Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“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.”

In a political culture that promotes equality as a paramount value, having less power or authority than others can feel intrinsically unjust. For Peterson, however, such hierarchies are inevitable and natural—if not quite always just in their operation. Therefore, learning how to operate with them, rather than complain about the disadvantages of one’s station, is indispensable for a successful and happy life.

“Alongside the wisdom of true conservatism is the danger that the status quo might become corrupt and its corruption self-servingly exploited. Alongside the brilliance of creative endeavor is the false heroism of the resentful ideologue, who wears the clothes of the original rebel while undeservedly claiming the moral upper hand and rejecting all genuine responsibility. Intelligent and cautious conservatism and careful and incisive change keep the world in order.”

Conservatism (not in the political sense, but rather in Peterson’s sense of conserving the primary components of a social order) and the creative impulse each have flaws, but their flaws are distinct. The conservative errs in confusing their authority with righteousness and using it to harm others and benefit themselves without proper regard for the common good. The flaw of creativity is a different kind of arrogance, a belief that one can exist outside of institutions, confusing the inherent limits of institutions with irredeemable flaws. The former is a perversion of an otherwise proper station, while the latter is an inherently faulty attitude that requires enfolding within an institutional setting.

“An unforgettable story captures the essence of humanity and distills, communicates, and clarifies it, bringing what we are and what we should be into focus. It speaks to us, motivating the attention that aspires us to imitate. We learn to see and act in the manner of the heroes of the stories that captivate us.”

Peterson puts enormous stock in stories, from ancient myths and religious texts to modern novels and films. He finds their power to be much more significant than their ability to entertain. The best stories speak to the most fundamental truths of humanity, which are often obscured by the complexity and frustrations of daily life. They are an inspiration to act beyond what one thinks is possible, to imitate an idealized model of heroism and thereby give life itself the aesthetic quality of a narrative.

“For better or worse, you are on a journey. You are having an adventure—and your map better be accurate. Voluntarily confront what stands in your way. The way—that is the path of life, the meaningful path of life, the straight and narrow path that constitutes the very border between order and chaos, and the traversing of which brings them into balance.”

A clear encapsulation of Peterson’s overarching thesis, he incorporates many of his main themes into a single statement. The notion of life as a grand adventure, where determination is the architect of possibility, the swirling of cosmic forces over the seemingly mundane life of an individual, and the ever-present chance of redemption and purpose, all come together in a call to action.

“Freud assumed that things experienced are things understood. In accordance with that assumption, he believed that a memory trace existed, somewhere in the mind, that accurately represented the past, like an objective video recording. There would be reasonable presumptions, of our experience was simply a series of objectively real and self-evident events transmitted through our senses, thought about, evaluated, and then acted upon. If this was all true, traumatic experience would be accurately represented in memory, even when pushed out of awareness by unconscious mechanisms […] However, neither reality nor our processing of reality is as objective or articulated as Freud presupposed.”

Peterson is influenced by his studies of Freud (especially as interpreted by Jung) but he does push back on several fundamental points, most significantly the connection between memory and reality. Where Freud was confident that a person generally remembered things as they happened, especially when that memory was recent, Peterson is more skeptical concerning our very ability to process reality given the myriad layers of emotion and social meaning that leave each person to remember similar events in a different fashion.

“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 to 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.”

Perhaps not surprising given Peterson’s Jungian background, he strongly believes that talking through an issue, no matter how difficult or uncomfortable, is absolutely essential for its resolution. Even trivial disagreements over aesthetic choices or minor peccadillos are, in his view, one more straw atop the camel’s back which are either dealt with as promptly as possible or soon become unbearable.

“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?’ ‘No, I want ease.’ ‘In your experience, has doing something easy been worthwhile?’ ‘Well, no, not very often.’”

Peterson notes an irony: People naturally avoid difficulty, but what is most valuable in life is typically difficult to achieve and maintain. Peterson is less interested in mitigating challenges, minor or otherwise, than in summoning the resolve to face what is difficult.

“Your life becomes meaningful in precise proportion to the depths of the responsibility you are willing to shoulder. That is because you are now genuinely involved in making things better. You are minimizing the unnecessary suffering. You are encouraging those around you, by example and word. You are constraining the malevolence in your own heart and the hearts of others.”

Returning to the theme of difficulty and ease, here Peterson is arguing that life, in a way, ironically becomes easier the more one embraces the challenges incumbent with responsibility. A person who is consistently working, and taking on as much as they can handle, develops the psychological wherewithal to face such challenges, while the life of ease makes someone incapable of dealing with even minor challenges. Peterson appears to be arguing that the actual degree of difficulty means far less than one’s ability to handle it.

“When we are called upon to do things that we find hateful and stupid, we are simultaneously forced to act contrary to the structure of values, motivating us to move forward stalwartly and protecting us from dissolution into confusion and terror.”

Peterson insists that a person in an unhappy job should leave, especially if that job entails political requirements that critics associate with concepts like “wokeness” (Peterson avoids the term in the book but has been harshly critical of it elsewhere). The loss of wages and potential risks to one’s loved ones are more than offset by the moral impact of remaining in a situation that is not just unpleasant but damaging to one’s own soul.

“If you wish to be engaged in a great enterprise—even if you regard yourself as a mere cog—you are required not to do things you hate. You must fortify your position, regardless of its meanness and littleness, 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.”

Here Peterson clearly states his belief that a person’s life should resemble an exciting story as much as possible. To the person who says they must stay in a dead-end job to pay the bills, Peterson responds that such an attitude makes someone fit for nothing other than a dead-end job, that they lack the vision and confidence to prove themselves worthy of something better, and therefore become authors of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“It might be true that the true meaning of life is available for discovery, if it can be discovered at all, by each individual, alone—although, in communication with others, past and present.”

Earlier chapters focus more on the sociability of existence, how a person cannot find the truth all by themselves outside the context in which they operate. While this passage does not exactly contradict that idea, it does shift focus to the need for individuals to have the freedom to make their own decisions, especially with respect to resisting the conventional wisdom which may be stale or even oppressive.

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

The reformist goals Peterson enumerates and dismisses here run a spectrum from left (fight patriarchy, reduce oppression) to right (reduce government, try to run every organization like a business). What unites all these noble but impossible goals, in his view, is that they are “too low-resolution”—a metaphor he uses to suggest that those wishing to improve their lives should narrow their focus from systemic problems to individual ones.

“Aim. Point. All this is part of maturation and discipline, and something to be properly valued. If you aim at nothing, you become plagued by everything. If you aim at nothing, you have nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nothing of high value in your life, as value requires the ranking of options and sacrifice of the lower to the higher. Do you really want to be anything you could be? Is that not too much? Might it not just be better to be something specific (and then, perhaps, to add to that)?”

Peterson regards self-actualization as a creative process in which, at least at the beginning stages, anything is possible. In to make real progress, however, individuals must let go of the dream of limitless possibility and instead focus on specific goals. This does not mean that a person can only pursue narrow ambitions, only that their focus needs to be single-minded or else they will become trapped by their own choices.

“If you work as hard as you can on one thing, you will change. You will start to also become one thing, instead of the clamoring multitude you once were. That one thing, developed properly, is not only the disciplined entity formed by sacrifice, commitment, and concentration. It is that which creates, destroys, and transforms discipline itself-civilization itself-by expressing its unity of personality and society.”

This passage provides one of the clearest examples of Peterson’s main thesis in the book—that a purposeful life is not just more likely to produce successful outcomes, but is also worthwhile for the effect it has on the person who embodies the attitudes in question. It also ties in the language of stories, that the creative and disciplined person is like the god of an ancient myth, with extraordinary powers as well as a responsibility to use them wisely.

“That edge, where artists are always transforming chaos into order, can be a very rough and dangerous place. Living there, an artist constantly risks falling into the chaos, instead of transforming it. But artists have always lived there, on the border of human understanding. Art bears the same relationship to society that the dream bears to mental life.”

In this chapter, Peterson praises the chaotic/creative impulse. While mainly restricting its utility to art, he devotes extensive time to the importance of art in shaping culture, so that even if the creative impulse generally lies outside the domain of politics, it is no less important in the formation of individuals and societies.

“If you stick your neck out, then the sword will come […] this is a nontrivial observation: hence its commonality. Artistic, creative endeavor is high risk, while the probability of return is low. But the probability of exceptionally high return does exist, and creative endeavor, while dangerous and unlikely to be successful, is also absolutely vital to the transformation that enables us to keep our footing.”

Here is another passage where Peterson betrays the depth of his sympathy for the artist. Throughout the book, he portrays artists as occupying a cultural vanguard, giving expression to chaotic societal impulses and thus preventing culture from becoming stale. The aphorism that opens this passage, “If you stick your neck out, then the sword will come,” uses a metaphor to convey the risk artists take in doing their work.

“The next time I saw him, he had finished the book. His face had hardened. He looked older and wiser. I had seen this happen frequently in my clinical practice when people incorporated the darker parts of themselves, instead of—let us say—compartmentalizing them. They no longer had the habitual look of deer caught in the headlights.”

In this passage, Peterson is referring to a client with an overly benign view of humanity. Peterson gave him a copy of a book that describes how regular people became killers in the Holocaust. In Peterson’s telling, the book (presumably in conjunction with therapy) is enough to do the trick, to harden this person in a way that ultimately benefits them by making them realize the true nature of humanity, rather than allow themselves to be pushed around in the expectation that everyone around them is essentially good.

“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.”

Here, Peterson draws an elaborate analogy between the psychotherapy example that informs most of the chapter and the broader themes of the book. Just as a patient needs a narrative of their life to help correct the distortions often involved in the remembrance of a tragic event, every person needs a definitive account of their life so as to chart the course forward and find their purpose, undeterred by unnecessary self-doubt or deference to the wishes of others.

“There is also the fact that even people of good will and character locked together in matrimony will face the mundane, dull, tragic, and terrible together, because life can be—and certainly will be at some point—difficult to the point of impossibility. […] What is going to make you voluntarily deal with your differences and establish a genuine agreement, a true consensus? You are going to have to negotiate in good faith, continually, to come to some sort of peaceful and productive accommodation.”

Peterson, whose own marriage is by all his accounts a long and happy one, is surprisingly bracing in his description of marriage as a difficult, even arduous process where no amount of goodwill can transcend the challenges involved. Still, he remains resolute that the right attitude and a commitment to steady improvement can have the desired effect, but on this topic, he seems particularly keen to note that it will not be easy.

“To begin with, there is not anyone out there who is perfect. There are just people out there who are damaged—quite severely, although not always irreparably, and with a fair bit of individual idiosyncrasy. Apart from that, if there was someone out there who was perfect, they would take one look at you and run away screaming.”

Peterson uses humor to puncture the expectation of perfection in romantic love. Rather than seeking the perfect companion in every respect, Peterson argues, people should approach marriage as a mutual commitment to support one another despite the inevitable challenges. This modest hope aligns with The Balance Between Order and Chaos: A marriage, in Peterson’s view, is a lifelong process of making order out of chaos.

“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 destinations. No one finds such an account out of the ordinary.”

Once again, Peterson draws the connection between lives and stories in a very explicit fashion. In this particular passage, he aims to show that while he finds this insight to be highly valuable, it is not necessarily profound or original—hopefully, when pointed out, a person can immediately recognize its relevance to their own lives.

“It is miraculous what sort of load people can bear when they take it on voluntarily. I know we cannot have an infinite capacity for that, but I also believe that it is in some sense unlimited. I think the more voluntary confrontation is practiced, the more can be borne. I do not know what the upper limit is for that.”

Peterson suggests that people can bear more than they might believe. The key point here is that the metaphorical “load” must be taken on voluntarily. Burdens feel much more oppressive and difficult to bear when they involve coercion. This insight aligns with Peterson’s overarching emphasis on the importance of individual agency.

“If you fail to understand evil, then you have laid yourself bare to it. You are susceptible to its effects, or to its will. If you ever encounter someone who is malevolent, they have control over you in precise proportion to the extent that you are unwilling or unable to understand them. Thus, you look in dark places to protect yourself, in case the darkness ever appears, as well as to find the light.”

Despite making frequent references to stories rooted in the struggle between good and evil, Peterson generally refrains from addressing the nature of evil until the book’s final chapter. Nonetheless, it is important not just to understand evil, but to encounter it, even in its fictional form, so as to retain the vigilance necessary to confront evil in its real-life manifestation.