth, grace, hope, virtue, and responsibility. But beauty

perpetrator or victim) the actual events and the associated memories evoke fear, guilt, and shame.

To orient ourselves in the world, we need to know where we are and where we are going. Where we are: that concept must optimally include a full account of our experience of the world to date. If you do not know what roads you have traversed, it is difficult to calculate where you are. Where we are going: that is the projection of our ultimate ideal—by no means simply a question, say, of accomplishment, love, wealth, or power, but development of the character that makes all fortunate outcomes more likely and all unfortunate outcomes less likely. We map the world so that we can make the move from where we are—from point A—to where we are going—to point B. We use our map to guide our movement, and we encounter successes and obstacles along the way.

Imagine that when you are very young, the map of the world you use to guide your immature self is correspondingly underdeveloped, like a child’s drawing of a house: always straight and centered, portraying only the front; always (or close enough) with a door and two windows; always with a square for the outside wall and a triangle for the roof; always with a chimney and smoke (which is a surprise, because smoking chimneys are not all that common now). The sun is shining irrepressibly—a circle with rays emanating from it. There are a few flowers—single lines with the schematic of a bloom at the top, and two leaves halfway up the “stems.” It is a very low-resolution representation of a house. It is more hieroglyph than drawing; more concept than sketch. It is something that represents the idea of house, or perhaps home, generically, like the words “house” or “home” themselves. However, it is almost always enough: The child who drew the picture knows it is a house, and the other children and the adults who see the picture know it is a house. The drawing does the trick. It fulfills its purpose. It is a good-enough map.

But the body knows what the mind does not yet grasp.

So, she was plausibly 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.

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. Is this not a universal experience?

We recall the places we started from, the positions we occupied when our stories began. We remember the pitfalls and successes of the past so that we can avoid the former and repeat the latter. To do so, we need to know where we have been, where we currently are, and in what direction we are headed. We reduce that account to its causal structure: we need to know what happened and why, and we need to know it as simply and practically as possible.

and is associated with an earlier Sumerian term, Tiamat,13 who is the great mother goddess/dragon (and denizen of salt water) who creates the world with her consort, Apsu, in the Mesopotamian creation myth Enuma Elish.

But you might also fail, and you could well be frightened enough by the possibility of not getting what you need (and want) that you keep your desires vague and unspecified. And the chance that you will get what you want if you fail to aim for it is vanishingly small.

There are three fundamental states of social being: tyranny (you do what I want), slavery

then it is the investigation into possibility that is the most important of all investigations.

We naturally think of our lives as stories, and communicate about our experience in that same manner. We tell people automatically where we are (to set the stage) and where we are going, so that we can create the present out of the possibility that springs forth as we journey toward our destination. No one finds such an account out of the ordinary. But we are doing more than portraying our lives, and those of others, as a sequence of events. It is something deeper than that. When you depict a person’s actions in the world, you describe how they perceive, evaluate, think, and act—and, when you do so, a story unfolds (and the better you are at such descriptions, the more storylike your accounts are). Furthermore, we experience the world as populated by figures that represent exactly what we must contend with. The unknown, unexpected, and novel—the world of possibility—is represented in dramatic form, as is the world that we expect and strive to bring into being, and ourselves, as actors faced with the unknown and the predictable alike. We use the story to represent all of this.

you are always somewhere, going somewhere else,

We act (perceive, think, react) that way because each member of the human species does almost everything he or she does in the presence, for better or worse, of other people.

Oedipal

One of its two modules is responsible for self-preservation (hunger, thirst, and, most important for our purposes, defensive aggression in the face of threat) as well as reproduction (sexual arousal and basic sexual behavior). The second is responsible for exploration.* Half of the hypothalamus drives our use of what has been explored previously to quell and satisfy the basic demands of life, including our capability to protect ourselves in the case of attack. The other half is always asking, What is out there? What could it be used for? How might it be dangerous? What are its habits? So, what is the story? Eat, drink, and be merry, until the provisions run out—but watch out, always, for the monsters. Then venture out into the dangerous but promising unknown world and discover what is there. Why? Well, you already know a lot of things you need to know, although you do not know nearly enough. You understand that, because life is not as good as it could be, and because you are going to die. Obviously, under such conditions, you should learn more. So, you are driven to explore. The fundamental representation of reality, as an eternal treasure house guarded by an eternal predator, is therefore a perfect representation of the way you are wired to react to the world at the most fundamental depths of your Being.

You are built, neurologically, to interpret the world in this dramatic manner, at a very deep level. An ancient part of your brain known as the hypothalamus5—a small region, sitting atop the spinal cord—regulates many of the fundamental responses that find their expression in the conceptualization of danger and potential. One of its two modules is responsible for self-preservation (hunger, thirst, and, most important for our purposes, defensive aggression in the face of threat) as well as reproduction (sexual arousal and basic sexual behavior). The second is responsible for exploration.* Half of the hypothalamus drives our use of what has been explored previously to quell and satisfy the basic demands of life, including our capability to protect ourselves in the case of attack. The other half is always asking, What is out there? What could it be used for? How might it be dangerous? What are its habits? So, what is the story? Eat, drink, and be merry, until the provisions run out—but watch out, always, for the monsters. Then venture out into the dangerous but promising unknown world and discover what is there. Why? Well, you already know a lot of things you need to know, although you do not know nearly enough. You understand that, because life is not as good as it could be, and because you are going to die. Obviously, under such conditions, you should learn more. So, you are driven to explore. The fundamental representation of reality, as an eternal treasure house guarded by an eternal predator, is therefore a perfect representation of the way you are wired to react to the world at the most fundamental depths of your Being.

If you understand the polarity of nature, its terror and benevolence, you recognize two fundamental elements of experience, permanent, eternal, and unavoidable, and you can begin to understand, for example, the profound pull toward sacrifice. It is a religious trope that sacrifices keep the gods happy, and coming to understand just who the unhappy gods are, so to speak, and just how terrible they are when they are unhappy is a genuine step toward wisdom—a genuine and humbling step.

because they think, for example, of a burnt offering on an altar, which is an archaic way of acting out the idea. But we have no problem at all when we conceptualize sacrifice psychologically, because we all know you must forgo gratification in the present to keep the wolf from the door in the future.

That sacrificial attitude is in fact the great discovery of the future, conjoined with the ability to negotiate and bargain and cope with that future—abandon impulsive gratification; let go of something you need and want; obtain something valuable in the long run in consequence (and keep the horror at bay). You forgo the partying and the easy hours. You immerse yourself, instead, in the difficulties of life.

We act out the belief that we can strike a bargain with the structure of reality. Strangely enough, we often can. If you are sensible, you do that all the time. You prepare for the worst. You prepare for the arrival of the Evil Queen. You do what you have to do, knowing about her existence, and you keep her at bay—in proportion to your wisdom and in accordance with your luck.

Aurora, the dawn.

All this does is keep Aurora naive and vulnerable. Maleficent shows up anyway, as she most certainly will, and there is a message in that: invite the Evil Queen to your child’s life. If you fail to do so, your children will grow up weak and in need of protection, and the Evil Queen is going to make herself known no matter what steps you take to stop her. At the christening, in fact, not only does she arrive, well behaved but uninvited, but she offers a present (in the form of a curse): the death of Aurora at the age of sixteen, brought about by the prick of the spindle of a spinning wheel.

They are sentient beings, in part, and we have a responsibility not to inflict any more suffering upon them than necessary, but they are not human beings, and they are certainly not children. 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).

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).

This left her completely unprepared for life’s essential harshness—the complications of sexuality and the requirement for everything that lives to devour other lives (and to be eventually subjected to the same fate).

We interpret the present through the lens of culture. We plan for the future by attempting to bring into being what we have been taught and what we have determined, personally, to value.

Imagine the realm of the Dragon of Chaos as the night sky, stretching infinitely above you on a clear night, representing what will remain forever outside your domain of understanding. Maybe you are standing on a beach, looking up, lost in contemplation and imagination. Then you turn your attention to the ocean—as grand in its way as the starry cosmos, but tangible and manifest and knowable, comparatively speaking. That is nature. It is not mere potential. It is there, in its unknowability, instead of removed from comprehension entirely. It is not yet tamed, however; not brought into the domain of order. And it is beautiful in its mystery. The moon reflects on its surface; the waves crash eternally and lull you to sleep; you can swim in its welcoming waters. But that beauty has a price. You better keep an eye out for sharks. And poisonous jellyfish. And the riptide that can pull you or your children under. And the storms that could destroy your warm and welcoming beach house. Imagine, further, that the beach on which you stand is the shore of an island. The island is culture. People live there—perhaps in harmony and peace, under a benevolent ruler; perhaps in a war-torn hell of oppression, hunger, and privation. And that is culture: Wise King or Authoritarian Tyrant. It is of vital necessity to become acquainted with both characters, just as in the case of Evil Queen and Benevolent Goddess, to ensure the appropriate balance in attitude required to adapt properly to the vicissitudes of life. Too much emphasis on the Wise King blinds those who hold that attitude to the injustice and unnecessary suffering that is a consequence of the inevitable flaws in our all-too-human social structures. Too much insistence on the Authoritarian Tyrant means lack of appreciation for the often fragile structures that bind us together and protect us from the chaos that would otherwise certainly reign.

If the map you are using is missing part of the world, you are going to be utterly unprepared when that absent element makes itself manifest.

Liberals, for example, are positively enthralled by new ideas. The advantages to being attracted by new ideas are obvious. Sometimes problems require new solutions, and it is people who take pleasure in novel conceptions who find them. Such people also tend not to be particularly orderly.6 Perhaps this is because if you are gripped and driven by new ideas, and are also inclined to test or implement them, you need to be able to tolerate the intermediary chaos produced between the time the old idea disintegrates and the new idea takes control. If you are a conservative, you have the opposite advantage and problem. You are wary of new ideas, and not particularly attracted to them, and that is in part because you are less sensitive to their possibilities and more concerned about their unpredicted consequences.

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.

it is necessary to understand that the line between the stability bequeathed to us by our ancestors and the tyranny that can so easily become shifts and moves with the transformations of existence.

It is difficult for any of us to see what we are blinded to by the nature of our personalities. It is for this reason that we must continually listen to people who differ from us, and who, because of that difference, have the ability to see and to react appropriately to what we cannot detect.

I think that somewhat pessimistic but also eminently realistic strategy is in keeping with the vision of the people who founded the American system (and the actions and attitudes of the English and other early democrats and parliamentarians whose gradually evolving systems laid the groundwork for the explicit claims those founders made). They were not utopian in their essential viewpoint. They believed that the people who were inevitably to be their successors were going to be just as flawed as they were, and just as flawed as people before them. 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. To the degree that I am conservative in orientation, I believe in the wisdom of that vision. I believe that is a more appropriate way of looking at things.

There were many things you could have been. Maybe some of them were more than you have become.

The question “Why did this have to happen to me?” frequently contains a reproachful element, based on a sense of injustice: “There are all these bad people in the world, and they seem to be getting away unpunished for this misbehavior,” or “There are all these people in the world who are enjoying good health, and it seems singularly unfair for them to be in that fortunate position when I am not.” That means that “Why me?” is in this manner generally contaminated with a sense of victimization, signifying injustice. This false misapprehension that the terrible experience that has befallen you somehow singularly characterizes you—is aimed, particularly, at you—is part of what turns exposure to tragedy into the very resentment we are discussing. The fact that unfortunate things are happening or are going to happen to you is built into the structure of reality itself. There is no doubt that awful things happen, but there is an element of true randomness about them. You might think, “That is trivial compensation, and of little help.” But some appreciation for the random element can be helpful, by distancing the personal element, and that can help you erect some barriers to developing that intense egotistical resentment. Furthermore, it can be of great utility to realize that each of the negatives that characterize human existence are balanced, in principle, by their positive counterpart.

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.

The issue is: 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? The hope is that you can conduct yourself in such a manner that it tilts things in that direction. That it is all we have—and it is much better than nothing.

If your justification for misbehaving was that life was bad, then the rationale for continuing to misbehave cannot reasonably be that you should embark on a pattern of action that does nothing but make it more so.

When called upon later to account for his behavior—for eating of the forbidden fruit—Adam blames the woman for the development of his painful self-knowledge, and God for making her, saying as he does, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat” (Genesis 3:12). The first man’s refusal to take responsibility for his actions is associated with resentment (for his acquisition of painful knowledge), deceit (as he knows he made a free choice, regardless of his wife’s behavior), and arrogance (he dares to blame God and the woman the divinity created). Adam takes the easy way out—just as you might, when you say to yourself, “I do not need to have this fight with my wife. I do not have to stand up to my tyrannical boss. I do not have to live by what I believe to be true. I can get away with avoiding my responsibilities.” Some of that is inertia and cowardice, but some of it is also motivated by a deep sense of disbelief in your own personal ability. Like Adam, you know you are naked. You are intimately aware of your flaws and vulnerabilities, and the faith in yourself dissolves. This is understandable, but neither helpful nor, in the final analysis, excusable.

if you do something that feels good (and therefore produces a dopamine kick) then the parts of you that played a role in the action under question become stronger, more dominant, more able to inhibit the function of other parts of your being. Continued use of an addictive drug therefore feeds the growth of what can be accurately conceptualized as a living monster in the user’s psyche—and the attention and intention of that monster is single-mindedly devoted to the drug’s effect. It wants one thing, and it comes armed with an entire philosophy about why that one thing must be considered of primary import.

Dopamine essentially produces the pleasure associated with hope or possibility. Furthermore, your brain is wired so that if you do something that feels good (and therefore produces a dopamine kick) then the parts of you that played a role in the action under question become stronger, more dominant, more able to inhibit the function of other parts of your being. Continued use of an addictive drug therefore feeds the growth of what can be accurately conceptualized as a living monster in the user’s psyche—and the attention and intention of that monster is single-mindedly devoted to the drug’s effect. It wants one thing, and it comes armed with an entire philosophy about why that one thing must be considered of primary import.

The same holds true for the issue of gratitude. I do not believe you can be appropriately grateful or thankful for what good you have and for what evil has not befallen you until you have some profound and even terrifying sense of the weight of existence. 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.

The great German writer Goethe, who is to Germanic culture what Shakespeare is to English, wrote a famous play, Faust, the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil for knowledge.2 Mephistopheles is the devil in Goethe’s play—the adversary. The adversary is a mythical figure; the spirit who eternally works against our positive intent (or, perhaps, against positive intent generally).

yet we note distressingly often that we leave undone what we know we should do, and do instead what we know we should not. 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,

To realize this is uncanny. That realization is the great contribution of the psychoanalysts, who insisted above all, perhaps, that we were inhabited by spirits that were beyond not only our control but even our conscious knowledge. And that realization brings up great and paralyzing questions: If you are not in control of yourself, who or what is? If you are not, a challenge has been posed to the very idea of the centrality, unity, and even reality of the “you” whose existence seems so immediately certain. And what is that who or what that is not you up to? And toward what end is it acting? We all hope we are the sorts of creatures who can tell ourselves what to do, and who will then do exactly that, in accordance with our will. 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.

despairs of the meaning of life and the goodness of His Father in the agony of His Crucifixion. At the peak of his suffering, just before death, He utters the words “Eli Eli lama sabachthani”7—“My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). This appears to strongly imply, in its narrative way, that the burden of life can become so great that even God Himself can lose faith when confronted with the unbearable reality of injustice, betrayal, suffering, and death.

“Life is so terrible, because of its limitations and malevolence, that it would be better if it did not exist at all.”

That is Mephistopheles, whose essential viewpoint might be paraphrased as follows: “Life is so terrible, because of its limitations and malevolence, that it would be better if it did not exist at all.”

If you can observe someone rising above the catastrophe, loss, bitterness, and despair, then you see evidence that such a response to catastrophe is possible. In consequence, you might mimic that, even under dire circumstances. Courage and nobility in the face of tragedy is the reverse of the destructive, nihilistic cynicism apparently justified under just such circumstances.

I began to seriously contemplate the topic of this rule just before Thanksgiving, in 2018, when I was touring the United States. That holiday has become, arguably, the biggest shared celebration in America (and is also a major event in Canada, approximately a month earlier). The only competitor, particularly since Easter has largely faded away, is Christmas, which is also in some sense a holiday of thanksgiving, concentrating as it does on the arrival of the eternal Redeemer in the midst of the darkness and cold of winter, and so reflects the endless birth and rebirth of hope itself. The giving of thanks is an alternative to bitterness—perhaps the alternative. My observation of American holidays—I lived in the States for seven years, and I have spent time there on countless other occasions—is that the prominence of Thanksgiving among holidays seems to be a good thing, practically and symbolically. The fact that the primary feast of celebration characterizing a country would be one of explicitly “giving thanks” appears, in principle, as a positive commentary on the fundamental ethic of the state. It means that the individual is striving to have his or her heart in the right place, and that the group is supporting and encouraging that endeavor. Why is that, given the trouble that constitutes life? It is because you can be courageous. You can be alert, awake, attentive. You can see how demanding life is and can be, and you can see it clearly. Despite this, you can remain grateful, because that is the intrepid attitude toward life and its difficulties. You are grateful not because you are naive, but because you have decided to put a hand forward to encourage the best in yourself, and the state, and the world. You are grateful, in the same manner, not because suffering is absent, but because it is valiant to remember what you have and what you may still be offered—and because the proper thankful attitude toward that existence and possibility positions you better than any other attitude toward the vicissitudes of existence. To be grateful for your family is to remember to treat them better. They could cease to exist at any moment. To be grateful for your friends is to awaken yourself to the necessity of treating them properly, given the comparative unlikelihood of friendship itself. To be grateful to your society is to remind yourself that you are the beneficiary of tremendous effort on the part of those who predeceased us, and left this amazing framework of social structure, ritual, culture, art, technology, power, water, and sanitation so that our lives could be better than theirs. The temptation to become embittered is great and real. It requires a genuine moral effort not to take that path, assuming that you are not—or are no longer—naive. The gratitude associated with that state of Being is predicated on ignorance and inexperience. That is not virtue. Thus, if you are attentive and awake, and you can see the structure of the world, bitterness and resentment beckon as a viable response. Then you might well ask yourself, “Well, why not walk down that dark path?” It seems to me that the answer to that, to state it again, is courage: the courage to decide “No, that is not for me, despite the reasons I may have for being tempted in that direction,” and to decide, instead, “Despite the burden of my awake mortality, I am going to work for the good of the world.”

Gratitude is therefore the process of consciously and courageously attempting thankfulness in the face of the catastrophe of life. Maybe that is what we are trying to do when we meet with our families during a holiday, wedding, or funeral. Those are often contentious and difficult affairs. We face a paradoxical, demanding tension. We bring people that we know and love close to us; we are pleased at their existence and their proximity, but also wish they could be more. We are inevitably disappointed in each other, and in ourselves, as well. 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). That is all painful to perceive. But the fundamental conclusion, despite all of that, is that “It is good that we are all together and able to share a meal, and to see and talk to each other, and to note that we are all here and facing this celebration or difficulty together.” And everyone hopes that “perhaps if we pull together, we can manage this properly.” And so you make the same fundamental decision, when you join communally with your people, that you make when you grieve: “Despite everything, it is good that we are together, and that we have one another.” That is something truly positive.

All that is part of the joy of having them, but also part of the pain. The pain is the absolute certainty that the fragility will be exploited. And yet I thought that whatever steps I might take to eradicate that fragility in my children would also destroy that for which I was thankful. I remember thinking this quite distinctly with my son when he was three, because he was supercute and fun. But he was three, so he was little. He would collapse, bang his head on tables, fall down the stairs, and get into little scraps with other kids. Maybe he would be playing in the supermarket parking lot and, distracted, run off briefly. This is not a wise move in a place ruled by cars. There is an undeniable vulnerability around children that wakes you up and makes you very conscious of the desire to protect them, but also of the desire to foster their autonomy and push them out in the world, because that is how you strengthen them. It is also a vulnerability that can make you angry at life because of its fragility, and lead you to curse the fate that joins the two together.