Beyond Order

By Jordan Peterson

26 April 2024 - 15 mins read time
Tags: Books Self-Improvement Philosophy Productivity

Rule I: Do Not Carelessly Denigrate Social Institutions or Creative Achievement

Society

• People depend on constant communication to keep their minds organized.
• People remain mentally healthy not merely because of the integrity of their own minds, but because they are constantly being reminded of how to think, act and speak by those around them.

Hierarchy

• Life is full of problems and people are unequally able to solve those problems and thus a hierarchy inevitably forms on the basis of people’s abilities. This is not power, this is the authority the properly accompanies competence.
• Ambition should be fostered.
• Young men should not be taught that their ambition equates to tyranny. To do so is cruel as most ambition comes from a desire to do or be good.
• There is great pleasure to be found in helping already competent and admirable young people become highly skilled, socially valuable, autonomous, responsible individuals.

Social Institutions are Necessary but Insufficient

• There is nothing wrong with being concerned about world wide issues, but there is with over-estimating your knowledge of those issues.
• Be humble and solve your own problems before you criticize the world.
• It had taken all of history to create the social order and institutions that provide the quality of life we have today. One should ata minimum have gratitude for this.

The Necessity of Balance

• Discipline needs to be understood as a pre-cursor to creative transformation.
• It is for this reason that the archetypical granter of wishes, the genie, is trapped in a lamp. Genie–genius–is the the combination of possibility and potential and extreme constraint.

Personality as Hierarchy

• You must understand the necessity of the rules to properly transcend them.
• Disregard for tradition will inevitably lead to failure.

Rule II: Imagine Who You Could Be, And Then Aim Single Mindedly At That

• Who are you? Who could you be?

Who You Could Be

• Pursuit changes you in the process and regardless of the journey or the result, it is deeply informative.
• Who dares wins–if he does not perish. And he who wins makes himself irresitibly attractive due to the development of character and the adventure that is produced.

How To Act

• The soul willing to transform, as deeply as necessary, is the most effective enemy of the demonic serpents of ideology.
• Aim at something. Pick the best target you can currently conceptualize and stumble toward it.
• Notice your errors along the way and correct them.
• Map you path. You need to know where you’ve been to know where you are going. And so you do not repeat the mistakes of the past.
• Voluntarily confront what stands in your path.
• If you find a better path once you have started, change course. But be careful not to disguise giving up as changing paths.

Rule III: Do Not Hide Unwanted Things In The Fog

• If something happens everyday, it is important.
• If it is chronically bothersome, attend to it, even if it seems minor.

What Is The Fog?

• You fear that if you specify what you want you will also discover what constitutes failure. You are afraid to fail.
• The fog is the refusal to notice and attend.
• No ideals? No judge. But the price paid is purposelessness. No purpose? Then no positive emotion.
• If you make what you want clear and pursue it, you may fail. But if if you do not make what you want clear, you will certainly fail.
• So what should you do? Admit to your feelings.

Rule IV: Notice That Opportunity Lurks Where Responsibility Has Been Abdicated

Make Yourself Invaluable

• Take responsibility for the tasks that are being left un-done at work.
• If you want to become invaluable, just do the useful things no one else is doing.
• Arrive earlier and leave later than you compatriots.
• Work when you are working instead of looking like you are working.
• There is a paradoxical relationship between the worth of something and the difficulty of accomplishing it.

Responsibility and Meaning

• People are often more upset with what they did not even try to do then with the mistakes they made while committed to actively engaging with the world.
• It is not cool to be the oldest person at a frat party. The attractive potential of a directionless but talented 25 year old starts to look hopeless at 30.
• You must sacrifice something in you manifold potential in exchange for something real in life.
• Aim at something. Discipline yourself.
• Obstacles are the opportunity to reveal yourself as must stronger and more competent then you might imagine. There is potential in you that will emerge when circumstance demand and transform you into someone who can prevail.

Rescue Your Father

• Voluntary confrontation with feared obstacles is curative.
• Voluntarily does not mean carelessly. Take on challenges at the rate that angages and compels us.
• Responsibility is to constrain evil and reduce suffering. Confront life with the desire to make things better.
• When you face a challenge, you become more then you are. It makes you increasingly into who you could be.

And Who Could You Be?

• There is in fact little difference between how you should treat yourself–once you realize that you are a community that extends across time–and how you should treat other people.

Happiness and Responsibility

• What is a more sophisticated alternative to happiness? Living in accordance with responsibility.
• What is a reliable source of positive emotion? The pursuit of a valuable goal.
• No one is satisfied when they know they are not doing everything they should be doing.

Pick Up The Extra Weight

• The cost of betraying yourself is guilt, shame and anxiety. The benefit is meaning. That is the most valuable thing that lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.
• What is the antidote to the suffering and malevolence of life? The highest possible goal. What is the prerequisite to the pursuit of the highest possible goal? Willingness to adopt the maximum degree of responsibility. If what you are doing is not enough to relieve your suffering then aim higher.
• Your disappointment is an indication to you from the most fundamental levels of your being that there is something wrong that needs to be set right.

Rule V: Do Not Do What You Hate

• The small goods that people do contribute more broadly than people think. Same goes for evil. We are each more responsible for the state of the world then we believe.
• If you do not object when transgressions against you conscience are minor, what makes you think you will be able to when the transgressions get out of hand?

Fortify Yourself

• You have a moral obligation to place yourself in a position of comparative strength, and to do what is necessary and capitalize on that strength.

Rule VI: Abandon Ideology

• The escape from nihilism and totalitarianism is the individual strong enough to create his own values, project them onto reality and abide by them.

Rule VII: Work As Hard As You Possibly Can On At Least One Thing And See What Happens

• Aim. Point. If you aim at nothing you will be plagued by everything.
• It is far better to become something than remain anything but become nothing.

Discipline and Unity

• Children that still have temper tantrums by the age of four risk permanent social ostracism.
• The properly functioning and integrated individual tempers te desires of the present with the necessities of the future.
• Discipline is not repression and disciplining your child will not impose on their creativity.

Rule VIII: Try To Make One Room In Your Home As Beautiful As Possible

• When you try to make something beautiful you establish a relationship with beauty.
• Buy artwork that speaks to you.

Rule IX: If Old Memories Still Upset You, Write Them Down Carefully and Completely

• Anything sufficiently threatening or harmful once encountered can never be forgotten if it has never been understood.
• Do not ignore old memories that bother you, they contain lessons from the deepest parts of yourself.

The Word as Savior

• To avoid repeating mistakes, we must know where we have been, where we currently are and in what direction we are headed.
• We need to know what happened and why and to know it as simply and practically as possible.
• Problems left unresolved grow and multiply.
• If you do not examine you experiences you will not be able to change for the better and you will not become all that you can be.
• Do you have the faith and the courage to make the changes you identify?

Rule X: Plan And Work Diligently To Maintain The Romance In Your Relationship

• Each person is an unfathomable enigma. With care, you might keep rediscovering in the person you have chosen enough residual mystery to maintain the spirit that first brought you together.
• When people fall in love, the become better than they were. But then the magic fades. Such love is a glimpse of what could be, if the relationship tremained true. It is delivered as a gift, but requires tremendous effort to realize and maintain.

Bedrock

• You must make clear what it is that you want.
• When you do this and then verbalize it to someone, you give them immense power. They have the power to meet or deprive you of your desires.
• You have to trust. Trust between those who are not naive is courage because betrayal is always a possibility.
• Trust is to invite the best in your partner to manifest itself.
• The first requirement of trust is truth. YOu cannot maintain trust in yourself if you lie. Similarly you cannot maintain trust in your partner if they lie.
• There will be a time in your life when you need your partner’s support. Maybe after you’ve made a mistake. If you tell your partner the truth and strive to act in a manner such that you can tell the truth, then they can tell the truth about how you act and then you have someone you can rely on in hard times.

Christ In the Candle

• Do not be a tyrant in your relationships. Your slave will take revenge where they can even if it means being much less than they could be.
• Having a marriage that works is an achievement. There are not many genuine achievement in life.
• A marriage that works is the foundation for a second achievement, brining children into a functional marriage. Then you have created a new relationship of the highest value and have created people to surround you throughout your long life.

Cohabitation

• The breakup rate among people who are not married but living together is significantly higher than amongst married couples.
• Even if you get married after living together, your rate of divorce is still much higher.
• Cohabitation without the promise of permanent commitment, socially announced, ceremonially established, seriously considered, does not produce more robust marriages.

The Domestic Economy

• You must determine in some manner who is going to do what and when and to what degree.
• You need to establish rules for how you will both operate in your relationship.
  • Who’s career with take precedence?
  • Who will raise the children?
  • Who does the cleaning
  • etc.
• You must struggle with these ideas and come to a consensus.
• About ninety minutes per week should be spend discussing the practical issues concerning the relationship.
• You do a million little things everyday with you partner. If these little things are not satisfactory, your life and marriage will be miserable.
• You and your spouse are both half insane, hopefully in different ways. You want to balance each other out and help each other compensate for each other’s weaknesses.

Romance

• Zero sex is bad. If you go to zero, then one of you is tyrannizing the other and the other is submitting.
• One of you is going to have some kind of affair. Something has to give.

• Do not ever punish you partner for doing something you want them to continue doing.

• Decide what you need to keep yourself satisfied both in and out of bed.
• if you do this, you will have a friend and a confidant and the world will be a little less harsh than it otherwise would be.

Rule XI: Do Not Allow Yourself To Become Resentful, Deceitful, or Arrogant

• Out there in the potential is everything you could have. It is the realm of unrealized possibility, and no one knows it’s full extent.

Nature: Creation and Destruction

• A sacrificial attitude is the great discovery of the future. To let go of something you need and want to obtain something valuable in the future.
• Immerse yourself in the difficulties of life so that fewer of those difficulties will manifest themselves in the future.
• If you shield your children from the negative elements of the world they will be weak and incapable.
• If you shelter young people, you destroy them. They are not going to want to live. They are going to long for unconsciousness.

Culture: Security and Tyranny

• Conservative are necessary for maintining thing when things are working and change might be dangerous.
• Liberals are necessary for changing things when they are no longer working.
• Determining when things are no longer working is the hard part. That is what politics is for.
• It is necessary to argue about the relative value of stability versus change so that we can determine when each is appropriate.

Resentment

• If something bad happens to you, you should ask yourself if there is something that you could have done in the past the increased the probability of the event.
• It is possible that you have something to learn that would decrease the chance of it’s recurrence.

Arrogance and Deceit

• Those who avoid their destiny by standing back when asked to step forward deprive everyone else of the advantage that may have come their way had the person who took the easy way instead determined to be all they could be.
• A truthful person can rely on his or her innate sense of meaning and truth as a reliable guide to the choice that must be made through life. There is little more terrifying thant the possibility that you could come to a point of crisis in your life and realize that you have pathologized yourself with deceit and can longer rely on your own judgement.

Rule XII: Be Grateful In Spite Of Your Suffering

• If you act nobly in the face of suffering, you can work practically and effectively to ameliorate and rectify you own and other people’s misery. You can make the material world a better place.
• Look in the dark places to protect yourself, in case the darkness ever appears, as well as to find the light.

The Mephistophelian Spirit

• During time of grief, take on the task of being the most reliable person in the aftermath.
• There is a call to your potential in doing that.
• Not being disabled by grief is not betrayal. The person dying likely feels guilty for the suffering they have caused and wants people to be able to move on with their lives.
• To collapse in the aftermath of a tragic loss is therefore more accurately a betrayal of the person who has died instead of a tribute as it multiplies the effect of the mortal catastrophe.

Courage–But Superordinate Love

• Grief must be a reflection of love.
• It is perhaps the ultimate manifestation of your belief that the lost person’s existence, limited and flawed as it might have been, was worthwhile, despite the limitations and flaws of even life itself.