12 RULES FOR LIFE JORDAN B. PETERSON

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12 rules

THE #1 BESTSELLER

AN ANTIDOTE TO CHAOS

“One of the most important thinkers to emerge on
the world stage for many years.” THE SPECTATOR

FOREWORD BY NORMAN DOIDGE

Jordan B. Peterson

12 RULES FOR LIFE

An Antidote for Chaos

Foreword by Norman Doidge
Illustrations by Ethan Van Scriver

Table of Contents

Foreword by Norman Doidge
Overture

RULE 1 / Stand up straight with your shoulders back
RULE 2 / Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
RULE 3 / Make friends with people who want the best for you
RULE 4 / Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
RULE 5 / Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
RULE 6 / Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
RULE 7 / Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

RULE 8 / Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie
RULE 9 / Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
RULE 10 / Be precise in your speech
RULE 11/ Do not bother children when they are skateboarding
RULE 12 / Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

Coda

Endnotes

Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin

Foreword

Rules? More rules? Really? Isn’t life complicated enough, restricting enough, without
abstract rules that don’t take our unique, individual situations into account? And given
that our brains are plastic, and all develop differently based on our life experiences, why
even expect that a few rules might be helpful to us all?

People don’t clamour for rules, even in the Bible ... as when Moses comes down the
mountain, after a long absence, bearing the tablets inscribed with ten commandments,
and finds the Children of Israel in revelry. They’d been Pharaoh’s slaves and subject to his
tyrannical regulations for four hundred years, and after that Moses subjected them to the
harsh desert wilderness for another forty years, to purify them of their slavishness. Now,
free at last, they are unbridled, and have lost all control as they dance wildly around an
idol, a golden calf, displaying all manner of corporeal corruption.

“I’ve got some good news ... and I’ve got some bad news,” the lawgiver yells to them.
“Which do you want first?”

“The good news!” the hedonists reply.

“I got Him from fifteen commandments down to ten!”

“Hallelujah!” cries the unruly crowd. “And the bad?”

“Adultery is still in.”

So rules there will be—but, please, not too many. We are ambivalent about rules, even
when we know they are good for us.

If we are spirited souls,
if we have character, rules seem restrictive,
an affront to our sense of agency and our pride in working out our own
lives.
Why should we be judged according to another’s rule?

And judged we are. After all, God didn’t give Moses “The Ten Suggestions,” he gave
Commandments; and if I’m a free agent, my first reaction to a command might just be
that nobody, not even God, tells me what to do, even if it’s good for me. But the story of
the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our
passions—and there’s nothing freeing about that.

And the story suggests something more: unchaperoned, and left to our own untutored
judgment, we are quick to aim low and worship qualities that are beneath us—in this
case, an artificial animal that brings out our own animal instincts in a completely
unregulated way. The old Hebrew story makes it clear how the ancients felt about our
prospects for civilized behaviour in the absence of rules that seek to elevate our gaze and
raise our standards.

One neat thing about the Bible story is that it doesn’t simply list its rules, as lawyers or
legislators or administrators might; it embeds them in a dramatic tale that illustrates why
we need them, thereby making them easier to understand. Similarly, in this book
Professor Peterson doesn’t just propose his twelve rules, he tells stories, too, bringing to
bear his knowledge of many fields as he illustrates and explains why the best rules do not
ultimately restrict us but instead facilitate our goals and make for fuller, freer lives.

The first time I met Jordan Peterson was on September 12, 2004, at the home of two
mutual friends, TV producer Wodek Szemberg and medical internist Estera Bekier. It was
Wodek’s birthday party. Wodek and Estera are Polish emigres who grew up within the
Soviet empire, where it was understood that many topics were off limits, and that casually

questioning certain social arrangements and philosophical ideas (not to mention the
regime itself) could mean big trouble.

But now, host and hostess luxuriated in easygoing, honest talk, by having elegant
parties devoted to the pleasure of saying what you really thought and hearing others do
the same, in an uninhibited give-and-take. Here, the rule was “Speak your mind.” If the
conversation turned to politics, people of different political persuasions spoke to each
other—indeed, looked forward to it—in a manner that is increasingly rare. Sometimes
Wodek’s own opinions, or truths, exploded out of him, as did his laugh. Then he’d hug
whoever had made him laugh or provoked him to speak his mind with greater intensity
than even he might have intended. This was the best part of the parties, and this
frankness, and his warm embraces, made it worth provoking him. Meanwhile, Estera’s
voice lilted across the room on a very precise path towards its intended listener. Truth
explosions didn’t make the atmosphere any less easygoing for the company—they made
for more truth explosions!—liberating us, and more laughs, and making the whole
evening more pleasant, because with de-repressing Eastern Europeans like the Szemberg-
Bekiers, you always knew with what and with whom you were dealing, and that frankness
was enlivening. Honore de Balzac, the novelist, once described the balls and parties in his
native France, observing that what appeared to be a single party was always really two. In
the first hours, the gathering was suffused with bored people posing and posturing, and
attendees who came to meet perhaps one special person who would confirm them in their
beauty and status. Then, only in the very late hours, after most of the guests had left,
would the second party, the real party, begin. Here the conversation was shared by each
person present, and open-hearted laughter replaced the starchy airs. At Estera and
Wodek’s parties, this kind of wee-hours-of-the-morning disclosure and intimacy often
began as soon as we entered the room.

Wodek is a silver-haired, lion-maned hunter, always on the lookout for potential public
intellectuals, who knows how to spot people who can really talk in front of a TV camera
and who look authentic because they are (the camera picks up on that). He often invites
such people to these salons. That day Wodek brought a psychology professor, from my
own University of Toronto, who fit the bill: intellect and emotion in tandem. Wodek was
the first to put Jordan Peterson in front of a camera, and thought of him as a teacher in
search of students—because he was always ready to explain. And it helped that he liked
the camera and that the camera liked him back.

That afternoon there was a large table set outside in the Szemberg-Bekiers’ garden;
around it was gathered the usual collection of lips and ears, and loquacious virtuosos. We
seemed, however, to be plagued by a buzzing paparazzi of bees, and here was this new
fellow at the table, with an Albertan accent, in cowboy boots, who was ignoring them,
and kept on talking. He kept talking while the rest of us were playing musical chairs to
keep away from the pests, yet also trying to remain at the table because this new addition
to our gatherings was so interesting.

He had this odd habit of speaking about the deepest questions to whoever was at this
table—most of them new acquaintances—as though he were just making small talk. Or, if
he did do small talk, the interval between “How do you know Wodek and Estera?” or “I
was a beekeeper once, so I’m used to them” and more serious topics would be
nanoseconds.

One might hear such questions discussed at parties where professors and professionals
gather, but usually the conversation would remain between two specialists in the topic,
off in a corner, or if shared with the whole group it was often not without someone
preening. But this Peterson, though erudite, didn’t come across as a pedant. He had the
enthusiasm of a kid who had just learned something new and had to share it. He seemed

to be assuming, as a child would—before learning how dulled adults can become—that if
he thought something was interesting, then so might others. There was something boyish
in the cowboy, in his broaching of subjects as though we had all grown up together in the
same small town, or family, and had all been thinking about the very same problems of
human existence all along.

Peterson wasn’t really an “eccentric”; he had sufficient conventional chops, had been a
Harvard professor, was a gentleman (as cowboys can be) though he did say damn and
bloody a lot, in a rural 1950s sort of way. But everyone listened, with fascination on their
faces, because he was in fact addressing questions of concern to everyone at the table.

There was something freeing about being with a person so learned yet speaking in such
an unedited way. His thinking was motoric; it seemed he needed to think aloud, to use his
motor cortex to think, but that motor also had to run fast to work properly. To get to
liftoff. Not quite manic, but his idling speed revved high. Spirited thoughts were tumbling
out. But unlike many academics who take the floor and hold it, if someone challenged or
corrected him he really seemed to like it. He didn’t rear up and neigh. He’d say, in a kind
of folksy way, “Yeah,” and bow his head involuntarily, wag it if he had overlooked
something, laughing at himself for overgeneralizing. He appreciated being shown another
side of an issue, and it became clear that thinking through a problem was, for him, a
dialogic process.

One could not but be struck by another unusual thing about him: for an egghead
Peterson was extremely practical. His examples were filled with applications to everyday
life: business management, how to make furniture (he made much of his own), designing
a simple house, making a room beautiful (now an internet meme) or in another, specific
case related to education, creating an online writing project that kept minority students
from dropping out of school by getting them to do a kind of psychoanalytic exercise on
themselves, in which they would free-associate about their past, present and future (now
known as the Self-Authoring Program).

I was always especially fond of mid-Western, Prairie types who come from a farm
(where they learned all about nature), or from a very small town, and who have worked
with their hands to make things, spent long periods outside in the harsh elements, and
are often self-educated and go to university against the odds. I found them quite unlike
their sophisticated but somewhat denatured urban counterparts, for whom higher
education was pre-ordained, and for that reason sometimes taken for granted, or thought
of not as an end in itself but simply as a life stage in the service of career advancement.
These Westerners were different: self-made, unentitled, hands on, neighbourly and less
precious than many of their big-city peers, who increasingly spend their lives indoors,
manipulating symbols on computers. This cowboy psychologist seemed to care about a
thought only if it might, in some way, be helpful to someone.

We became friends. As a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who loves literature, I was drawn
to him because here was a clinician who also had given himself a great books education,
and who not only loved soulful Russian novels, philosophy and ancient mythology, but
who also seemed to treat them as his most treasured inheritance. But he also did
illuminating statistical research on personality and temperament, and had studied
neuroscience. Though trained as a behaviourist, he was powerfully drawn to
psychoanalysis with its focus on dreams, archetypes, the persistence of childhood
conflicts in the adult, and the role of defences and rationalization in everyday life. He was
also an outlier in being the only member of the research-oriented Department of
Psychology at the University of Toronto who also kept a clinical practice.

On my visits, our conversations began with banter and laughter—that was the small¬
town Peterson from the Alberta hinterland—his teenage years right out of the movie

FUBAR —welcoming you into his home. The house had been gutted by Tammy, his wife,
and himself, and turned into perhaps the most fascinating and shocking middle-class
home I had seen. They had art, some carved masks, and abstract portraits, but they were
overwhelmed by a huge collection of original Socialist Realist paintings of Lenin and the
early Communists commissioned by the USSR. Not long after the Soviet Union fell, and
most of the world breathed a sigh of relief, Peterson began purchasing this propaganda for
a song online. Paintings lionizing the Soviet revolutionary spirit completely filled every
single wall, the ceilings, even the bathrooms. The paintings were not there because Jordan
had any totalitarian sympathies, but because he wanted to remind himself of something
he knew he and everyone would rather forget: that hundreds of millions were murdered
in the name of utopia.

It took getting used to, this semi-haunted house “decorated” by a delusion that had
practically destroyed mankind. But it was eased by his wonderful and unique spouse,
Tammy, who was all in, who embraced and encouraged this unusual need for expression!
These paintings provided a visitor with the first window onto the full extent of Jordan’s
concern about our human capacity for evil in the name of good, and the psychological
mystery of self-deception (how can a person deceive himself and get away with it?)—an
interest we share. And then there were also the hours we’d spend discussing what I might
call a lesser problem (lesser because rarer), the human capacity for evil for the sake of
evil, the joy some people take in destroying others, captured famously by the seventeenth-
century English poet John Milton in Paradise Lost.

And so we’d chat and have our tea in his kitchen-underworld, walled by this odd art
collection, a visual marker of his earnest quest to move beyond simplistic ideology, left or
right, and not repeat mistakes of the past. After a while, there was nothing peculiar about
taking tea in the kitchen, discussing family issues, one’s latest reading, with those
ominous pictures hovering. It was just living in the world as it was, or in some places, is.

In Jordan’s first and only book before this one, Maps of Meaning, he shares his profound
insights into universal themes of world mythology, and explains how all cultures have
created stories to help us grapple with, and ultimately map, the chaos into which we are
thrown at birth; this chaos is everything that is unknown to us, and any unexplored
territory that we must traverse, be it in the world outside or the psyche within.

Combining evolution, the neuroscience of emotion, some of the best of Jung, some of
Freud, much of the great works of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Eliade,
Neumann, Piaget, Frye and Frankl, Maps of Meaning, published nearly two decades ago,
shows Jordan’s wide-ranging approach to understanding how human beings and the
human brain deal with the archetypal situation that arises whenever we, in our daily lives,
must face something we do not understand. The brilliance of the book is in his
demonstration of how rooted this situation is in evolution, our DNA, our brains and our
most ancient stories. And he shows that these stories have survived because they still
provide guidance in dealing with uncertainty, and the unavoidable unknown.

One of the many virtues of the book you are reading now is that it provides an entry
point into Maps of Meaning, which is a highly complex work because Jordan was working
out his approach to psychology as he wrote it. But it was foundational, because no matter
how different our genes or life experiences may be, or how differently our plastic brains
are wired by our experience, we all have to deal with the unknown, and we all attempt to
move from chaos to order. And this is why many of the rules in this book, being based on
Maps of Meaning, have an element of universality to them.

Maps of Meaning was sparked by Jordan’s agonized awareness, as a teenager growing up in
the midst of the Cold War, that much of mankind seemed on the verge of blowing up the
planet to defend their various identities. He felt he had to understand how it could be that

people would sacrifice everything for an “identity,” whatever that was. And he felt he had
to understand the ideologies that drove totalitarian regimes to a variant of that same
behaviour: killing their own citizens. In Maps of Meaning, and again in this book, one of
the matters he cautions readers to be most wary of is ideology, no matter who is peddling
it or to what end.

Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain
the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it. Ideologues are people
who pretend they know how to “make the world a better place” before they’ve taken care
of their own chaos within. (The warrior identity that their ideology gives them covers
over that chaos.) That’s hubris, of course, and one of the most important themes of this
book, is “set your house in order” first, and Jordan provides practical advice on how to do
this.

Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous
when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match
for the complexity of existence. Furthermore, when their social contraptions fail to fly,
ideologues blame not themselves but all who see through the simplifications. Another
great U of T professor, Lewis Feuer, in his book Ideology and the Ideologists, observed that
ideologies retool the very religious stories they purport to have supplanted, but eliminate
the narrative and psychological richness. Communism borrowed from the story of the
Children of Israel in Egypt, with an enslaved class, rich persecutors, a leader, like Lenin,
who goes abroad, lives among the enslavers, and then leads the enslaved to the promised
land (the utopia; the dictatorship of the proletariat).

To understand ideology, Jordan read extensively about not only the Soviet gulag, but
also the Holocaust and the rise of Nazism. I had never before met a person, born
Christian and of my generation, who was so utterly tormented by what happened in
Europe to the Jews, and who had worked so hard to understand how it could have
occurred. I too had studied this in depth. My own father survived Auschwitz. My
grandmother was middle-aged when she stood face to face with Dr. Josef Mengele, the
Nazi physician who conducted unspeakably cruel experiments on his victims, and she
survived Auschwitz by disobeying his order to join the line with the elderly, the grey and
the weak, and instead slipping into a line with younger people. She avoided the gas
chambers a second time by trading food for hair dye so she wouldn’t be murdered for
looking too old. My grandfather, her husband, survived the Mauthausen concentration
camp, but choked to death on the first piece of solid food he was given, just before
liberation day. I relate this, because years after we became friends, when Jordan would
take a classical liberal stand for free speech, he would be accused by left-wing extremists
as being a right-wing bigot.

Let me say, with all the moderation I can summon: at best, those accusers have simply
not done their due diligence. I have; with a family history such as mine, one develops not
only radar, but underwater sonar for right-wing bigotry; but even more important, one
learns to recognize the kind of person with the comprehension, tools, good will and
courage to combat it, and Jordan Peterson is that person.

My own dissatisfaction with modern political science’s attempts to understand the rise
of Nazism, totalitarianism and prejudice was a major factor in my decision to supplement
my studies of political science with the study of the unconscious, projection,
psychoanalysis, the regressive potential of group psychology, psychiatry and the brain.
Jordan switched out of political science for similar reasons. With these important parallel
interests, we didn’t always agree on “the answers” (thank God), but we almost always
agreed on the questions.

Our friendship wasn’t all doom and gloom. I have made a habit of attending my fellow
professors’ classes at our university, and so attended his, which were always packed, and I

saw what now millions have seen online: a brilliant, often dazzling public speaker who
was at his best riffing like a jazz artist; at times he resembled an ardent Prairie preacher
(not in evangelizing, but in his passion, in his ability to tell stories that convey the life-
stakes that go with believing or disbelieving various ideas). Then he’d just as easily switch
to do a breathtakingly systematic summary of a series of scientific studies. He was a
master at helping students become more reflective, and take themselves and their futures
seriously. He taught them to respect many of the greatest books ever written. He gave
vivid examples from clinical practice, was (appropriately) self-revealing, even of his own
vulnerabilities, and made fascinating links between evolution, the brain and religious
stories. In a world where students are taught to see evolution and religion as simply
opposed (by thinkers like Richard Dawkins), Jordan showed his students how evolution,
of all things, helps to explain the profound psychological appeal and wisdom of many
ancient stories, from Gilgamesh to the life of the Buddha, Egyptian mythology and the
Bible. He showed, for instance, how stories about journeying voluntarily into the
unknown—the hero’s quest—mirror universal tasks for which the brain evolved. He
respected the stories, was not reductionist, and never claimed to exhaust their wisdom. If
he discussed a topic such as prejudice, or its emotional relatives fear and disgust, or the
differences between the sexes on average, he was able to show how these traits evolved
and why they survived.

Above all, he alerted his students to topics rarely discussed in university, such as the
simple fact that all the ancients, from Buddha to the biblical authors, knew what every
slightly worn-out adult knows, that life is suffering. If you are suffering, or someone close
to you is, that’s sad. But alas, it’s not particularly special. We don’t suffer only because
“politicians are dimwitted,” or “the system is corrupt,” or because you and I, like almost
everyone else, can legitimately describe ourselves, in some way, as a victim of something or
someone. It is because we are born human that we are guaranteed a good dose of
suffering. And chances are, if you or someone you love is not suffering now, they will be
within five years, unless you are freakishly lucky. Rearing kids is hard, work is hard,
aging, sickness and death are hard, and Jordan emphasized that doing all that totally on
your own, without the benefit of a loving relationship, or wisdom, or the psychological
insights of the greatest psychologists, only makes it harder. He wasn’t scaring the
students; in fact, they found this frank talk reassuring, because in the depths of their
psyches, most of them knew what he said was true, even if there was never a forum to
discuss it—perhaps because the adults in their lives had become so naively overprotective
that they deluded themselves into thinking that not talking about suffering would in
some way magically protect their children from it.

Here he would relate the myth of the hero, a cross-cultural theme explored
psychoanalytically by Otto Rank, who noted, following Freud, that hero myths are similar
in many cultures, a theme that was picked up by Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and Erich
Neumann, among others. Where Freud made great contributions in explaining neuroses
by, among other things, focusing on understanding what we might call a failed-hero story
(that of Oedipus), Jordan focused on triumphant heroes. In all these triumph stories, the
hero has to go into the unknown, into an unexplored territory, and deal with a new great
challenge and take great risks. In the process, something of himself has to die, or be given
up, so he can be reborn and meet the challenge. This requires courage, something rarely
discussed in a psychology class or textbook. During his recent public stand for free speech
and against what I call “forced speech” (because it involves a government forcing citizens
to voice political views), the stakes were very high; he had much to lose, and knew it.
Nonetheless, I saw him (and Tammy, for that matter) not only display such courage, but
also continue to live by many of the rules in this book, some of which can be very
demanding.

I saw him grow, from the remarkable person he was, into someone even more able and
assured—through living by these rules. In fact, it was the process of writing this book,
and developing these rules, that led him to take the stand he did against forced or
compelled speech. And that is why, during those events, he started posting some of his
thoughts about life and these rules on the internet. Now, over 100 million YouTube hits
later, we know they have struck a chord.

Given our distaste for rules, how do we explain the extraordinary response to his lectures,
which give rules? In Jordan’s case, it was of course his charisma and a rare willingness to
stand for a principle that got him a wide hearing online initially; views of his first
YouTube statements quickly numbered in the hundreds of thousands. But people have
kept listening because what he is saying meets a deep and unarticulated need. And that is
because alongside our wish to be free of rules, we all search for structure.

The hunger among many younger people for rules, or at least guidelines, is greater
today for good reason. In the West at least, millennials are living through a unique
historical situation. They are, I believe, the first generation to have been so thoroughly
taught two seemingly contradictory ideas about morality, simultaneously—at their
schools, colleges and universities, by many in my own generation. This contradiction has
left them at times disoriented and uncertain, without guidance and, more tragically,
deprived of riches they don’t even know exist.

The first idea or teaching is that morality is relative, at best a personal “value
judgment.” Relative means that there is no absolute right or wrong in anything; instead,
morality and the rules associated with it are just a matter of personal opinion or
happenstance, “relative to” or “related to” a particular framework, such as one’s ethnicity,
one’s upbringing, or the culture or historical moment one is born into. It’s nothing but an
accident of birth. According to this argument (now a creed), history teaches that
religions, tribes, nations and ethnic groups tend to disagree about fundamental matters,
and always have. Today, the postmodernist left makes the additional claim that one
group’s morality is nothing but its attempt to exercise power over another group. So, the
decent thing to do—once it becomes apparent how arbitrary your, and your society’s,
“moral values” are—is to show tolerance for people who think differently, and who come
from different (diverse) backgrounds. That emphasis on tolerance is so paramount that
for many people one of the worst character flaws a person can have is to be
“judgmental.” And, since we don’t know right from wrong, or what is good, just about
the most inappropriate thing an adult can do is give a young person advice about how to live.

And so a generation has been raised untutored in what was once called, aptly, “practical
wisdom,” which guided previous generations. Millennials, often told they have received
the finest education available anywhere, have actually suffered a form of serious
intellectual and moral neglect. The relativists of my generation and Jordan’s, many of
whom became their professors, chose to devalue thousands of years of human knowledge
about how to acquire virtue, dismissing it as passe, “not relevant” or even “oppressive.”
They were so successful at it that the very word “virtue” sounds out of date, and someone
using it appears anachronistically moralistic and self-righteous.

The study of virtue is not quite the same as the study of morals (right and wrong, good
and evil). Aristotle defined the virtues simply as the ways of behaving that are most
conducive to happiness in life. Vice was defined as the ways of behaving least conducive
to happiness. He observed that the virtues always aim for balance and avoid the extremes
of the vices. Aristotle studied the virtues and the vices in his Nicomachean Ethics. It was a
book based on experience and observation, not conjecture, about the kind of happiness
that was possible for human beings. Cultivating judgment about the difference between
virtue and vice is the beginning of wisdom, something that can never be out of date.

By contrast, our modern relativism begins by asserting that making judgments about
how to live is impossible, because there is no real good, and no true virtue (as these too
are relative). Thus relativism’s closest approximation to “virtue” is “tolerance.” Only
tolerance will provide social cohesion between different groups, and save us from harming
each other. On Facebook and other forms of social media, therefore, you signal your so-
called virtue, telling everyone how tolerant, open and compassionate you are, and wait for
likes to accumulate. (Leave aside that telling people you’re virtuous isn’t a virtue, it’s self¬
promotion. Virtue signalling is not virtue. Virtue signalling is, quite possibly, our
commonest vice.)

Intolerance of others’ views (no matter how ignorant or incoherent they may be) is not
simply wrong; in a world where there is no right or wrong, it is worse: it is a sign you are
embarrassingly unsophisticated or, possibly, dangerous.

But it turns out that many people cannot tolerate the vacuum—the chaos—which is
inherent in life, but made worse by this moral relativism; they cannot live without a moral
compass, without an ideal at which to aim in their lives. (For relativists, ideals are values
too, and like all values, they are merely “relative” and hardly worth sacrificing for.) So,
right alongside relativism, we find the spread of nihilism and despair, and also the
opposite of moral relativism: the blind certainty offered by ideologies that claim to have
an answer for everything.

And so we arrive at the second teaching that millennials have been bombarded with.
They sign up for a humanities course, to study greatest books ever written. But they’re
not assigned the books; instead they are given ideological attacks on them, based on some
appalling simplification. Where the relativist is filled with uncertainty, the ideologue is
the very opposite. He or she is hyper-judgmental and censorious, always knows what’s
wrong about others, and what to do about it. Sometimes it seems the only people willing
to give advice in a relativistic society are those with the least to offer.

Modern moral relativism has many sources. As we in the West learned more history, we
understood that different epochs had different moral codes. As we travelled the seas and
explored the globe, we learned of far-flung tribes on different continents whose different
moral codes made sense relative to, or within the framework of, their societies. Science
played a role, too, by attacking the religious view of the world, and thus undermining the
religious grounds for ethics and rules. Materialist social science implied that we could
divide the world into facts (which all could observe, and were objective and “real”) and
values (which were subjective and personal). Then we could first agree on the facts, and,
maybe, one day, develop a scientific code of ethics (which has yet to arrive). Moreover, by
implying that values had a lesser reality than facts, science contributed in yet another way
to moral relativism, for it treated “value” as secondary. (But the idea that we can easily
separate facts and values was and remains naive; to some extent, one’s values determine
what one will pay attention to, and what will count as a fact.)

The idea that different societies had different rules and morals was known to the
ancient world too, and it is interesting to compare its response to this realization with the
modern response (relativism, nihilism and ideology). When the ancient Greeks sailed to
India and elsewhere, they too discovered that rules, morals and customs differed from
place to place, and saw that the explanation for what was right and wrong was often
rooted in some ancestral authority. The Greek response was not despair, but a new
invention: philosophy.

Socrates, reacting to the uncertainty bred by awareness of these conflicting moral
codes, decided that instead of becoming a nihilist, a relativist or an ideologue, he would
devote his life to the search for wisdom that could reason about these differences, i.e., he
helped invent philosophy. He spent his life asking perplexing, foundational questions,

such as “What is virtue?” and “How can one live the good life?” and “What is justice?”
and he looked at different approaches, asking which seemed most coherent and most in
accord with human nature. These are the kinds of questions that I believe animate this
book.

For the ancients, the discovery that different people have different ideas about how,
practically, to live, did not paralyze them; it deepened their understanding of humanity
and led to some of the most satisfying conversations human beings have ever had, about
how life might be lived.

Likewise, Aristotle. Instead of despairing about these differences in moral codes,
Aristotle argued that though specific rules, laws and customs differed from place to place,
what does not differ is that in all places human beings, by their nature, have a proclivity
to make rules, laws and customs. To put this in modern terms, it seems that all human
beings are, by some kind of biological endowment, so ineradicably concerned with
morality that we create a structure of laws and rules wherever we are. The idea that
human life can be free of moral concerns is a fantasy.

We are rule generators. And given that we are moral animals, what must be the effect
of our simplistic modern relativism upon us? It means we are hobbling ourselves by
pretending to be something we are not. It is a mask, but a strange one, for it mostly
deceives the one who wears it. Scccccratccch the most clever postmodern-relativist
professor’s Mercedes with a key, and you will see how fast the mask of relativism (with
its pretense that there can be neither right nor wrong) and the cloak of radical tolerance
come off.

Because we do not yet have an ethics based on modern science, Jordan is not trying to
develop his rules by wiping the slate clean—by dismissing thousands of years of wisdom
as mere superstition and ignoring our greatest moral achievements. Far better to integrate
the best of what we are now learning with the books human beings saw fit to preserve
over millennia, and with the stories that have survived, against all odds, time’s tendency
to obliterate.

He is doing what reasonable guides have always done: he makes no claim that human
wisdom begins with himself, but, rather, turns first to his own guides. And although the
topics in this book are serious, Jordan often has great fun addressing them with a light
touch, as the chapter headings convey. He makes no claim to be exhaustive, and
sometimes the chapters consist of wide-ranging discussions of our psychology as he
understands it.

So why not call this a book of “guidelines,” a far more relaxed, user-friendly and less
rigid sounding term than “rules”?

Because these really are rules. And the foremost rule is that you must take
responsibility for your own life. Period.

One might think that a generation that has heard endlessly, from their more ideological
teachers, about the rights, rights, rights that belong to them, would object to being told
that they would do better to focus instead on taking responsibility. Yet this generation,
many of whom were raised in small families by hyper-protective parents, on soft-surface
playgrounds, and then taught in universities with “safe spaces” where they don’t have to
hear things they don’t want to—schooled to be risk-averse—has among it, now, millions
who feel stultified by this underestimation of their potential resilience and who have
embraced Jordan’s message that each individual has ultimate responsibility to bear; that if
one wants to live a full life, one first sets one’s own house in order; and only then can one
sensibly aim to take on bigger responsibilities. The extent of this reaction has often
moved both of us to the brink of tears.

Sometimes these rules are demanding. They require you to undertake an incremental
process that over time will stretch you to a new limit. That requires, as I’ve said,

venturing into the unknown. Stretching yourself beyond the boundaries of your current
self requires carefully choosing and then pursuing ideals: ideals that are up there, above
you, superior to you—and that you can’t always be sure you will reach.

But if it’s uncertain that our ideals are attainable, why do we bother reaching in the
first place? Because if you don’t reach for them, it is certain you will never feel that your
life has meaning.

And perhaps because, as unfamiliar and strange as it sounds, in the deepest part of our
psyche, we all want to be judged.

Dr. Norman Doidge, MD, is the author
of The Brain That Changes Itself

Overture

This book has a short history and a long history. We’ll begin with the short history.

In 2012, I started contributing to a website called Quora. On Quora, anyone can ask a
question, of any sort—and anyone can answer. Readers upvote those answers they like,
and downvote those they don’t. In this manner, the most useful answers rise to the top,
while the others sink into oblivion. I was curious about the site. I liked its free-for-all
nature. The discussion was often compelling, and it was interesting to see the diverse
range of opinions generated by the same question.

When I was taking a break (or avoiding work), I often turned to Quora, looking for
questions to engage with. I considered, and eventually answered, such questions as
“What’s the difference between being happy and being content?”, “What things get better
as you age?” and “What makes life more meaningful?”

Quora tells you how many people have viewed your answer and how many upvotes you
received. Thus, you can determine your reach, and see what people think of your ideas.
Only a small minority of those who view an answer upvote it. As of July 2017, as I write
this—and five years after I addressed “What makes life more meaningful?”—my answer
to that question has received a relatively small audience (14,000 views, and 133 upvotes),
while my response to the question about aging has been viewed by 7,200 people and
received 36 upvotes. Not exactly home runs. However, it’s to be expected. On such sites,
most answers receive very little attention, while a tiny minority become
disproportionately popular.

Soon after, I answered another question: “What are the most valuable things everyone
should know?” I wrote a list of rules, or maxims; some dead serious, some tongue-in-
cheek—“Be grateful in spite of your suffering,” “Do not do things that you hate,” “Do not
hide things in the fog,” and so on. The Quora readers appeared pleased with this list.
They commented on and shared it. They said such things as “I’m definitely printing this
list out and keeping it as a reference. Simply phenomenal,” and “You win Quora. We can
just close the site now.” Students at the University of Toronto, where I teach, came up to
me and told me how much they liked it. To date, my answer to “What are the most
valuable things ...” has been viewed by a hundred and twenty thousand people and been
upvoted twenty-three hundred times. Only a few hundred of the roughly six hundred
thousand questions on Quora have cracked the two-thousand-upvote barrier. My
procrastination-induced musings hit a nerve. I had written a 99.9 percentile answer.

It was not obvious to me when I wrote the list of rules for living that it was going to
perform so well. I had put a fair bit of care into all the sixty or so answers I submitted in
the few months surrounding that post. Nonetheless, Quora provides market research at
its finest. The respondents are anonymous. They’re disinterested, in the best sense. Their
opinions are spontaneous and unbiased. So, I paid attention to the results, and thought
about the reasons for that answer’s disproportionate success. Perhaps I struck the right
balance between the familiar and the unfamiliar while formulating the rules. Perhaps
people were drawn to the structure that such rules imply. Perhaps people just like lists.

A few months earlier, in March of 2012, I had received an email from a literary agent.
She had heard me speak on CBC radio during a show entitled Just Say No to Happiness,
where I had criticized the idea that happiness was the proper goal for life. Over the

previous decades I had read more than my share of dark books about the twentieth
century, focusing particularly on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, the great documenter of the slave-labour-camp horrors of the latter, once
wrote that the “pitiful ideology” holding that “human beings are created for happiness”
was an ideology “done in by the first blow of the work assigner’s cudgel.”! In a crisis, the
inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness
is the proper pursuit of the individual. On the radio show, I suggested, instead, that a
deeper meaning was required. I noted that the nature of such meaning was constantly re¬
presented in the great stories of the past, and that it had more to do with developing
character in the face of suffering than with happiness. This is part of the long history of
the present work.

From 1985 until 1999 I worked for about three hours a day on the only other book I
have ever published: Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief During that time, and in the
years since, I also taught a course on the material in that book, first at Harvard, and now
at the University of Toronto. In 2013, observing the rise of YouTube, and because of the
popularity of some work I had done with TVO, a Canadian public TV station, I decided to
film my university and public lectures and place them online. They attracted an
increasingly large audience—more than a million views by April 2016. The number of
views has risen very dramatically since then (up to eighteen million as I write this), but
that is in part because I became embroiled in a political controversy that drew an
inordinate amount of attention.

That’s another story. Maybe even another book.

I proposed in Maps of Meaning that the great myths and religious stories of the past,
particularly those derived from an earlier, oral tradition, were moral in their intent, rather
than descriptive. Thus, they did not concern themselves with what the world was, as a
scientist might have it, but with how a human being should act. I suggested that our
ancestors portrayed the world as a stage—a drama—instead of a place of objects. I
described how I had come to believe that the constituent elements of the world as drama
were order and chaos, and not material things.

Order is where the people around you act according to well-understood social norms,
and remain predictable and cooperative. It’s the world of social structure, explored
territory, and familiarity. The state of Order is typically portrayed, symbolically—
imaginatively—as masculine. It’s the Wise King and the Tyrant, forever bound together,
as society is simultaneously structure and oppression.

Chaos, by contrast, is where—or when—something unexpected happens. Chaos
emerges, in trivial form, when you tell a joke at a party with people you think you know
and a silent and embarrassing chill falls over the gathering. Chaos is what emerges more
catastrophically when you suddenly find yourself without employment, or are betrayed by
a lover. As the antithesis of symbolically masculine order, it’s presented imaginatively as
feminine. It’s the new and unpredictable suddenly emerging in the midst of the
commonplace familiar. It’s Creation and Destruction, the source of new things and the
destination of the dead (as nature, as opposed to culture, is simultaneously birth and
demise).

Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head
to tail. Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart.
The black dot in the white—and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of
transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and
large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from
catastrophe and chaos.

For the Taoists, meaning is to be found on the border between the ever-entwined pair.
To walk that border is to stay on the path of life, the divine Way.

And that’s much better than happiness.

The literary agent I referred to listened to the CBC radio broadcast where I discussed
such issues. It left her asking herself deeper questions. She emailed me, asking if I had
considered writing a book for a general audience. I had previously attempted to produce a
more accessible version of Maps of Meaning, which is a very dense book. But I found that
the spirit was neither in me during that attempt nor in the resultant manuscript. I think
this was because I was imitating my former self, and my previous book, instead of
occupying the place between order and chaos and producing something new. I suggested
that she watch four of the lectures I had done for a TVO program called Big Ideas on my
YouTube channel. I thought if she did that we could have a more informed and thorough
discussion about what kind of topics I might address in a more publicly accessible book.

She contacted me a few weeks later, after watching all four lectures and discussing
them with a colleague. Her interest had been further heightened, as had her commitment
to the project. That was promising—and unexpected. I’m always surprised when people
respond positively to what I am saying, given its seriousness and strange nature. I’m
amazed I have been allowed (even encouraged) to teach what I taught first in Boston and
now in Toronto. I’ve always thought that if people really noticed what I was teaching
there would be Hell to pay. You can decide for yourself what truth there might be in that
concern after reading this book. :)

She suggested that I write a guide of sorts to what a person needs “to live well”—
whatever that might mean. I thought immediately about my Quora list. I had in the
meantime written some further thoughts about of the rules I had posted. People had
responded positively toward those new ideas, as well. It seemed to me, therefore, that
there might be a nice fit between the Quora list and my new agent’s ideas. So, I sent her
the list. She liked it.

At about the same time, a friend and former student of mine—the novelist and
screenwriter Gregg Hurwitz—was considering a new book, which would become the
bestselling thriller Orphan X. He liked the rules, too. He had Mia, the book’s female lead,
post a selection of them, one by one, on her fridge, at points in the story where they
seemed apropos. That was another piece of evidence supporting my supposition of their
attractiveness. I suggested to my agent that I write a brief chapter on each of the rules.
She agreed, so I wrote a book proposal suggesting as much. When I started writing the
actual chapters, however, they weren’t at all brief. I had much more to say about each rule
than I originally envisioned.

This was partly because I had spent a very long time researching my first book:
studying history, mythology, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, child psychology, poetry, and
large sections of the Bible. I read and perhaps even understood much of Milton’s Paradise
Lost, Goethe’s Faust and Dante’s Inferno. I integrated all of that, for better or worse, trying
to address a perplexing problem: the reason or reasons for the nuclear standoff of the
Cold War. I couldn’t understand how belief systems could be so important to people that
they were willing to risk the destruction of the world to protect them. I came to realize
that shared belief systems made people intelligible to one another—and that the systems
weren’t just about belief.

People who live by the same code are rendered mutually predictable to one another.
They act in keeping with each other’s expectations and desires. They can cooperate. They
can even compete peacefully, because everyone knows what to expect from everyone else.
A shared belief system, partly psychological, partly acted out, simplifies everyone—in
their own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Shared beliefs simplify the world, as well,
because people who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the
world. There is perhaps nothing more important than the maintenance of this
organization—this simplification. If it’s threatened, the great ship of state rocks.

It isn’t precisely that people will fight for what they believe. They will fight, instead, to
maintain the match between what they believe, what they expect, and what they desire.
They will fight to maintain the match between what they expect and how everyone is
acting. It is precisely the maintenance of that match that enables everyone to live together
peacefully, predictably and productively. It reduces uncertainty and the chaotic mix of
intolerable emotions that uncertainty inevitably produces.

Imagine someone betrayed by a trusted lover. The sacred social contract obtaining
between the two has been violated. Actions speak louder than words, and an act of
betrayal disrupts the fragile and carefully negotiated peace of an intimate relationship. In
the aftermath of disloyalty, people are seized by terrible emotions: disgust, contempt (for
self and traitor), guilt, anxiety, rage and dread. Conflict is inevitable, sometimes with
deadly results. Shared belief systems—shared systems of agreed-upon conduct and
expectation—regulate and control all those powerful forces. It’s no wonder that people
will fight to protect something that saves them from being possessed by emotions of
chaos and terror (and after that from degeneration into strife and combat).

There’s more to it, too. A shared cultural system stabilizes human interaction, but is
also a system of value—a hierarchy of value, where some things are given priority and
importance and others are not. In the absence of such a system of value, people simply
cannot act. In fact, they can’t even perceive, because both action and perception require a
goal, and a valid goal is, by necessity, something valued. We experience much of our
positive emotion in relation to goals. We are not happy, technically speaking, unless we
see ourselves progressing—and the very idea of progression implies value. Worse yet is
the fact that the meaning of life without positive value is not simply neutral. Because we
are vulnerable and mortal, pain and anxiety are an integral part of human existence. We
must have something to set against the suffering that is intrinsic to Being. We must
have the meaning inherent in a profound system of value or the horror of existence
rapidly becomes paramount. Then, nihilism beckons, with its hopelessness and despair.

So: no value, no meaning. Between value systems, however, there is the possibility of
conflict. We are thus eternally caught between the most diamantine rock and the hardest
of places: loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence
of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable. In the West, we have
been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly
to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the
desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.

While writing Maps of Meaning, I was (also) driven by the realization that we can no
longer afford conflict—certainly not on the scale of the world conflagrations of the
twentieth century. Our technologies of destruction have become too powerful. The
potential consequences of war are literally apocalyptic. But we cannot simply abandon our
systems of value, our beliefs, our cultures, either. I agonized over this apparently
intractable problem for months. Was there a third way, invisible to me? I dreamt one
night during this period that I was suspended in mid-air, clinging to a chandelier, many
stories above the ground, directly under the dome of a massive cathedral. The people on
the floor below were distant and tiny. There was a great expanse between me and any
wall—and even the peak of the dome itself.

I have learned to pay attention to dreams, not least because of my training as a clinical
psychologist. Dreams shed light on the dim places where reason itself has yet to voyage. I
have studied Christianity a fair bit, too (more than other religious traditions, although I
am always trying to redress this lack). Like others, therefore, I must and do draw more
from what I do know than from what I do not. I knew that cathedrals were constructed in
the shape of a cross, and that the point under the dome was the centre of the cross. I
knew that the cross was simultaneously, the point of greatest suffering, the point of death

and transformation, and the symbolic centre of the world. That was not somewhere I
wanted to be. I managed to get down, out of the heights—out of the symbolic sky—back
to safe, familiar, anonymous ground. I don’t know how. Then, still in my dream, I
returned to my bedroom and my bed and tried to return to sleep and the peace of
unconsciousness. As I relaxed, however, I could feel my body transported. A great wind
was dissolving me, preparing to propel me back to the cathedral, to place me once again
at that central point. There was no escape. It was a true nightmare. I forced myself awake.
The curtains behind me were blowing in over my pillows. Half asleep, I looked at the foot
of the bed. I saw the great cathedral doors. I shook myself completely awake and they
disappeared.

My dream placed me at the centre of Being itself, and there was no escape. It took me
months to understand what this meant. During this time, I came to a more complete,
personal realization of what the great stories of the past continually insist upon: the
centre is occupied by the individual. The centre is marked by the cross, as X marks the
spot. Existence at that cross is suffering and transformation—and that fact, above all,
needs to be voluntarily accepted. It is possible to transcend slavish adherence to the group
and its doctrines and, simultaneously, to avoid the pitfalls of its opposite extreme,
nihilism. It is possible, instead, to find sufficient meaning in individual consciousness and
experience.

How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand,
and psychological and social dissolution, on the other? The answer was this: through the
elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to
shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path. We must each adopt as much
responsibility as possible for individual life, society and the world. We must each tell the
truth and repair what is in disrepair and break down and recreate what is old and
outdated. It is in this manner that we can and must reduce the suffering that poisons the
world. It’s asking a lot. It’s asking for everything. But the alternative—the horror of
authoritarian belief, the chaos of the collapsed state, the tragic catastrophe of the
unbridled natural world, the existential angst and weakness of the purposeless individual
—is clearly worse.

I have been thinking and lecturing about such ideas for decades. I have built up a large
corpus of stories and concepts pertaining to them. I am not for a moment claiming,
however, that I am entirely correct or complete in my thinking. Being is far more
complicated than one person can know, and I don’t have the whole story. I’m simply
offering the best I can manage.

In any case, the consequence of all that previous research and thinking was the new
essays which eventually became this book. My initial idea was to write a short essay on all
forty of the answers I had provided to Quora. That proposal was accepted by Penguin
Random House Canada. While writing, however, I cut the essay number to twenty-five
and then to sixteen and then finally, to the current twelve. I’ve been editing that
remainder, with the help and care of my official editor (and with the vicious and horribly
accurate criticism of Hurwitz, mentioned previously) for the past three years.

It took a long time to settle on a title: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Why did
that one rise up above all others? First and foremost, because of its simplicity. It indicates
clearly that people need ordering principles, and that chaos otherwise beckons. We
require rules, standards, values—alone and together. We’re pack animals, beasts of
burden. We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence. We require routine and
tradition. That’s order. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can
swamp us, so we drown—and that is also not good. We need to stay on the straight and
narrow path. Each of the twelve rules of this book—and their accompanying essays—
therefore provide a guide to being there. “There” is the dividing line between order and

chaos. That’s where we are simultaneously stable enough, exploring enough,
transforming enough, repairing enough, and cooperating enough. It’s there we find the
meaning that justifies life and its inevitable suffering. Perhaps, if we lived properly, we
would be able to tolerate the weight of our own self-consciousness. Perhaps, if we lived
properly, we could withstand the knowledge of our own fragility and mortality, without
the sense of aggrieved victimhood that produces, first, resentment, then envy, and then
the desire for vengeance and destruction. Perhaps, if we lived properly, we wouldn’t have
to turn to totalitarian certainty to shield ourselves from the knowledge of our own
insufficiency and ignorance. Perhaps we could come to avoid those pathways to Hell—and
we have seen in the terrible twentieth century just how real Hell can be.

I hope that these rules and their accompanying essays will help people understand what
they already know: that the soul of the individual eternally hungers for the heroism of
genuine Being, and that the willingness to take on that responsibility is identical to the
decision to live a meaningful life.

If we each live properly, we will collectively flourish.

Best wishes to you all, as you proceed through these pages.

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Clinical Psychologist and Professor of Psychology

RULE 1

STAND UP STRAIGHT WITH YOUR SHOULDERS BACK

LOBSTERS—AND TERRITORY

If you are like most people, you don’t often think about lobsters —unless you’re eating
one. However, these interesting and delicious crustaceans are very much worth
considering. Their nervous systems are comparatively simple, with large, easily observable
neurons, the magic cells of the brain. Because of this, scientists have been able to map the
neural circuitry of lobsters very accurately. This has helped us understand the structure
and function of the brain and behaviour of more complex animals, including human
beings. Lobsters have more in common with you than you might think (particularly when
you are feeling crabby—ha ha).

Lobsters live on the ocean floor. They need a home base down there, a range within
which they hunt for prey and scavenge around for stray edible bits and pieces of whatever
rains down from the continual chaos of carnage and death far above. They want
somewhere secure, where the hunting and the gathering is good. They want a home.

This can present a problem, since there are many lobsters. What if two of them occupy
the same territory, at the bottom of the ocean, at the same time, and both want to live
there? What if there are hundreds of lobsters, all trying to make a living and raise a
family, in the same crowded patch of sand and refuse?

Other creatures have this problem, too. When songbirds come north in the spring, for
example, they engage in ferocious territorial disputes. The songs they sing, so peaceful
and beautiful to human ears, are siren calls and cries of domination. A brilliantly musical
bird is a small warrior proclaiming his sovereignty. Take the wren, for example, a small,
feisty, insect-eating songbird common in North America. A newly arrived wren wants a
sheltered place to build a nest, away from the wind and rain. He wants it close to food,
and attractive to potential mates. He also wants to convince competitors for that space to
keep their distance.

Birds—and Territory

My dad and I designed a house for a wren family when I was ten years old. It looked like a
Conestoga wagon, and had a front entrance about the size of a quarter. This made it a
good house for wrens, who are tiny, and not so good for other, larger birds, who couldn’t
get in. My elderly neighbour had a birdhouse, too, which we built for her at the same
time, from an old rubber boot. It had an opening large enough for a bird the size of a
robin. She was looking forward to the day it was occupied.

A wren soon discovered our birdhouse, and made himself at home there. We could hear
his lengthy, trilling song, repeated over and over, during the early spring. Once he’d built
his nest in the covered wagon, however, our new avian tenant started carrying small
sticks to our neighbour’s nearby boot. He packed it so full that no other bird, large or
small, could possibly get in. Our neighbour was not pleased by this pre-emptive strike,
but there was nothing to be done about it. “If we take it down,” said my dad, “clean it up,
and put it back in the tree, the wren will just pack it full of sticks again.” Wrens are small,
and they’re cute, but they’re merciless.

I had broken my leg skiing the previous winter—first time down the hill—and had
received some money from a school insurance policy designed to reward unfortunate,

clumsy children. I purchased a cassette recorder (a high-tech novelty at the time) with the
proceeds. My dad suggested that I sit on the back lawn, record the wren’s song, play it
back, and watch what happened. So, I went out into the bright spring sunlight and taped a
few minutes of the wren laying furious claim to his territory with song. Then I let him
hear his own voice. That little bird, one-third the size of a sparrow, began to dive-bomb
me and my cassette recorder, swooping back and forth, inches from the speaker. We saw
a lot of that sort of behaviour, even in the absence of the tape recorder. If a larger bird
ever dared to sit and rest in any of the trees near our birdhouse there was a good chance
he would get knocked off his perch by a kamikaze wren.

Now, wrens and lobsters are very different. Lobsters do not fly, sing or perch in trees.
Wrens have feathers, not hard shells. Wrens can’t breathe underwater, and are seldom
served with butter. However, they are also similar in important ways. Both are obsessed
with status and position, for example, like a great many creatures. The Norwegian
zoologist and comparative psychologist Thorlief Schjelderup-Ebbe observed (back in
1921) that even common barnyard chickens establish a “pecking order.”

The determination of Who’s Who in the chicken world has important implications for
each individual bird’s survival, particularly in times of scarcity. The birds that always have
priority access to whatever food is sprinkled out in the yard in the morning are the
celebrity chickens. After them come the second-stringers, the hangers-on and wannabes.
Then the third-rate chickens have their turn, and so on, down to the bedraggled, partially-
feathered and badly-pecked wretches who occupy the lowest, untouchable stratum of the
chicken hierarchy.

Chickens, like suburbanites, live communally. Songbirds, such as wrens, do not, but
they still inhabit a dominance hierarchy. It’s just spread out over more territory. The
wiliest, strongest, healthiest and most fortunate birds occupy prime territory, and defend
it. Because of this, they are more likely to attract high-quality mates, and to hatch chicks
who survive and thrive. Protection from wind, rain and predators, as well as easy access to
superior food, makes for a much less stressed existence. Territory matters, and there is
little difference between territorial rights and social status. It is often a matter of life and
death.

If a contagious avian disease sweeps through a neighbourhood of well-stratified
songbirds, it is the least dominant and most stressed birds, occupying the lowest rungs of
the bird world, who are most likely to sicken and die. This is equally true of human
neighbourhoods, when bird flu viruses and other illnesses sweep across the planet. The
poor and stressed always die first, and in greater numbers. They are also much more
susceptible to non-infectious diseases, such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. When
the aristocracy catches a cold, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia.

Because territory matters, and because the best locales are always in short supply,
territory-seeking among animals produces conflict. Conflict, in turn, produces another
problem: how to win or lose without the disagreeing parties incurring too great a cost.
This latter point is particularly important. Imagine that two birds engage in a squabble
about a desirable nesting area. The interaction can easily degenerate into outright physical
combat. Under such circumstances, one bird, usually the largest, will eventually win—but
even the victor may be hurt by the fight. That means a third bird, an undamaged, canny
bystander, can move in, opportunistically, and defeat the now-crippled victor. That is not
at all a good deal for the first two birds.

Conflict—and Territory

Over the millennia, animals who must co-habit with others in the same territories have in
consequence learned many tricks to establish dominance, while risking the least amount

of possible damage. A defeated wolf, for example, will roll over on its back, exposing its
throat to the victor, who will not then deign to tear it out. The now-dominant wolf may
still require a future hunting partner, after all, even one as pathetic as his now-defeated
foe. Bearded dragons, remarkable social lizards, wave their front legs peaceably at one
another to indicate their wish for continued social harmony. Dolphins produce specialized
sound pulses while hunting and during other times of high excitement to reduce potential
conflict among dominant and subordinate group members. Such behavior is endemic in
the community of living things.

Lobsters, scuttling around on the ocean floor, are no exception.- If you catch a few
dozen, and transport them to a new location, you can observe their status-forming rituals
and techniques. Each lobster will first begin to explore the new territory, partly to map its
details, and partly to find a good place for shelter. Lobsters learn a lot about where they
live, and they remember what they learn. If you startle one near its nest, it will quickly zip
back and hide there. If you startle it some distance away, however, it will immediately
dart towards the nearest suitable shelter, previously identified and now remembered.

A lobster needs a safe hiding place to rest, free from predators and the forces of nature.
Furthermore, as lobsters grow, they moult, or shed their shells, which leaves them soft
and vulnerable for extended periods of time. A burrow under a rock makes a good lobster
home, particularly if it is located where shells and other detritus can be dragged into place
to cover the entrance, once the lobster is snugly ensconced inside. However, there may be
only a small number of high-quality shelters or hiding places in each new territory. They
are scarce and valuable. Other lobsters continually seek them out.

This means that lobsters often encounter one another when out exploring. Researchers
have demonstrated that even a lobster raised in isolation knows what to do when such a
thing happens. It has complex defensive and aggressive behaviours built right into its
nervous system. It begins to dance around, like a boxer, opening and raising its claws,
moving backward, forward, and side to side, mirroring its opponent, waving its opened
claws back and forth. At the same time, it employs special jets under its eyes to direct
streams of liquid at its opponent. The liquid spray contains a mix of chemicals that tell
the other lobster about its size, sex, health, and mood.

Sometimes one lobster can tell immediately from the display of claw size that it is
much smaller than its opponent, and will back down without a fight. The chemical
information exchanged in the spray can have the same effect, convincing a less healthy or
less aggressive lobster to retreat. That’s dispute resolution Level 1. If the two lobsters
are very close in size and apparent ability, however, or if the exchange of liquid has been
insufficiently informative, they will proceed to dispute resolution Level 2. With antennae
whipping madly and claws folded downward, one will advance, and the other retreat.
Then the defender will advance, and the aggressor retreat. After a couple of rounds of this
behaviour, the more nervous of the lobsters may feel that continuing is not in his best
interest. He will flick his tail reflexively, dart backwards, and vanish, to try his luck
elsewhere. If neither blinks, however, the lobsters move to Level 3, which involves
genuine combat.

This time, the now enraged lobsters come at each other viciously, with their claws
extended, to grapple. Each tries to flip the other on its back. A successfully flipped lobster
will conclude that its opponent is capable of inflicting serious damage. It generally gives
up and leaves (although it harbours intense resentment and gossips endlessly about the
victor behind its back). If neither can overturn the other—or if one will not quit despite
being flipped—the lobsters move to Level 4. Doing so involves extreme risk, and is not
something to be engaged in without forethought: one or both lobsters will emerge
damaged from the ensuing fray, perhaps fatally.

The animals advance on each other, with increasing speed. Their claws are open, so
they can grab a leg, or antenna, or an eye-stalk, or anything else exposed and vulnerable.
Once a body part has been successfully grabbed, the grabber will tail-flick backwards,
sharply, with claw clamped firmly shut, and try to tear it off. Disputes that have escalated
to this point typically create a clear winner and loser. The loser is unlikely to survive,
particularly if he or she remains in the territory occupied by the winner, now a mortal
enemy.

In the aftermath of a losing battle, regardless of how aggressively a lobster has behaved,
it becomes unwilling to fight further, even against another, previously defeated opponent.
A vanquished competitor loses confidence, sometimes for days. Sometimes the defeat can
have even more severe consequences. If a dominant lobster is badly defeated, its brain
basically dissolves. Then it grows a new, subordinate’s brain—one more appropriate to its
new, lowly position. Its original brain just isn’t sophisticated to manage the
transformation from king to bottom dog without virtually complete dissolution and
regrowth. Anyone who has experienced a painful transformation after a serious defeat in
romance or career may feel some sense of kinship with the once successful crustacean.

The Neurochemistry of Defeat and Victory

A lobster loser’s brain chemistry differs importantly from that of a lobster winner. This is
reflected in their relative postures. Whether a lobster is confident or cringing depends on
the ratio of two chemicals that modulate communication between lobster neurons:
serotonin and octopamine. Winning increases the ratio of the former to the latter.

A lobster with high levels of serotonin and low levels of octopamine is a cocky,
strutting sort of shellfish, much less likely to back down when challenged. This is because
serotonin helps regulate postural flexion. A flexed lobster extends its appendages so that
it can look tall and dangerous, like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti Western. When a
lobster that has just lost a battle is exposed to serotonin, it will stretch itself out, advance
even on former victors, and fight longer and harder.- The drugs prescribed to depressed
human beings, which are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, have much the same
chemical and behavioural effect. In one of the more staggering demonstrations of the
evolutionary continuity of life on Earth, Prozac even cheers up lobsters.

High serotonin/low octopamine characterizes the victor. The opposite neurochemical
configuration, a high ratio of octopamine to serotonin, produces a defeated-looking,
scrunched-up, inhibited, drooping, skulking sort of lobster, very likely to hang around
street corners, and to vanish at the first hint of trouble. Serotonin and octopamine also
regulate the tail-flick reflex, which serves to propel a lobster rapidly backwards when it
needs to escape. Less provocation is necessary to trigger that reflex in a defeated lobster.
You can see an echo of that in the heightened startle reflex characteristic of the soldier or
battered child with post-traumatic stress disorder.

The Principle of Unequal Distribution

When a defeated lobster regains its courage and dares to fight again it is more likely to
lose again than you would predict, statistically, from a tally of its previous fights. Its
victorious opponent, on the other hand, is more likely to win. It’s winner-take-all in the
lobster world, just as it is in human societies, where the top 1 percent have as much loot
as the bottom 50 percent —and where the richest eighty-five people have as much as the
bottom three and a half billion.

That same brutal principle of unequal distribution applies outside the financial domain
—indeed, anywhere that creative production is required. The majority of scientific papers

are published by a very small group of scientists. A tiny proportion of musicians produces
almost all the recorded commercial music. Just a handful of authors sell all the books. A
million and a half separately titled books (!) sell each year in the US. However, only five
hundred of these sell more than a hundred thousand copies. Similarly, just four classical
composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky) wrote almost all the music played
by modern orchestras. Bach, for his part, composed so prolifically that it would take
decades of work merely to hand-copy his scores, yet only a small fraction of this
prodigious output is commonly performed. The same thing applies to the output of the
other three members of this group of hyper-dominant composers: only a small fraction of
their work is still widely played. Thus, a small fraction of the music composed by a small
fraction of all the classical composers who have ever composed makes up almost all the
classical music that the world knows and loves.

This principle is sometimes known as Price’s law, after Derek J. de Solla Price, the
researcher who discovered its application in science in 1963. It can be modelled using an
approximately L-shaped graph, with number of people on the vertical axis, and
productivity or resources on the horizontal. The basic principle had been discovered much
earlier. Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), an Italian polymath, noticed its applicability to
wealth distribution in the early twentieth century, and it appears true for every society
ever studied, regardless of governmental form. It also applies to the population of cities (a
very small number have almost all the people), the mass of heavenly bodies (a very small
number hoard all the matter), and the frequency of words in a language (90 percent of
communication occurs using just 500 words), among many other things. Sometimes it is
known as the Matthew Principle (Matthew 25:29), derived from what might be the
harshest statement ever attributed to Christ: “to those who have everything, more will be
given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.”

You truly know you are the Son of God when your dicta apply even to crustaceans.

Back to the fractious shellfish: it doesn’t take that long before lobsters, testing each
other out, learn who can be messed with and who should be given a wide berth—and
once they have learned, the resultant hierarchy is exceedingly stable. All a victor needs to
do, once he has won, is to wiggle his antennae in a threatening manner, and a previous
opponent will vanish in a puff of sand before him. A weaker lobster will quit trying,
accept his lowly status, and keep his legs attached to his body. The top lobster, by
contrast—occupying the best shelter, getting some good rest, finishing a good meal—
parades his dominance around his territory, rousting subordinate lobsters from their
shelters at night, just to remind them who’s their daddy.

All the Girls

The female lobsters (who also fight hard for territory during the explicitly maternal stages
of their existence ) identify the top guy quickly, and become irresistibly attracted to him.
This is brilliant strategy, in my estimation. It’s also one used by females of many different
species, including humans. Instead of undertaking the computationally difficult task of
identifying the best man, the females outsource the problem to the machine-like
calculations of the dominance hierarchy. They let the males fight it out and peel their
paramours from the top. This is very much what happens with stock-market pricing,
where the value of any particular enterprise is determined through the competition of all.

When the females are ready to shed their shells and soften up a bit, they become
interested in mating. They start hanging around the dominant lobster’s pad, spraying
attractive scents and aphrodisiacs towards him, trying to seduce him. His aggression has
made him successful, so he’s likely to react in a dominant, irritable manner. Furthermore,
he’s large, healthy and powerful. It’s no easy task to switch his attention from fighting to

mating. (If properly charmed, however, he will change his behaviour towards the female.
This is the lobster equivalent of Fifty Shades of Grey, the fastest-selling paperback of all
time, and the eternal Beauty-and-the-Beast plot of archetypal romance. This is the pattern
of behaviour continually represented in the sexually explicit literary fantasies that are as
popular among women as provocative images of naked women are among men.)

It should be pointed out, however, that sheer physical power is an unstable basis on
which to found lasting dominance, as the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal has taken
pains to demonstrate. Among the chimp troupes he studied, males who were successful
in the longer term had to buttress their physical prowess with more sophisticated
attributes. Even the most brutal chimp despot can be taken down, after all, by two
opponents, each three-quarters as mean. In consequence, males who stay on top longer
are those who form reciprocal coalitions with their lower-status compatriots, and who pay
careful attention to the troupe’s females and their infants. The political ploy of baby-
kissing is literally millions of years old. But lobsters are still comparatively primitive, so
the bare plot elements of Beast and Beauty suffice for them.

Once the Beast has been successfully charmed, the successful female (lobster) will
disrobe, shedding her shell, making herself dangerously soft, vulnerable, and ready to
mate. At the right moment, the male, now converted into a careful lover, deposits a
packet of sperm into the appropriate receptacle. Afterward, the female hangs around, and
hardens up for a couple of weeks (another phenomenon not entirely unknown among
human beings). At her leisure, she returns to her own domicile, laden with fertilized eggs.
At this point another female will attempt the same thing—and so on. The dominant male,
with his upright and confident posture, not only gets the prime real estate and easiest
access to the best hunting grounds. He also gets all the girls. It is exponentially more
worthwhile to be successful, if you are a lobster, and male.

Why is all this relevant? For an amazing number of reasons, apart from those that are
comically obvious. First, we know that lobsters have been around, in one form or another,
for more than 350 million years. This is a very long time. Sixty-five million years ago,
there were still dinosaurs. That is the unimaginably distant past to us. To the lobsters,
however, dinosaurs were the nouveau riche, who appeared and disappeared in the flow of
near-eternal time. This means that dominance hierarchies have been an essentially
permanent feature of the environment to which all complex life has adapted. A third of a
billion years ago, brains and nervous systems were comparatively simple. Nonetheless,
they already had the structure and neurochemistry necessary to process information
about status and society. The importance of this fact can hardly be overstated.

The Nature of Nature

It is a truism of biology that evolution is conservative. When something evolves, it must
build upon what nature has already produced. New features may be added, and old
features may undergo some alteration, but most things remain the same. It is for this
reason that the wings of bats, the hands of human beings, and the fins of whales look
astonishingly alike in their skeletal form. They even have the same number of bones.
Evolution laid down the cornerstones for basic physiology long ago.

Now evolution works, in large part, through variation and natural selection. Variation
exists for many reasons, including gene-shuffling (to put it simply) and random mutation.
Individuals vary within a species for such reasons. Nature chooses from among them,
across time. That theory, as stated, appears to account for the continual alteration of life-
forms over the eons. But there’s an additional question lurking under the surface: what
exactly is the “nature” in “natural selection”? What exactly is “the environment” to which
animals adapt? We make many assumptions about nature—about the environment—and

these have consequences. Mark Twain once said, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets
us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

First, it is easy to assume that “nature” is something with a nature—something static.
But it’s not: at least not in any simple sense. It’s static and dynamic, at the same time.
The environment—the nature that selects—itself transforms. The famous yin and yang
symbols of the Taoists capture this beautifully. Being, for the Taoists—reality itself—is
composed of two opposing principles, often translated as feminine and masculine, or even
more narrowly as female and male. However, yin and yang are more accurately
understood as chaos and order. The Taoist symbol is a circle enclosing twin serpents,
head to tail. The black serpent, chaos, has a white dot in its head. The white serpent,
order, has a black dot in its head. This is because chaos and order are interchangeable, as
well as eternally juxtaposed. There is nothing so certain that it cannot vary. Even the sun
itself has its cycles of instability. Likewise, there is nothing so mutable that it cannot be
fixed. Every revolution produces a new order. Every death is, simultaneously, a
metamorphosis.

Considering nature as purely static produces serious errors of apprehension. Nature
“selects.” The idea of selects contains implicitly nested within it the idea of fitness. It is
“fitness” that is “selected.” Fitness, roughly speaking, is the probability that a given
organism will leave offspring (will propagate its genes through time). The “fit” in
“fitness” is therefore the matching of organismal attribute to environmental demand. If
that demand is conceptualized as static—if nature is conceptualized as eternal and
unchanging—then evolution is a never-ending series of linear improvements, and fitness
is something that can be ever more closely approximated across time. The still-powerful
Victorian idea of evolutionary progress, with man at the pinnacle, is a partial consequence
of this model of nature. It produces the erroneous notion that there is a destination of
natural selection (increasing fitness to the environment), and that it can be
conceptualized as a fixed point.

But nature, the selecting agent, is not a static selector—not in any simple sense. Nature
dresses differently for each occasion. Nature varies like a musical score—and that, in part,
explains why music produces its deep intimations of meaning. As the environment
supporting a species transforms and changes, the features that make a given individual
successful in surviving and reproducing also transform and change. Thus, the theory of
natural selection does not posit creatures matching themselves ever more precisely to a
template specified by the world. It is more that creatures are in a dance with nature, albeit
one that is deadly. “In my kingdom,” as the Red Queen tells Alice in Wonderland, “you
have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.” No one standing still can
triumph, no matter how well constituted.

Nature is not simply dynamic, either. Some things change quickly, but they are nested
within other things that change less quickly (music frequently models this, too). Leaves
change more quickly than trees, and trees more quickly than forests. Weather changes
faster than climate. If it wasn’t this way, then the conservatism of evolution would not
work, as the basic morphology of arms and hands would have to change as fast as the
length of arm bones and the function of fingers. It’s chaos, within order, within chaos,
within higher order. The order that is most real is the order that is most unchanging—
and that is not necessarily the order that is most easily seen. The leaf, when perceived,
might blind the observer to the tree. The tree can blind him to the forest. And some
things that are most real (such as the ever-present dominance hierarchy) cannot be
“seen” at all.

It is also a mistake to conceptualize nature romantically. Rich, modern city-dwellers,
surrounded by hot, baking concrete, imagine the environment as something pristine and
paradisal, like a French impressionist landscape. Eco-activists, even more idealistic in

their viewpoint, envision nature as harmoniously balanced and perfect, absent the
disruptions and depredations of mankind. Unfortunately, “the environment” is also
elephantiasis and guinea worms (don’t ask), anopheles mosquitoes and malaria,
starvation-level droughts, AIDS and the Black Plague. We don’t fantasize about the
beauty of these aspects of nature, although they are just as real as their Edenic
counterparts. It is because of the existence of such things, of course, that we attempt to
modify our surroundings, protecting our children, building cities and transportation
systems and growing food and generating power. If Mother Nature wasn’t so hell-bent on
our destruction, it would be easier for us to exist in simple harmony with her dictates.

And this brings us to a third erroneous concept: that nature is something strictly
segregated from the cultural constructs that have emerged within it. The order within the
chaos and order of Being is all the more “natural” the longer it has lasted. This is because
“nature” is “what selects,” and the longer a feature has existed the more time it has had
to be selected—and to shape life. It does not matter whether that feature is physical and
biological, or social and cultural. All that matters, from a Darwinian perspective, is
permanence—and the dominance hierarchy, however social or cultural it might appear,
has been around for some half a billion years. It’s permanent. It’s real. The dominance
hierarchy is not capitalism. It’s not communism, either, for that matter. It’s not the
military-industrial complex. It’s not the patriarchy—that disposable, malleable, arbitrary
cultural artefact. It’s not even a human creation; not in the most profound sense. It is
instead a near-eternal aspect of the environment, and much of what is blamed on these
more ephemeral manifestations is a consequence of its unchanging existence. We (the
sovereign we, the we that has been around since the beginning of life) have lived in a
dominance hierarchy for a long, long time. We were struggling for position before we had
skin, or hands, or lungs, or bones. There is little more natural than culture. Dominance
hierarchies are older than trees.

The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy is
therefore exceptionally ancient and fundamental. It is a master control system,
modulating our perceptions, values, emotions, thoughts and actions. It powerfully affects
every aspect of our Being, conscious and unconscious alike. This is why, when we are
defeated, we act very much like lobsters who have lost a fight. Our posture droops. We
face the ground. We feel threatened, hurt, anxious and weak. If things do not improve, we
become chronically depressed. Under such conditions, we can’t easily put up the kind of
fight that life demands, and we become easy targets for harder-shelled bullies. And it is
not only the behavioural and experiential similarities that are striking. Much of the basic
neurochemistry is the same.

Consider serotonin, the chemical that governs posture and escape in the lobster. Low-
ranking lobsters produce comparatively low levels of serotonin. This is also true of low-
ranking human beings (and those low levels decrease more with each defeat). Low
serotonin means decreased confidence. Low serotonin means more response to stress and
costlier physical preparedness for emergency—as anything whatsoever may happen, at
any time, at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy (and rarely something good). Low
serotonin means less happiness, more pain and anxiety, more illness, and a shorter
lifespan—among humans, just as among crustaceans. Higher spots in the dominance
hierarchy, and the higher serotonin levels typical of those who inhabit them, are
characterized by less illness, misery and death, even when factors such as absolute income
—or number of decaying food scraps—are held constant. The importance of this can
hardly be overstated.

Top and Bottom

There is an unspeakably primordial calculator, deep within you, at the very foundation of
your brain, far below your thoughts and feelings. It monitors exactly where you are
positioned in society—on a scale of one to ten, for the sake of argument. If you’re a
number one, the highest level of status, you’re an overwhelming success. If you’re male,
you have preferential access to the best places to live and the highest-quality food. People
compete to do you favours. You have limitless opportunity for romantic and sexual
contact. You are a successful lobster, and the most desirable females line up and vie for
your attention.

If you’re female, you have access to many high-quality suitors: tall, strong and
symmetrical; creative, reliable, honest and generous. And, like your dominant male
counterpart, you will compete ferociously, even pitilessly, to maintain or improve your
position in the equally competitive female mating hierarchy. Although you are less likely
to use physical aggression to do so, there are many effective verbal tricks and strategies at
your disposal, including the disparaging of opponents, and you may well be expert at their
use.

If you are a low-status ten, by contrast, male or female, you have nowhere to live (or
nowhere good). Your food is terrible, when you’re not going hungry. You’re in poor
physical and mental condition. You’re of minimal romantic interest to anyone, unless
they are as desperate as you. You are more likely to fall ill, age rapidly, and die young,
with few, if any, to mourn you. Even money itself may prove of little use. You won’t
know how to use it, because it is difficult to use money properly, particularly if you are
unfamiliar with it. Money will make you liable to the dangerous temptations of drugs and
alcohol, which are much more rewarding if you have been deprived of pleasure for a long
period. Money will also make you a target for predators and psychopaths, who thrive on
exploiting those who exist on the lower rungs of society. The bottom of the dominance
hierarchy is a terrible, dangerous place to be.

The ancient part of your brain specialized for assessing dominance watches how you are
treated by other people. On that evidence, it renders a determination of your value and
assigns you a status. If you are judged by your peers as of little worth, the counter
restricts serotonin availability. That makes you much more physically and psychologically
reactive to any circumstance or event that might produce emotion, particularly if it is
negative. You need that reactivity. Emergencies are common at the bottom, and you must
be ready to survive.

Unfortunately, that physical hyper-response, that constant alertness, burns up a lot of
precious energy and physical resources. This response is really what everyone calls stress,
and it is by no means only or even primarily psychological. It’s a reflection of the genuine
constraints of unfortunate circumstances. When operating at the bottom, the ancient
brain counter assumes that even the smallest unexpected impediment might produce an
uncontrollable chain of negative events, which will have to be handled alone, as useful
friends are rare indeed, on society’s fringes. You will therefore continually sacrifice what
you could otherwise physically store for the future, using it up on heightened readiness
and the possibility of immediate panicked action in the present. When you don’t know
what to do, you must be prepared to do anything and everything, in case it becomes
necessary. You’re sitting in your car with the gas and brake pedals both punched to the
mat. Too much of that and everything falls apart. The ancient counter will even shut
down your immune system, expending the energy and resources required for future
health now, during the crises of the present. It will render you impulsive,— 1 so that you
will jump, for example, at any short-term mating opportunities, or any possibilities of
pleasure, no matter how sub-par, disgraceful or illegal. It will leave you far more likely to
live, or die, carelessly, for a rare opportunity at pleasure, when it manifests itself. The
physical demands of emergency preparedness will wear you down in every way.

If you have a high status, on the other hand, the counter’s cold, pre-reptilian mechanics
assume that your niche is secure, productive and safe, and that you are well buttressed
with social support. It thinks the chance that something will damage you is low and can
be safely discounted. Change might be opportunity, instead of disaster. The serotonin
flows plentifully. This renders you confident and calm, standing tall and straight, and
much less on constant alert. Because your position is secure, the future is likely to be
good for you. It’s worthwhile to think in the long term and plan for a better tomorrow.
You don’t need to grasp impulsively at whatever crumbs come your way, because you can
realistically expect good things to remain available. You can delay gratification, without
forgoing it forever. You can afford to be a reliable and thoughtful citizen.

Malfunction

Sometimes, however, the counter mechanism can go wrong. Erratic habits of sleeping and
eating can interfere with its function. Uncertainty can throw it for a loop. The body, with
its various parts, needs to function like a well-rehearsed orchestra. Every system must
play its role properly, and at exactly the right time, or noise and chaos ensue. It is for this
reason that routine is so necessary. The acts of life we repeat every day need to be
automatized. They must be turned into stable and reliable habits, so they lose their
complexity and gain predictability and simplicity. This can be perceived most clearly in
the case of small children, who are delightful and comical and playful when their sleeping
and eating schedules are stable, and horrible and whiny and nasty when they are not.

It is for such reasons that I always ask my clinical clients first about sleep. Do they
wake up in the morning at approximately the time the typical person wakes up, and at the
same time every day? If the answer is no, fixing that is the first thing I recommend. It
doesn’t matter so much if they go to bed at the same time each evening, but waking up at
a consistent hour is a necessity. Anxiety and depression cannot be easily treated if the
sufferer has unpredictable daily routines. The systems that mediate negative emotion are
tightly tied to the properly cyclical circadian rhythms.

The next thing I ask about is breakfast. I counsel my clients to eat a fat and protein-
heavy breakfast as soon as possible after they awaken (no simple carbohydrates, no
sugars, as they are digested too rapidly, and produce a blood-sugar spike and rapid dip).
This is because anxious and depressed people are already stressed, particularly if their
lives have not been under control for a good while. Their bodies are therefore primed to
hypersecrete insulin, if they engage in any complex or demanding activity. If they do so
after fasting all night and before eating, the excess insulin in their bloodstream will mop
up all their blood sugar. Then they become hypoglycemic and psycho-physiologically
unstable. All day. Their systems cannot be reset until after more sleep. I have had many
clients whose anxiety was reduced to subclinical levels merely because they started to
sleep on a predictable schedule and eat breakfast.

Other bad habits can also interfere with the counter’s accuracy. Sometimes this
happens directly, for poorly understood biological reasons, and sometimes it happens
because those habits initiate a complex positive feedback loop. A positive feedback loop
requires an input detector, an amplifier, and some form of output. Imagine a signal picked
up by the input detector, amplified, and then emitted, in amplified form. So far, so good.
The trouble starts when the input detector detects that output, and runs it through the
system again, amplifying and emitting it again. A few rounds of intensification and things
get dangerously out of control.

Most people have been subject to the deafening howling of feedback at a concert, when
the sound system squeals painfully. The microphone sends a signal to the speakers. The
speakers emit the signal. The signal can be picked up by the microphone and sent through

the system again, if it’s too loud or too close to the speakers. The sound rapidly amplifies
to unbearable levels, sufficient to destroy the speakers, if it continues.

The same destructive loop happens within people’s lives. Much of the time, when it
happens, we label it mental illness, even though it’s not only or even at all occurring
inside people’s psyches. Addiction to alcohol or another mood-altering drug is a common
positive-feedback process. Imagine a person who enjoys alcohol, perhaps a bit too much.
He has a quick three or four drinks. His blood alcohol level spikes sharply. This can be
extremely exhilarating, particularly for someone who has a genetic predisposition to
alcoholism.- But it only occurs while blood alcohol levels are actively rising, and that
only continues if the drinker keeps drinking. When he stops, not only does his blood
alcohol level plateau and then start to sink, but his body begins to produce a variety of
toxins, as it metabolizes the ethanol already consumed. He also starts to experience
alcohol withdrawal, as the anxiety systems that were suppressed during intoxication start
to hyper-respond. A hangover is alcohol withdrawal (which quite frequently kills
withdrawing alcoholics), and it starts all too soon after drinking ceases. To continue the
warm glow, and stave off the unpleasant aftermath, the drinker may just continue to
drink, until all the liquor in his house is consumed, the bars are closed and his money is
spent.

The next day, the drinker wakes up, badly hungover. So far, this is just unfortunate.
The real trouble starts when he discovers that his hangover can be “cured” with a few
more drinks the morning after. Such a cure is, of course, temporary. It merely pushes the
withdrawal symptoms a bit further into the future. But that might be what is required, in
the short term, if the misery is sufficiently acute. So now he has learned to drink to cure
his hangover. When the medication causes the disease, a positive feedback loop has been
established. Alcoholism can quickly emerge under such conditions.

Something similar often happens to people who develop an anxiety disorder, such as
agoraphobia. People with agoraphobia can become so overwhelmed with fear that they
will no longer leave their homes. Agoraphobia is the consequence of a positive feedback
loop. The first event that precipitates the disorder is often a panic attack. The sufferer is
typically a middle-aged woman who has been too dependent on other people. Perhaps she
went immediately from over-reliance on her father to a relationship with an older and
comparatively dominant boyfriend or husband, with little or no break for independent
existence.

In the weeks leading up to the emergence of her agoraphobia, such a woman typically
experiences something unexpected and anomalous. It might be something physiological,
such as heart palpitations, which are common in any case, and whose likelihood is
increased during menopause, when the hormonal processes regulating a women’s
psychological experience fluctuate unpredictably. Any perceptible alteration in heart-rate
can trigger thoughts both of heart attack and an all-too-public and embarrassing display
of post-heart attack distress and suffering (death and social humiliation constituting the
two most basic fears). The unexpected occurrence might instead be conflict in the
sufferer’s marriage, or the illness or death of a spouse. It might be a close friend’s divorce
or hospitalization. Some real event typically precipitates the initial increase in fear of
mortality and social judgment.

After the shock, perhaps, the pre-agoraphobic woman leaves her house, and makes her
way to the shopping mall. It’s busy and difficult to park. This makes her even more
stressed. The thoughts of vulnerability occupying her mind since her recent unpleasant
experience rise close to the surface. They trigger anxiety. Her heart rate rises. She begins
to breathe shallowly and quickly. She feels her heart racing and begins to wonder if she is
suffering a heart attack. This thought triggers more anxiety. She breathes even more

shallowly, increasing the levels of carbon dioxide in her blood. Her heart rate increases
again, because of her additional fear. She detects that, and her heart rate rises again.

Poof! Positive feedback loop. Soon the anxiety transforms into panic, regulated by a
different brain system, designed for the severest of threats, which can be triggered by too
much fear. She is overwhelmed by her symptoms, and heads for the emergency room,
where after an anxious wait her heart function is checked. There is nothing wrong. But
she is not reassured.

It takes an additional feedback loop to transform even that unpleasant experience into
full-blown agoraphobia. The next time she needs to go to the mall, the pre-agoraphobic
becomes anxious, remembering what happened last time. But she goes, anyway. On the
way, she can feel her heart pounding. That triggers another cycle of anxiety and concern.
To forestall panic, she avoids the stress of the mall and returns home. But now the
anxiety systems in her brain note that she ran away from the mall, and conclude that the
journey there was truly dangerous. Our anxiety systems are very practical. They assume
that anything you run away from is dangerous. The proof of that is, of course, the fact you
ran away.

So now the mall is tagged “too dangerous to approach” (or the budding agoraphobic
has labelled herself, “too fragile to approach the mall”). Perhaps that is not yet taking
things far enough to cause her real trouble. There are other places to shop. But maybe the
nearby supermarket is mall-like enough to trigger a similar response, when she visits it
instead, and then retreats. Now the supermarket occupies the same category. Then it’s
the corner store. Then it’s buses and taxis and subways. Soon it’s everywhere. The
agoraphobic will even eventually become afraid of her house, and would run away from
that if she could. But she can’t. Soon she’s stuck in her home. Anxiety-induced retreat
makes everything retreated from more anxiety-inducing. Anxiety-induced retreat makes
the self smaller and the ever-more-dangerous world larger.

There are many systems of interaction between brain, body and social world that can
get caught in positive feedback loops. Depressed people, for example, can start feeling
useless and burdensome, as well as grief-stricken and pained. This makes them withdraw
from contact with friends and family. Then the withdrawal makes them more lonesome
and isolated, and more likely to feel useless and burdensome. Then they withdraw more.
In this manner, depression spirals and amplifies.

If someone is badly hurt at some point in life—traumatized—the dominance counter
can transform in a manner that makes additional hurt more rather than less likely. This
often happens in the case of people, now adults, who were viciously bullied during
childhood or adolescence. They become anxious and easily upset. They shield themselves
with a defensive crouch, and avoid the direct eye contact interpretable as a dominance
challenge.

This means that the damage caused by the bullying (the lowering of status and
confidence) can continue, even after the bullying has ended.— In the simplest of cases,
the formerly lowly persons have matured and moved to new and more successful places in
their lives. But they don’t fully notice. Their now-counterproductive physiological
adaptations to earlier reality remain, and they are more stressed and uncertain than is
necessary. In more complex cases, a habitual assumption of subordination renders the
person more stressed and uncertain than necessary, and their habitually submissive
posturing continues to attract genuine negative attention from one or more of the fewer
and generally less successful bullies still extant in the adult world. In such situations, the
psychological consequence of the previous bullying increases the likelihood of continued
bullying in the present (even though, strictly speaking, it wouldn’t have to, because of
maturation, or geographical relocation, or continued education, or improvement in
objective status).

Rising Up

Sometimes people are bullied because they can’t fight back. This can happen to people
who are weaker, physically, than their opponents. This is one of the most common
reasons for the bullying experienced by children. Even the toughest of six-year-olds is no
match for someone who is nine. A lot of that power differential disappears in adulthood,
however, with the rough stabilization and matching of physical size (with the exception
of that pertaining to men and women, with the former typically larger and stronger,
particularly in the upper body) as well as the increased penalties generally applied in
adulthood to those who insist upon continuing with physical intimidation.

But just as often, people are bullied because they won’t fight back. This happens not
infrequently to people who are by temperament compassionate and self-sacrificing—
particularly if they are also high in negative emotion, and make a lot of gratifying noises
of suffering when someone sadistic confronts them (children who cry more easily, for
example, are more frequently bullied). It also happens to people who have decided, for
one reason or another, that all forms of aggression, including even feelings of anger, are
morally wrong. I have seen people with a particularly acute sensitivity to petty tyranny
and over-aggressive competitiveness restrict within themselves all the emotions that
might give rise to such things. Often they are people whose fathers who were excessively
angry and controlling. Psychological forces are never unidimensional in their value,
however, and the truly appalling potential of anger and aggression to produce cruelty and
mayhem are balanced by the ability of those primordial forces to push back against
oppression, speak truth, and motivate resolute movement forward in times of strife,
uncertainty and danger.

With their capacity for aggression strait-jacketed within a too-narrow morality, those
who are only or merely compassionate and self-sacrificing (and naive and exploitable)
cannot call forth the genuinely righteous and appropriately self-protective anger necessary
to defend themselves. If you can bite, you generally don’t have to. When skillfully
integrated, the ability to respond with aggression and violence decreases rather than
increases the probability that actual aggression will become necessary. If you say no, early
in the cycle of oppression, and you mean what you say (which means you state your
refusal in no uncertain terms and stand behind it) then the scope for oppression on the
part of oppressor will remain properly bounded and limited. The forces of tyranny expand
inexorably to fill the space made available for their existence. People who refuse to
muster appropriately self-protective territorial responses are laid open to exploitation as
much as those who genuinely can’t stand up for their own rights because of a more
essential inability or a true imbalance in power.

Naive, harmless people usually guide their perceptions and actions with a few simple
axioms: people are basically good; no one really wants to hurt anyone else; the threat
(and, certainly, the use) of force, physical or otherwise, is wrong. These axioms collapse,
or worse, in the presence of individuals who are genuinely malevolent. Worse means
that naive beliefs can become a positive invitation to abuse, because those who aim to
harm have become specialized to prey on people who think precisely such things. Under
such conditions, the axioms of harmlessness must be retooled. In my clinical practice I
often draw the attention of my clients who think that good people never become angry to
the stark realities of their own resentments.

No one likes to be pushed around, but people often put up with it for too long. So, I get
them to see their resentment, first, as anger, and then as an indication that something
needs to be said, if not done (not least because honesty demands it). Then I get them to
see such action as part of the force that holds tyranny at bay—at the social level, as much
as the individual. Many bureaucracies have petty authoritarians within them, generating
unnecessary rules and procedures simply to express and cement power. Such people

produce powerful undercurrents of resentment around them which, if expressed, would
limit their expression of pathological power. It is in this manner that the willingness of
the individual to stand up for him or herself protects everyone from the corruption of
society.

When naive people discover the capacity for anger within themselves, they are shocked,
sometimes severely. A profound example of that can be found in the susceptibility of new
soldiers to post-traumatic stress disorder, which often occurs because of something they
watch themselves doing, rather than because of something that has happened to them.
They react like the monsters they can truly be in extreme battlefield conditions, and the
revelation of that capacity undoes their world. And no wonder. Perhaps they assumed
that all of history’s terrible perpetrators were people totally unlike themselves. Perhaps
they were never able to see within themselves the capacity for oppression and bullying
(and perhaps not their capacity for assertion and success, as well). I have had clients who
were terrified into literally years of daily hysterical convulsions by the sheer look of
malevolence on their attackers’ faces. Such individuals typically come from hyper-
sheltered families, where nothing terrible is allowed to exist, and everything is fairyland
wonderful (or else).

When the wakening occurs—when once-na'ive people recognize in themselves the seeds
of evil and monstrosity, and see themselves as dangerous (at least potentially) their fear
decreases. They develop more self-respect. Then, perhaps, they begin to resist oppression.
They see that they have the ability to withstand, because they are terrible too. They see
they can and must stand up, because they begin to understand how genuinely monstrous
they will become, otherwise, feeding on their resentment, transforming it into the most
destructive of wishes. To say it again: There is very little difference between the capacity
for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character. This is one of the most
difficult lessons of life.

Maybe you are a loser. And maybe you’re not—but if you are, you don’t have to
continue in that mode. Maybe you just have a bad habit. Maybe you’re even just a
collection of bad habits. Nonetheless, even if you came by your poor posture honestly—
even if you were unpopular or bullied at home or in grade school —it’s not necessarily
appropriate now. Circumstances change. If you slump around, with the same bearing that
characterizes a defeated lobster, people will assign you a lower status, and the old counter
that you share with crustaceans, sitting at the very base of your brain, will assign you a
low dominance number. Then your brain will not produce as much serotonin. This will
make you less happy, and more anxious and sad, and more likely to back down when you
should stand up for yourself. It will also decrease the probability that you will get to live
in a good neighbourhood, have access to the highest quality resources, and obtain a
healthy, desirable mate. It will render you more likely to abuse cocaine and alcohol, as
you live for the present in a world full of uncertain futures. It will increase your
susceptibility to heart disease, cancer and dementia. All in all, it’s just not good.

Circumstances change, and so can you. Positive feedback loops, adding effect to effect,
can spiral counterproductively in a negative direction, but can also work to get you ahead.
That’s the other, far more optimistic lesson of Price’s law and the Pareto distribution:
those who start to have will probably get more. Some of these upwardly moving loops can
occur in your own private, subjective space. Alterations in body language offer an
important example. If you are asked by a researcher to move your facial muscles, one at a
time, into a position that would look sad to an observer, you will report feeling sadder. If
you are asked to move the muscles one by one into a position that looks happy, you will
report feeling happier. Emotion is partly bodily expression, and can be amplified (or
dampened) by that expression.

Some of the positive feedback loops instantiated by body language can occur beyond the
private confines of subjective experience, in the social space you share with other people.
If your posture is poor, for example—if you slump, shoulders forward and rounded, chest
tucked in, head down, looking small, defeated and ineffectual (protected, in theory,
against attack from behind)—then you will feel small, defeated and ineffectual. The
reactions of others will amplify that. People, like lobsters, size each other up, partly in
consequence of stance. If you present yourself as defeated, then people will react to you as
if you are losing. If you start to straighten up, then people will look at and treat you
differently.

You might object: the bottom is real. Being at the bottom is equally real. A mere
transformation of posture is insufficient to change anything that fixed. If you’re in
number ten position, then standing up straight and appearing dominant might only
attract the attention of those who want, once again, to put you down. And fair enough.
But standing up straight with your shoulders back is not something that is only physical,
because you’re not only a body. You’re a spirit, so to speak—a psyche—as well. Standing
up physically also implies and invokes and demands standing up metaphysically. Standing
up means voluntarily accepting the burden of Being. Your nervous system responds in an
entirely different manner when you face the demands of life voluntarily. You respond to a
challenge, instead of bracing for a catastrophe. You see the gold the dragon hoards,
instead of shrinking in terror from the all-too-real fact of the dragon. You step forward to
take your place in the dominance hierarchy, and occupy your territory, manifesting your
willingness to defend, expand and transform it. That can all occur practically or
symbolically, as a physical or as a conceptual restructuring.

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of
life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of
potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-
conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood,
where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly
undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it
means acting to please God, in the ancient language).

To stand up straight with your shoulders back means building the ark that protects the
world from the flood, guiding your people through the desert after they have escaped
tyranny, making your way away from comfortable home and country, and speaking the
prophetic word to those who ignore the widows and children. It means shouldering the
cross that marks the X, the place where you and Being intersect so terribly. It means
casting dead, rigid and too tyrannical order back into the chaos in which it was generated;
it means withstanding the ensuing uncertainty, and establishing, in consequence, a better,
more meaningful and more productive order.

So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your
mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as
others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the
serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming
influence.

People, including yourself, will start to assume that you are competent and able (or at
least they will not immediately conclude the reverse). Emboldened by the positive
responses you are now receiving, you will begin to be less anxious. You will then find it
easier to pay attention to the subtle social clues that people exchange when they are
communicating. Your conversations will flow better, with fewer awkward pauses. This
will make you more likely to meet people, interact with them, and impress them. Doing
so will not only genuinely increase the probability that good things will happen to you—it
will also make those good things feel better when they do happen.

Thus strengthened and emboldened, you may choose to embrace Being, and work for
its furtherance and improvement. Thus strengthened, you may be able to stand, even
during the illness of a loved one, even during the death of a parent, and allow others to
find strength alongside you when they would otherwise be overwhelmed with despair.
Thus emboldened, you will embark on the voyage of your life, let your light shine, so to
speak, on the heavenly hill, and pursue your rightful destiny. Then the meaning of your
life may be sufficient to keep the corrupting influence of mortal despair at bay.

Then you may be able to accept the terrible burden of the World, and find joy.

Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of
practical wisdom. Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.

/**

RULE 2

TREAT YOURSELF LIKE SOMEONE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE

FOR HELPING

WHY WON’T YOU JUST TAKE YOUR DAMN PILLS?

Imagine that a hundred people are prescribed a drug. Consider what happens next. One-
third of them won’t fill the prescription. Half of the remaining sixty-seven will fill it, but
won’t take the medication correctly. They’ll miss doses. They’ll quit taking it early. They
might not even take it at all.

Physicians and pharmacists tend to blame such patients for their noncompliance,
inaction and error. You can lead a horse to water, they reason. Psychologists tend to take
a dim view of such judgments. We are trained to assume that the failure of patients to
follow professional advice is the fault of the practitioner, not the patient. We believe the
health-care provider has a responsibility to profer advice that will be followed, offer
interventions that will be respected, plan with the patient or client until the desired result
is achieved, and follow up to ensure that everything is going correctly. This is just one of
the many things that make psychologists so wonderful — :). Of course, we have the luxury
of time with our clients, unlike other more beleaguered professionals, who wonder why
sick people won’t take their medication. What’s wrong with them? Don’t they want to get
better?

Here’s something worse. Imagine that someone receives an organ transplant. Imagine
it’s a kidney. A transplant typically occurs only after a long period of anxious waiting on
the part of the recipient. Only a minority of people donate organs when they die (and
even fewer when they are still alive). Only a small number of donated organs are a good
match for any hopeful recipient. This means that the typical kidney transplantee has been
undergoing dialysis, the only alternative, for years. Dialysis involves passing all the
patient’s blood out of his or her body, through a machine, and back in. It is an unlikely
and miraculous treatment, so that’s all good, but it’s not pleasant. It must happen five to
seven times a week, for eight hours a time. It should happen every time the patient
sleeps. That’s too much. No one wants to stay on dialysis.

Now, one of the complications of transplantation is rejection. Your body does not like it
when parts of someone else’s body are stitched into it. Your immune system will attack
and destroy such foreign elements, even when they are crucial to your survival. To stop
this from happening, you must take anti-rejection drugs, which weaken immunity,
increasing your susceptibility to infectious disease. Most people are happy to accept the
trade-off. Recipients of transplants still suffer the effects of organ rejection, despite the
existence and utility of these drugs. It’s not because the drugs fail (although they
sometimes do). It’s more often because those prescribed the drugs do not take them. This
beggars belief. It is seriously not good to have your kidneys fail. Dialysis is no picnic.
Transplantation surgery occurs after long waiting, at high risk and great expense. To lose
all that because you don’t take your medication? How could people do that to
themselves? How could this possibly be?

It’s complicated, to be fair. Many people who receive a transplanted organ are isolated,
or beset by multiple physical health problems (to say nothing of problems associated with
unemployment or family crisis). They may be cognitively impaired or depressed. They
may not entirely trust their doctor, or understand the necessity of the medication. Maybe
they can barely afford the drugs, and ration them, desperately and unproductively.

But—and this is the amazing thing—imagine that it isn’t you who feels sick. It’s your
dog. So, you take him to the vet. The vet gives you a prescription. What happens then?
You have just as many reasons to distrust a vet as a doctor. Furthermore, if you cared so
little for your pet that you weren’t concerned with what improper, substandard or error-
ridden prescription he might be given, you wouldn’t have taken him to the vet in the first
place. Thus, you care. Your actions prove it. In fact, on average, you care more. People are
better at filling and properly administering prescription medication to their pets than to
themselves. That’s not good. Even from your pet’s perspective, it’s not good. Your pet
(probably) loves you, and would be happier if you took your medication.

It is difficult to conclude anything from this set of facts except that people appear to
love their dogs, cats, ferrets and birds (and maybe even their lizards) more than
themselves. How horrible is that? How much shame must exist, for something like that
to be true? What could it be about people that makes them prefer their pets to
themselves?

It was an ancient story in the Book of Genesis—the first book in the Old Testament—
that helped me find an answer to that perplexing question.

The Oldest Story and the Nature of the World

Two stories of Creation from two different Middle Eastern sources appear to be woven
together in the Genesis account. In the chronologically first but historically more recent
account—known as the “Priestly”—God created the cosmos, using His divine Word,
speaking light, water and land into existence, following that with the plants and the
heavenly bodies. Then He created birds and animals and fish (again, employing speech) —
and ended with man, male and female, both somehow formed in his image. That all
happens in Genesis 1. In the second, older, “Jawhist” version, we find another origin
account, involving Adam and Eve (where the details of creation differ somewhat), as well
as the stories of Cain and Abel, Noah and the Tower of Babel. That is Genesis 2 to 11. To
understand Genesis 1, the Priestly story, with its insistence on speech as the fundamental
creative force, it is first necessary to review a few fundamental, ancient assumptions
(these are markedly different in type and intent from the assumptions of science, which
are, historically speaking, quite novel).

Scientific truths were made explicit a mere five hundred years ago, with the work of
Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes and Isaac Newton. In whatever manner our forebears
viewed the world prior to that, it was not through a scientific lens (any more than they
could view the moon and the stars through the glass lenses of the equally recent
telescope). Because we are so scientific now—and so determinedly materialistic—it is
very difficult for us even to understand that other ways of seeing can and do exist. But
those who existed during the distant time in which the foundational epics of our culture
emerged were much more concerned with the actions that dictated survival (and with
interpreting the world in a manner commensurate with that goal) than with anything
approximating what we now understand as objective truth.

Before the dawn of the scientific worldview, reality was construed differently. Being
was understood as a place of action, not a place of things. It was understood as
something more akin to story or drama. That story or drama was lived, subjective
experience, as it manifested itself moment to moment in the consciousness of every living
person. It was something similar to the stories we tell each other about our lives and their
personal significance; something similar to the happenings that novelists describe when
they capture existence in the pages of their books. Subjective experience—that includes
familiar objects such as trees and clouds, primarily objective in their existence, but also
(and more importantly) such things as emotions and dreams as well as hunger, thirst and

pain. It is such things, experienced personally, that are the most fundamental elements of
human life, from the archaic, dramatic perspective, and they are not easily reducible to
the detached and objective—even by the modern reductionist, materialist mind. Take
pain, for example—subjective pain. That’s something so real no argument can stand
against it. Everyone acts as if their pain is real—ultimately, finally real. Pain matters,
more than matter matters. It is for this reason, I believe, that so many of the world’s
traditions regard the suffering attendant upon existence as the irreducible truth of Being.

In any case, that which we subjectively experience can be likened much more to a novel or a
movie than to a scientific description of physical reality. It is the drama of lived
experience—the unique, tragic, personal death of your father, compared to the objective
death listed in the hospital records; the pain of your first love; the despair of dashed
hopes; the joy attendant upon a child’s success.

The Domain, Not of Matter, but of What Matters

The scientific world of matter can be reduced, in some sense, to its fundamental
constituent elements: molecules, atoms, even quarks. However, the world of experience
has primal constituents, as well. These are the necessary elements whose interactions
define drama and fiction. One of these is chaos. Another is order. The third (as there are
three) is the process that mediates between the two, which appears identical to what
modern people call consciousness. It is our eternal subjugation to the first two that makes
us doubt the validity of existence—that makes us throw up our hands in despair, and fail
to care for ourselves properly. It is proper understanding of the third that allows us the
only real way out.

Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself. It’s unexplored territory. Chaos is what extends,
eternally and without limit, beyond the boundaries of all states, all ideas, and all
disciplines. It’s the foreigner, the stranger, the member of another gang, the rustle in the
bushes in the night-time, the monster under the bed, the hidden anger of your mother,
and the sickness of your child. Chaos is the despair and horror you feel when you have
been profoundly betrayed. It’s the place you end up when things fall apart; when your
dreams die, your career collapses, or your marriage ends. It’s the underworld of fairytale
and myth, where the dragon and the gold it guards eternally co-exist. Chaos is where we
are when we don’t know where we are, and what we are doing when we don’t know what
we are doing. It is, in short, all those things and situations we neither know nor
understand.

Chaos is also the formless potential from which the God of Genesis 1 called forth order
using language at the beginning of time. It’s the same potential from which we, made in
that Image, call forth the novel and ever-changing moments of our lives. And Chaos is
freedom, dreadful freedom, too.

Order, by contrast, is explored territory. That’s the hundreds-of-millions-of-years-old
hierarchy of place, position and authority. That’s the structure of society. It’s the
structure provided by biology, too—particularly insofar as you are adapted, as you are, to
the structure of society. Order is tribe, religion, hearth, home and country. It’s the warm,
secure living-room where the fireplace glows and the children play. It’s the flag of the
nation. It’s the value of the currency. Order is the floor beneath your feet, and your plan
for the day. It’s the greatness of tradition, the rows of desks in a school classroom, the
trains that leave on time, the calendar, and the clock. Order is the public facade we’re
called upon to wear, the politeness of a gathering of civilized strangers, and the thin ice
on which we all skate. Order is the place where the behavior of the world matches our
expectations and our desires; the place where all things turn out the way we want them

to. But order is sometimes tyranny and stultification, as well, when the demand for
certainty and uniformity and purity becomes too one-sided.

Where everything is certain, we’re in order. We’re there when things are going
according to plan and nothing is new and disturbing. In the domain of order, things
behave as God intended. We like to be there. Familiar environments are congenial. In
order, we’re able to think about things in the long term. There, things work, and we’re
stable, calm and competent. We seldom leave places we understand—geographical or
conceptual—for that reason, and we certainly do not like it when we are compelled to or
when it happens accidentally.

You’re in order, when you have a loyal friend, a trustworthy ally. When the same
person betrays you, sells you out, you move from the daytime world of clarity and light to
the dark underworld of chaos, confusion and despair. That’s the same move you make,
and the same place you visit, when the company you work starts to fail and your job is
placed in doubt. When your tax return has been filed, that’s order. When you’re audited,
that’s chaos. Most people would rather be mugged than audited. Before the Twin Towers
fell—that was order. Chaos manifested itself afterward. Everyone felt it. The very air
became uncertain. What exactly was it that fell? Wrong question. What exactly remained
standing? That was the issue at hand.

When the ice you’re skating on is solid, that’s order. When the bottom drops out, and
things fall apart, and you plunge through the ice, that’s chaos. Order is the Shire of
Tolkien’s hobbits: peaceful, productive and safely inhabitable, even by the naive. Chaos is
the underground kingdom of the dwarves, usurped by Smaug, the treasure-hoarding
serpent. Chaos is the deep ocean bottom to which Pinocchio voyaged to rescue his father
from Monstro, whale and fire-breathing dragon. That journey into darkness and rescue is
the most difficult thing a puppet must do, if he wants to be real; if he wants to extract
himself from the temptations of deceit and acting and victimization and impulsive
pleasure and totalitarian subjugation; if he wants to take his place as a genuine Being in
the world.

Order is the stability of your marriage. It’s buttressed by the traditions of the past and
by your expectations—grounded, often invisibly, in those traditions. Chaos is that
stability crumbling under your feet when you discover your partner’s infidelity. Chaos is
the experience of reeling unbound and unsupported through space when your guiding
routines and traditions collapse.

Order is the place and time where the oft-invisible axioms you live by organize your
experience and your actions so that what should happen does happen. Chaos is the new
place and time that emerges when tragedy strikes suddenly, or malevolence reveals its
paralyzing visage, even in the confines of your own home. Something unexpected or
undesired can always make its appearance, when a plan is being laid out, regardless of
how familiar the circumstances. When that happens, the territory has shifted. Make no
mistake about it: the space, the apparent space, may be the same. But we live in time, as
well as space. In consequence, even the oldest and most familiar places retain an
ineradicable capacity to surprise you. You may be cruising happily down the road in the
automobile you have known and loved for years. But time is passing. The brakes could
fail. You might be walking down the road in the body you have always relied on. If your
heart malfunctions, even momentarily, everything changes. Friendly old dogs can still
bite. Old and trusted friends can still deceive. New ideas can destroy old and comfortable
certainties. Such things matter. They’re real.

Our brains respond instantly when chaos appears, with simple, hyper-fast circuits
maintained from the ancient days, when our ancestors dwelled in trees, and snakes struck
in a flash. After that nigh-instantaneous, deeply reflexive bodily response comes the
later-evolving, more complex but slower responses of emotions—and, after that, comes

thinking, of the higher order, which can extend over seconds, minutes or years. All that
response is instinctive, in some sense—but the faster the response, the more instinctive.

Chaos and Order: Personality, Female and Male

Chaos and order are two of the most fundamental elements of lived experience—two of
the most basic subdivisions of Being itself. But they’re not things, or objects, and they’re
not experienced as such. Things or objects are part of the objective world. They’re
inanimate; spiritless. They’re dead. This is not true of chaos and order. Those are
perceived, experienced and understood (to the degree that they are understood at all) as
personalities—and that is just as true of the perceptions, experiences and understanding
of modern people as their ancient forebears. It’s just that moderners don’t notice.

Order and chaos are not understood first, objectively (as things or objects), and then
personified. That would only be the case if we perceived objective reality first, and then
inferred intent and purpose. But that isn’t how perception operates, despite our
preconceptions. Perception of things as tools, for example, occurs before or in concert
with perception of things as objects. We see what things mean just as fast or faster than
we see what they are. Perception of things as entities with personality also occurs before
perception of things as things. This is particularly true of the action of others, living
others, but we also see the non-living “objective world” as animated, with purpose and
intent. This is because of the operation of what psychologists have called “the hyperactive
agency detector” within us. We evolved, over millennia, within intensely social
circumstances. This means that the most significant elements of our environment of
origin were personalities, not things, objects or situations.

The personalities we have evolved to perceive have been around, in predictable form,
and in typical, hierarchical configurations, forever, for all intents and purposes. They have
been male or female, for example, for a billion years. That’s a long time. The division of
life into its twin sexes occurred before the evolution of multi-cellular animals. It was in a
still-respectable one-fifth of that time that mammals, who take extensive care of their
young, emerged. Thus, the category of “parent” and/or “child” has been around for 200
million years. That’s longer than birds have existed. That’s longer than flowers have
grown. It’s not a billion years, but it’s still a very long time. It’s plenty long enough for
male and female and parent and child to serve as vital and fundamental parts of the
environment to which we have adapted. This means that male and female and parent and
child are categories, for us—natural categories, deeply embedded in our perceptual,
emotional and motivational structures.

Our brains are deeply social. Other creatures (particularly, other humans) were
crucially important to us as we lived, mated and evolved. Those creatures were literally
our natural habitat—our environment. From a Darwinian perspective, nature—reality
itself; the environment, itself—is what selects. The environment cannot be defined in any
more fundamental manner. It is not mere inert matter. Reality itself is whatever we
contend with when we are striving to survive and reproduce. A lot of that is other beings,
their opinions of us, and their communities. And that’s that.

Over the millennia, as our brain capacity increased and we developed curiosity to spare,
we became increasingly aware of and curious about the nature of the world—what we
eventually conceptualized as the objective world—outside the personalities of family and
troupe. And “outside” is not merely unexplored physical territory. Outside is outside of
what we currently understand—and understanding is dealing with and coping with and not
merely representing objectively. But our brains had been long concentrating on other people.
Thus, it appears that we first began to perceive the unknown, chaotic, non-human world
with the innate categories of our social brain. And even this is a misstatement: when we

first began to perceive the unknown, chaotic, non-animal world, we used categories that
had originally evolved to represent the pre-human animal social world. Our minds are far
older than mere humanity. Our categories are far older than our species. Our most basic
category—as old, in some sense, as the sexual act itself—appears to be that of sex, male
and female. We appear to have taken that primordial knowledge of structured, creative
opposition and begun to interpret everything through its lens.

Order, the known, appears symbolically associated with masculinity (as illustrated in
the aforementioned yang of the Taoist yin-yang symbol). This is perhaps because the
primary hierarchical structure of human society is masculine, as it is among most
animals, including the chimpanzees who are our closest genetic and, arguably,
behavioural match. It is because men are and throughout history have been the builders
of towns and cities, the engineers, stonemasons, bricklayers, and lumberjacks, the
operators of heavy machinery. Order is God the Father, the eternal Judge, ledger-keeper
and dispenser of rewards and punishments. Order is the peacetime army of policemen
and soldiers. It’s the political culture, the corporate environment, and the system. It’s the
“they” in “you know what they say.” It’s credit cards, classrooms, supermarket checkout
lineups, turn-taking, traffic lights, and the familiar routes of daily commuters. Order,
when pushed too far, when imbalanced, can also manifest itself destructively and terribly.
It does so as the forced migration, the concentration camp, and the soul-devouring
uniformity of the goose-step.

Chaos—the unknown—is symbolically associated with the feminine. This is partly
because all the things we have come to know were born, originally, of the unknown, just
as all beings we encounter were born of mothers. Chaos is mater, origin, source, mother;
materia, the substance from which all things are made. It is also what matters, or what is the
matter —the very subject matter of thought and communication. In its positive guise,
chaos is possibility itself, the source of ideas, the mysterious realm of gestation and birth.
As a negative force, it’s the impenetrable darkness of a cave and the accident by the side
of the road. It’s the mother grizzly, all compassion to her cubs, who marks you as
potential predator and tears you to pieces.

Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are
choosy maters (unlike female chimps, their closest animal counterparts ). Most men do
not meet female human standards. It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85
percent of men as below average in attractiveness. It is for this reason that we all have
twice as many female ancestors as male (imagine that all the women who have ever lived
have averaged one child. Now imagine that half the men who have ever lived have
fathered two children, if they had any, while the other half fathered none).— It is Woman
as Nature who looks at half of all men and says, “No!” For the men, that’s a direct
encounter with chaos, and it occurs with devastating force every time they are turned
down for a date. Human female choosiness is also why we are very different from the
common ancestor we shared with our chimpanzee cousins, while the latter are very much
the same. Women’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our
evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive,
domineering) creatures that we are. It is Nature as Woman who says, “Well, bucko,
you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the
suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.”

The most profound religious symbols rely for their power in large part on this
underlying fundamentally bipartisan conceptual subdivision. The Star of David is, for
example, the downward pointing triangle of femininity and the upward pointing triangle
of the male. It’s the same for the yoni and lingam of Hinduism (which come covered
with snakes, our ancient adversaries and provocateurs: the Shiva Linga is depicted with

snake deities called the Nagas). The ancient Egyptians represented Osiris, god of the
state, and Isis, goddess of the underworld, as twin cobras with their tails knotted
together. The same symbol was used in China to portray Fuxi and Nuwa, creators of
humanity and of writing. The representations in Christianity are less abstract, more like
personalities, but the familiar Western images of the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child
and the Pieta both express the female/male dual unity, as does the traditional insistence
on the androgyny of Christ.

It should also be noted, finally, that the structure of the brain itself at a gross
morphological level appears to reflect this duality. This, to me, indicates the fundamental,
beyond-the-metaphorical reality of this symbolically feminine/masculine divide, since the
brain is adapted, by definition, to reality itself (that is, reality conceptualized in this
quasi-Darwinian manner). Elkhonon Goldberg, student of the great Russian
neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, has proposed quite lucidly and directly that the very
hemispheric structure of the cortex reflects the fundamental division between novelty
(the unknown, or chaos) and routinization (the known, order). He doesn’t make
reference to the symbols representing the structure of the world in reference to this
theory, but that’s all the better: an idea is more credible when it emerges as a
consequence of investigations in different realms.

We already know all this, but we don’t know we know it. But we immediately
comprehend it when it’s articulated in a manner such as this. Everyone understands order
and chaos, world and underworld, when it’s explained using these terms. We all have a
palpable sense of the chaos lurking under everything familiar. That’s why we understand
the strange, surreal stories of Pinocchio, and Sleeping Beauty, and The Lion King, and The
Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast, with their eternal landscapes of known and
unknown, world and underworld. We’ve all been in both places, many times: sometimes
by happenstance, sometimes by choice.

Many things begin to fall into place when you begin to consciously understand the
world in this manner. It’s as if the knowledge of your body and soul falls into alignment
with the knowledge of your intellect. And there’s more: such knowledge is proscriptive,
as well as descriptive. This is the kind of knowing what that helps you know how. This is
the kind of is from which you can derive an ought. The Taoist juxtaposition of yin and
yang, for example, doesn’t simply portray chaos and order as the fundamental elements of
Being—it also tells you how to act. The Way, the Taoist path of life, is represented by (or
exists on) the border between the twin serpents. The Way is the path of proper Being. It’s
the same Way as that referred to by Christ in John 14:6: I am the way, and the truth and the
life. The same idea is expressed in Matthew 7:14: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the
way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

We eternally inhabit order, surrounded by chaos. We eternally occupy known territory,
surrounded by the unknown. We experience meaningful engagement when we mediate
appropriately between them. We are adapted, in the deepest Darwinian sense, not to the
world of objects, but to the meta-realities of order and chaos, yang and yin. Chaos and
order make up the eternal, transcendent environment of the living.

To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted
in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure. When life
suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you’re
so engrossed in what you’re doing you don’t notice—it is there and then that you are
located precisely on the border between order and chaos. The subjective meaning that we
encounter there is the reaction of our deepest being, our neurologically and evolutionarily
grounded instinctive self, indicating that we are ensuring the stability but also the
expansion of habitable, productive territory, of space that is personal, social and natural.
It’s the right place to be, in every sense. You are there when—and where—it matters.

That’s what music is telling you, too, when you’re listening—even more, perhaps, when
you’re dancing—when its harmonious layered patterns of predictability and
unpredictability make meaning itself well up from the most profound depths of your
Being.

Chaos and order are fundamental elements because every lived situation (even every
conceivable lived situation) is made up of both. No matter where we are, there are some
things we can identify, make use of, and predict, and some things we neither know nor
understand. No matter who we are, Kalahari Desert-dweller or Wall Street banker, some
things are under our control, and some things are not. That’s why both can understand
the same stories, and dwell within the confines of the same eternal truths. Finally, the
fundamental reality of chaos and order is true for everything alive, not only for us. Living
things are always to be found in places they can master, surrounded by things and
situations that make them vulnerable.

Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because
there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too
much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to
cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot
in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently
exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence
is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is
where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is
where meaning is to be found.

The Garden of Eden

Remember, as discussed earlier, that the Genesis stories were amalgamated from several
sources. After the newer Priestly story (Genesis 1), recounting the emergence of order
from chaos, comes the second, even more ancient, “Jahwist” part, beginning, essentially,
with Genesis 2. The Jahwist account, which uses the name YHWH orjahweh to represent
God, contains the story of Adam and Eve, along with a much fuller explication of the
events of the sixth day alluded to in the previous “Priestly” story. The continuity between
the stories appears to be the result of careful editing by the person or persons known
singly to biblical scholars as the “Redactor,” who wove the stories together. This may
have occurred when the peoples of two traditions united, for one reason or another, and
the subsequent illogic of their melded stories, growing together over time in an ungainly
fashion, bothered someone conscious, courageous, and obsessed with coherence.

According to the Jahwist creation story, God first created a bounded space, known as
Eden (which, in Aramaic—Jesus’s putative language—means well-watered place) or
Paradise (pairidaeza in old Iranian or Avestan, which means walled or protected enclosure
or garden). God placed Adam in there, along with all manner of fruit-bearing trees, two of
which were marked out. One of these was the Tree of Life; the other, the Tree of
Knowledge of Good and Evil. God then told Adam to have his fill of fruit, as he wished,
but added that the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was forbidden.
After that, He created Eve as a partner for Adam.

Adam and Eve don’t seem very conscious, at the beginning, when they are first placed
in Paradise, and they were certainly not self-conscious. As the story insists, the original
parents were naked, but not ashamed. Such phrasing implies first that it’s perfectly
natural and normal for people to be ashamed of their nakedness (otherwise nothing
would have to be said about its absence) and second that there was something amiss, for
better or worse, with our first parents. Although there are exceptions, the only people
around now who would be unashamed if suddenly dropped naked into a public place—

excepting the odd exhibitionist—are those younger than three years of age. In fact, a
common nightmare involves the sudden appearance of the dreamer, naked, on a stage in
front of a packed house.

In the third verse of Genesis, a serpent appears—first, apparently, in legged form. God
only knows why He allowed—or placed—such a creature in the garden. I have long
puzzled over the meaning of this. It seems to be a reflection, in part, of the order/chaos
dichotomy characterizing all of experience, with Paradise serving as habitable order and
the serpent playing the role of chaos. The serpent in Eden therefore means the same thing
as the black dot in the yin side of the Taoist yin/yang symbol of totality—that is, the
possibility of the unknown and revolutionary suddenly manifesting itself where
everything appears calm.

It just does not appear possible, even for God himself, to make a bounded space
completely protected from the outside—not in the real world, with its necessary
limitations, surrounded by the transcendent. The outside, chaos, always sneaks into the
inside, because nothing can be completely walled off from the rest of reality. So even the
ultimate in safe spaces inevitably harbours a snake. There were—forever—genuine,
quotidian, reptilian snakes in the grass and in the trees of our original African paradise.
Even had all of those been banished, however (in some inconceivable manner, by some
primordial St. George) snakes would have still remained in the form of our primordial
human rivals (at least when they were acting like enemies, from our limited, in-group,
kin-bonded perspectives). There was, after all, no shortage of conflict and warfare among
our ancestors, tribal and otherwise.

And even if we had defeated all the snakes that beset us from without, reptilian and
human alike, we would still not have been safe. Nor are we now. We have seen the
enemy, after all, and he is us. The snake inhabits each of our souls. This is the reason, as
far as I can tell, for the strange Christian insistence, made most explicit by John Milton,
that the snake in the Garden of Eden was also Satan, the Spirit of Evil itself. The
importance of this symbolic identification—its staggering brilliance—can hardly be
overstated. It is through such millennia-long exercise of the imagination that the idea of
abstracted moral concepts themselves, with all they entail, developed. Work beyond
comprehension was invested into the idea of Good and Evil, and its surrounding, dream¬
like metaphor. The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity for evil. The worst
of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal. No walls, however tall, will
keep that out. Even if the fortress were thick enough, in principle, to keep everything bad
whatsoever outside, it would immediately appear again within. As the great Russian
writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn insisted, the line dividing good and evil cuts through the
heart of every human being.

There is simply no way to wall off some isolated portion of the greater surrounding
reality and make everything permanently predictable and safe within it. Some of what has
been no-matter-how-carefully excluded will always sneak back in. A serpent,
metaphorically speaking, will inevitably appear. Even the most assiduous of parents
cannot fully protect their children, even if they lock them in the basement, safely away
from drugs, alcohol and internet porn. In that extreme case, the too-cautious, too-caring
parent merely substitutes him or herself for the other terrible problems of life. This is the
great Freudian Oedipal nightmare. It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than
to protect them.

And even if it were possible to permanently banish everything threatening—everything
dangerous (and, therefore, everything challenging and interesting), that would mean only
that another danger would emerge: that of permanent human infantilism and absolute
uselessness. How could the nature of man ever reach its full potential without challenge
and danger? How dull and contemptible would we become if there was no longer reason

to pay attention? Maybe God thought His new creation would be able to handle the
serpent, and considered its presence the lesser of two evils.

Question for parents: do you want to make your children safe, or strong?

In any case, there’s a serpent in the Garden, and he’s a “subtil” beast, according to the
ancient story (difficult to see, vaporous, cunning, deceitful and treacherous). It therefore
comes as no surprise when he decides to play a trick on Eve. Why Eve, instead of Adam?
It could just be chance. It was fifty-fifty for Eve, statistically speaking, and those are pretty
high odds. But I have learned that these old stories contain nothing superfluous.
Anything accidental—anything that does not serve the plot—has long been forgotten in
the telling. As the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov advised, “If there is a rifle hanging
on the wall in act one, it must be fired in the next act. Otherwise it has no business being
there.” Perhaps primordial Eve had more reason to attend to serpents than Adam.
Maybe they were more likely, for example, to prey on her tree-dwelling infants. Perhaps it
is for this reason that Eve’s daughters are more protective, self-conscious, fearful and
nervous, to this day (even, and especially, in the most egalitarian of modern human
societies^ ). In any case, the serpent tells Eve that if she eats the forbidden fruit, she
won’t die. Instead, her eyes will be opened. She will become like God, knowing good from
evil. Of course, the serpent doesn’t let her know she will be like God in only that one way.
But he is a serpent, after all. Being human, and wanting to know more, Eve decides to eat
the fruit. Poof! She wakes up: she’s conscious, or perhaps self-conscious, for the first
time.

Now, no clear-seeing, conscious woman is going to tolerate an unawakened man. So,
Eve immediately shares the fruit with Adam. That makes him self-conscious. Little has
changed. Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time. They
do this primarily by rejecting them—but they also do it by shaming them, if men do not
take responsibility. Since women bear the primary burden of reproduction, it’s no
wonder. It is very hard to see how it could be otherwise. But the capacity of women to
shame men and render them self-conscious is still a primal force of nature.

Now, you may ask: what in the world have snakes got to do with vision? Well, first, it’s
clearly of some importance to see them, because they might prey on you (particularly
when you’re little and live in trees, like our arboreal ancestors). Dr. Lynn Isbell, professor
of anthropology and animal behaviour at the University of California, has suggested that
the stunningly acute vision almost uniquely possessed by human beings was an
adaptation forced on us tens of millions of years ago by the necessity of detecting and
avoiding the terrible danger of snakes, with whom our ancestors co-evolved. This is
perhaps one of the reasons the snake features in the garden of Paradise as the creature
who gave us the vision of God (in addition to serving as the primordial and eternal enemy
of mankind). This is perhaps one of the reasons why Mary, the eternal, archetypal mother
—Eve perfected—is so commonly shown in medieval and Renaissance iconography
holding the Christ Child in the air, as far away as possible from a predatory reptile, which
she has firmly pinned under her foot.— And there’s more. It’s fruit that the snake offers,
and fruit is also associated with a transformation of vision, in that our ability to see color
is an adaptation that allows us to rapidly detect the ripe and therefore edible bounty of

c.a

trees.

Our primordial parents hearkened to the snake. They ate the fruit. Their eyes opened.
They both awoke. You might think, as Eve did initially, that this would be a good thing.
Sometimes, however, half a gift is worse than none. Adam and Eve wake up, all right, but
only enough to discover some terrible things. First, they notice that they’re naked.

The Naked Ape

My son figured out that he was naked well before he was three. He wanted to dress
himself. He kept the washroom door firmly shut. He didn’t appear in public without his
clothes. I couldn’t for the life of me see how this had anything to do with his upbringing.
It was his own discovery, his own realization, and his own choice of reactions. It looked
built in, to me.

What does it mean to know yourself naked—or, potentially worse, to know yourself
and your partner naked? All manner of terrible things—expressed in the rather horrifying
manner, for example, of the Renaissance painter Hans Baldung Grien, whose painting
inspired the illustration that begins this chapter. Naked means vulnerable and easily
damaged. Naked means subject to judgment for beauty and health. Naked means
unprotected and unarmed in the jungle of nature and man. This is why Adam and Eve
became ashamed, immediately after their eyes were opened. They could see—and what
they first saw was themselves. Their faults stood out. Their vulnerability was on display.
Unlike other mammals, whose delicate abdomens are protected by the armour-like
expanse of their backs, they were upright creatures, with the most vulnerable parts of
their body presented to the world. And worse was to come. Adam and Eve made
themselves loincloths (in the International Standard Version; aprons in the King James
Version) right away, to cover up their fragile bodies—and to protect their egos. Then they
promptly skittered off and hid. In their vulnerability, now fully realized, they felt
unworthy to stand before God.

If you can’t identify with that sentiment, you’re just not thinking. Beauty shames the
ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living—and the Ideal shames us all.
Thus we fear it, resent it—even hate it (and, of course, that’s the theme next examined in
Genesis, in the story of Cain and Abel). What are we to do about that? Abandon all ideals
of beauty, health, brilliance and strength? That’s not a good solution. That would merely
ensure that we would feel ashamed, all the time—and that we would even more justly
deserve it. I don’t want women who can stun by their mere presence to disappear just so
that others can feel unselfconscious. I don’t want intellects such as John von Neumann’s
to vanish, just because of my barely-grade-twelve grasp of mathematics. By the time he
was nineteen, he had redefined numbers. Numbers! Thank God for John von Neumann!
Thank God for Grace Kelly and Anita Ekberg and Monica Bellucci! I’m proud to feel
unworthy in the presence of people like that. It’s the price we all pay for aim, achievement
and ambition. But it’s also no wonder that Adam and Eve covered themselves up.

The next part of the story is downright farcical, in my opinion, although it’s also tragic
and terrible. That evening, when Eden cools down, God goes out for His evening stroll.
But Adam is absent. This puzzles God, who is accustomed to walking with him. “Adam,”
calls God, apparently forgetting that He can see through bushes, “Where are you?” Adam
immediately reveals himself, but badly: first as a neurotic; then, as a ratfink. The creator
of all the universe calls, and Adam replies: “I heard you, God. But I was naked, and hid.”
What does this mean? It means that people, unsettled by their vulnerability, eternally fear
to tell the truth, to mediate between chaos and order, and to manifest their destiny. In
other words, they are afraid to walk with God. That’s not particularly admirable, perhaps,
but it’s certainly understandable. God’s a judgmental father. His standards are high. He’s
hard to please.

God says, “Who told you that you were naked? Did you eat something you weren’t
supposed to?” And Adam, in his wretchedness, points right at Eve, his love, his partner,
his soul-mate, and snitches on her. And then he blames God. He says, “The woman,
whom you gave to me, she gave it to me (and then I ate it).” How pathetic—and how
accurate. The first woman made the first man self-conscious and resentful. Then the first
man blamed the woman. And then the first man blamed God. This is exactly how every
spurned male feels, to this day. First, he feels small, in front of the potential object of his

love, after she denigrates his reproductive suitability. Then he curses God for making her
so bitchy, himself so useless (if he has any sense) and Being itself so deeply flawed. Then
he turns to thoughts of revenge. How thoroughly contemptible (and how utterly
understandable). At least the woman had the serpent to blame, and it later turns out that
snake is Satan himself, unlikely as that seems. Thus, we can understand and sympathize
with Eve’s error. She was deceived by the best. But Adam! No one forced his words from
his mouth.

Unfortunately, the worst isn’t over—for Man or Beast. First, God curses the serpent,
telling him that he will now have to slither around, legless, forever in peril of being
stomped on by angry humans. Second, He tells the woman that she will now bring forth
children in sorrow, and desire an unworthy, sometimes resentful man, who will in
consequence lord her biological fate over her, permanently. What might this mean? It
could just mean that God is a patriarchal tyrant, as politically motivated interpretations of
the ancient story insist. I think it’s—merely descriptive. Merely. And here is why: As
human beings evolved, the brains that eventually gave rise to self-consciousness expanded
tremendously. This produced an evolutionary arms race between fetal head and female
pelvis. The female graciously widened her hips, almost to the point where running
would no longer be possible. The baby, for his part, allowed himself to be born more than
a year early, compared to other mammals of his size, and evolved a semi-collapsible
head. This was and is a painful adjustment for both. The essentially fetal baby is almost
completely dependent on his mother for everything during that first year. The
programmability of his massive brain means that he must be trained until he is eighteen
(or thirty) before being pushed out of the nest. This is to say nothing of the woman’s
consequential pain in childbirth, and high risk of death for mother and infant alike. This
all means that women pay a high price for pregnancy and child-rearing, particularly in the
early stages, and that one of the inevitable consequences is increased dependence upon
the sometimes unreliable and always problematic good graces of men.

After God tells Eve what is going to happen, now that she has awakened, He turns to
Adam—who, along with his male descendants, doesn’t get off any easier. God says
something akin to this: “Man, because you attended to the woman, your eyes have been
opened. Your godlike vision, granted to you by snake, fruit and lover, allows you to see
far, even into the future. But those who see into the future can also eternally see trouble
coming, and must then prepare for all contingencies and possibilities. To do that, you will
have to eternally sacrifice the present for the future. You must put aside pleasure for
security. In short: you will have to work. And it’s going to be difficult. I hope you’re fond
of thorns and thistles, because you’re going to grow a lot of them.”

And then God banishes the first man and the first woman from Paradise, out of infancy,
out of the unconscious animal world, into the horrors of history itself. And then He puts
cherubim and a flaming sword at the gate of Eden, just to stop them from eating the Fruit
of the Tree of Life. That, in particular, appears rather mean-spirited. Why not just make
the poor humans immortal, right away? Particularly if that is your plan for the ultimate
future, anyway, as the story goes? But who would dare to question God?

Perhaps Heaven is something you must build, and immortality something you must
earn.

And so we return to our original query: Why would someone buy prescription
medication for his dog, and then so carefully administer it, when he would not do the
same for himself? Now you have the answer, derived from one of the foundational texts
of mankind. Why should anyone take care of anything as naked, ugly, ashamed,
frightened, worthless, cowardly, resentful, defensive and accusatory as a descendant of
Adam? Even if that thing, that being, is himself? And I do not mean at all to exclude
women with this phrasing.

All the reasons we have discussed so far for taking a dim view of humanity are
applicable to others, as much as to the self. They’re generalizations about human nature;
nothing more specific. But you know so much more about yourself. You’re bad enough, as
other people know you. But only you know the full range of your secret transgressions,
insufficiencies and inadequacies. No one is more familiar than you with all the ways your
mind and body are flawed. No one has more reason to hold you in contempt, to see you
as pathetic—and by withholding something that might do you good, you can punish
yourself for all your failings. A dog, a harmless, innocent, unselfconscious dog, is clearly
more deserving.

But if you are not yet convinced, let us consider another vital issue. Order, chaos, life,
death, sin, vision, work and suffering: that is not enough for the authors of Genesis, nor
for humanity itself. The story continues, in all its catastrophe and tragedy, and the people
involved (that’s us) must contend with yet another painful awakening. We are next fated
to contemplate morality itself.

Good and Evil

When their eyes are opened, Adam and Eve realize more than just their nakedness and
the necessity of toil. They also come to know Good and Evil (the serpent says, referring to
the fruit, “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be
opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”). What could that possibly
mean? What could be left to explore and relate, after the vast ground already covered?
Well, simple context indicates that it must have something to do with gardens, snakes,
disobedience, fruit, sexuality and nakedness. It was the last item—nakedness—that finally
clued me in. It took years.

Dogs are predators. So are cats. They kill things and eat them. It’s not pretty. But we’ll
take them as pets and care for them, and give them their medication when they’re sick,
regardless. Why? They’re predators, but it’s just their nature. They do not bear
responsibility for it. They’re hungry, not evil. They don’t have the presence of mind, the
creativity—and, above all, the self-consciousness—necessary for the inspired cruelty of
man.

Why not? It’s simple. Unlike us, predators have no comprehension of their
fundamental weakness, their fundamental vulnerability, their own subjugation to pain
and death. But we know exactly how and where we can be hurt, and why. That is as good
a definition as any of self-consciousness. We are aware of our own defencelessness,
finitude and mortality. We can feel pain, and self-disgust, and shame, and horror, and we
know it. We know what makes us suffer. We know how dread and pain can be inflicted
on us—and that means we know exactly how to inflict it on others. We know how we are
naked, and how that nakedness can be exploited—and that means we know how others
are naked, and how they can be exploited.

We can terrify other people, consciously. We can hurt and humiliate them for faults we
understand only too well. We can torture them—literally—slowly, artfully and terribly.
That’s far more than predation. That’s a qualitative shift in understanding. That’s a
cataclysm as large as the development of self-consciousness itself. That’s the entry of the
knowledge of Good and Evil into the world. That’s a second as-yet-unhealed fracture in
the structure of Existence. That’s the transformation of Being itself into a moral
endeavour—all attendant on the development of sophisticated self-consciousness.

Only man could conceive of the rack, the iron maiden and the thumbscrew. Only man
will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the best definition of evil I have been
able to formulate. Animals can’t manage that, but humans, with their excruciating, semi¬
divine capacities, most certainly can. And with this realization we have well-nigh full

legitimization of the idea, very unpopular in modern intellectual circles, of Original Sin.
And who would dare to say that there was no element of voluntary choice in our
evolutionary, individual and theological transformation? Our ancestors chose their sexual
partners, and they selected for—consciousness? And self-consciousness? And moral
knowledge? And who can deny the sense of existential guilt that pervades human
experience? And who could avoid noting that without that guilt—that sense of inbuilt
corruption and capacity for wrongdoing—a man is one step from psychopathy?

Human beings have a great capacity for wrongdoing. It’s an attribute that is unique in
the world of life. We can and do make things worse, voluntarily, with full knowledge of
what we are doing (as well as accidentally, and carelessly, and in a manner that is willfully
blind). Given that terrible capacity, that proclivity for malevolent actions, is it any wonder
we have a hard time taking care of ourselves, or others—or even that we doubt the value
of the entire human enterprise? And we’ve suspected ourselves, for good reason, for a
very long time. Thousands of years ago, the ancient Mesopotamians believed, for
example, that mankind itself was made from the blood of Kingu, the single most terrible
monster that the great Goddess of Chaos could produce, in her most vengeful and
destructive moments. After drawing conclusions such as that, how could we not
question the value of our being, and even of Being itself? Who then could be faced with
illness, in himself or another, without doubting the moral utility of prescribing a healing
medicament? And no one understands the darkness of the individual better than the
individual himself. Who, then, when ill, is going to be fully committed to his own care?

Perhaps Man is something that should never have been. Perhaps the world should even
be cleansed of all human presence, so that Being and consciousness could return to the
innocent brutality of the animal. I believe that the person who claims never to have
wished for such a thing has neither consulted his memory nor confronted his darkest
fantasies.

What then is to be done?

A Spark of the Divine

In Genesis 1, God creates the world with the divine, truthful Word, generating habitable,
paradisal order from the precosmogonic chaos. He then creates Man and Woman in His
Image, imbuing them with the capacity to do the same—to create order from chaos, and
continue His work. At each stage of creation, including that involving the formation of
the first couple, God reflects upon what has come to be, and pronounces it Good.

The juxtaposition of Genesis 1 with Genesis 2 & 3 (the latter two chapters outlining
the fall of man, describing why our lot is so tragedy-ridden and ethically torturous)
produces a narrative sequence almost unbearable in its profundity. The moral of Genesis
1 is that Being brought into existence through true speech is Good. This is true even of
man himself, prior to his separation from God. This goodness is terribly disrupted by the
events of the fall (and of Cain and Abel and the Flood and the Tower of Babel), but we
retain an intimation of the prelapsarian state. We remember, so to speak. We remain
eternally nostalgic for the innocence of childhood, the divine, unconscious Being of the
animal, and the untouched cathedral-like old-growth forest. We find respite in such
things. We worship them, even if we are self-proclaimed atheistic environmentalists of
the most anti-human sort. The original state of Nature, conceived in this manner, is
paradisal. But we are no longer one with God and Nature, and there is no simple turning
back.

The original Man and Woman, existing in unbroken unity with their Creator, did not
appear conscious (and certainly not self-conscious). Their eyes were not open. But, in
their perfection, they were also less, not more, than their post-Fail counterparts. Their

goodness was something bestowed, rather than deserved or earned. They exercised no
choice. God knows, that’s easier. But maybe it’s not better than, for example, goodness
genuinely earned. Maybe, even in some cosmic sense (assuming that consciousness itself
is a phenomenon of cosmic significance), free choice matters. Who can speak with
certainty about such things? I am unwilling to take these questions off the table, however,
merely because they are difficult. So, here’s a proposition: perhaps it is not simply the
emergence of self-consciousness and the rise of our moral knowledge of Death and the
Fall that besets us and makes us doubt our own worth. Perhaps it is instead our
unwillingness—reflected in Adam’s shamed hiding—to walk with God, despite our
fragility and propensity for evil.

The entire Bible is structured so that everything after the Fall—the history of Israel, the
prophets, the coming of Christ—is presented as a remedy for that Fall, a way out of evil.
The beginning of conscious history, the rise of the state and all its pathologies of pride
and rigidity, the emergence of great moral figures who try to set things right, culminating
in the Messiah Himself—that is all part of humanity’s attempt, God willing, to set itself
right. And what would that mean?

And this is an amazing thing: the answer is already implicit in Genesis 1: to embody the
Image of God—to speak out of chaos the Being that is Good—but to do so consciously, of
our own free choice. Back is the way forward—as T. S. Eliot so rightly insisted—but back
as awake beings, exercising the proper choice of awake beings, instead of back to sleep:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always —

A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

(“Little Gidding,” Four Quartets, 1943)

If we wish to take care of ourselves properly, we would have to respect ourselves—but we
don’t, because we are—not least in our own eyes—fallen creatures. If we lived in Truth; if
we spoke the Truth—then we could walk with God once again, and respect ourselves, and
others, and the world. Then we might treat ourselves like people we cared for. We might
strive to set the world straight. We might orient it toward Heaven, where we would want
people we cared for to dwell, instead of Hell, where our resentment and hatred would
eternally sentence everyone.

In the areas where Christianity emerged two thousand years ago, people were much
more barbaric than they are today. Conflict was everywhere. Human sacrifice, including
that of children, was a common occurrence even in technologically sophisticated societies,
such as that of ancient Carthage. In Rome, arena sports were competitions to the death,
and the spilling of blood was a commonplace. The probability that a modern person, in a
functional democratic country, will now kill or be killed is infinitesimally low compared to
what it was in previous societies (and still is, in the unorganized and anarchic parts of the

world). Then, the primary moral issue confronting society was control of violent,
impulsive selfishness and the mindless greed and brutality that accompanies it. People
with those aggressive tendencies still exist. At least now they know that such behaviour is
sub-optimal, and either try to control it or encounter major social obstacles if they don’t.

But now, also, another problem has arisen, which was perhaps less common in our
harsher past. It is easy to believe that people are arrogant, and egotistical, and always
looking out for themselves. The cynicism that makes that opinion a universal truism is
widespread and fashionable. But such an orientation to the world is not at all
characteristic of many people. They have the opposite problem: they shoulder intolerable
burdens of self-disgust, self-contempt, shame and self-consciousness. Thus, instead of
narcissistically inflating their own importance, they don’t value themselves at all, and they
don’t take care of themselves with attention and skill. It seems that people often don’t
really believe that they deserve the best care, personally speaking. They are excruciatingly
aware of their own faults and inadequacies, real and exaggerated, and ashamed and
doubtful of their own value. They believe that other people shouldn’t suffer, and they will
work diligently and altruistically to help them alleviate it. They extend the same courtesy
even to the animals they are acquainted with—but not so easily to themselves.

It is true that the idea of virtuous self-sacrifice is deeply embedded in Western culture
(at least insofar as the West has been influenced by Christianity, which is based on the
imitation of someone who performed the ultimate act of self-sacrifice). Any claim that the
Golden Rule does not mean “sacrifice yourself for others” might therefore appear
dubious. But Christ’s archetypal death exists as an example of how to accept finitude,
betrayal and tyranny heroically—how to walk with God despite the tragedy of self-
conscious knowledge—and not as a directive to victimize ourselves in the service of
others. To sacrifice ourselves to God (to the highest good, if you like) does not mean to
suffer silently and willingly when some person or organization demands more from us,
consistently, than is offered in return. That means we are supporting tyranny, and
allowing ourselves to be treated like slaves. It is not virtuous to be victimized by a bully,
even if that bully is oneself.

I learned two very important lessons from Carl Jung, the famous Swiss depth
psychologist, about “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “loving
your neighbour as yourself.” The first lesson was that neither of these statements has
anything to do with being nice. The second was that both are equations, rather than
injunctions. If I am someone’s friend, family member, or lover, then I am morally obliged
to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on theirs. If I fail to do so, I will end up a
slave, and the other person a tyrant. What good is that? It much better for any
relationship when both partners are strong. Furthermore, there is little difference
between standing up and speaking for yourself, when you are being bullied or otherwise
tormented and enslaved, and standing up and speaking for someone else. As Jung points
out, this means embracing and loving the sinner who is yourself, as much as forgiving and
aiding someone else who is stumbling and imperfect.

As God himself claims (so goes the story), “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the
Lord.” According to this philosophy, you do not simply belong to yourself. You are not
simply your own possession to torture and mistreat. This is partly because your Being is
inexorably tied up with that of others, and your mistreatment of yourself can have
catastrophic consequences for others. This is most clearly evident, perhaps, in the
aftermath of suicide, when those left behind are often both bereft and traumatized. But,
metaphorically speaking, there is also this: you have a spark of the divine in you, which
belongs not to you, but to God. We are, after all—according to Genesis—made in His
image. We have the semi-divine capacity for consciousness. Our consciousness
participates in the speaking forth of Being. We are low-resolution (“kenotic”) versions of

God. We can make order from chaos—and vice versa—in our way, with our words. So, we
may not exactly be God, but we’re not exactly nothing, either.

In my own periods of darkness, in the underworld of the soul, I find myself frequently
overcome and amazed by the ability of people to befriend each other, to love their
intimate partners and parents and children, and to do what they must do to keep the
machinery of the world running. I knew a man, injured and disabled by a car accident,
who was employed by a local utility. For years after the crash he worked side by side with
another man, who for his part suffered with a degenerative neurological disease. They
cooperated while repairing the lines, each making up for the other’s inadequacy. This sort
of everyday heroism is the rule, I believe, rather than the exception. Most individuals are
dealing with one or more serious health problems while going productively and
uncomplainingly about their business. If anyone is fortunate enough to be in a rare period
of grace and health, personally, then he or she typically has at least one close family
member in crisis. Yet people prevail and continue to do difficult and effortful tasks to
hold themselves and their families and society together. To me this is miraculous—so
much so that a dumbfounded gratitude is the only appropriate response. There are so
many ways that things can fall apart, or fail to work altogether, and it is always wounded
people who are holding it together. They deserve some genuine and heartfelt admiration
for that. It’s an ongoing miracle of fortitude and perseverance.

In my clinical practice I encourage people to credit themselves and those around them
for acting productively and with care, as well as for the genuine concern and
thoughtfulness they manifest towards others. People are so tortured by the limitations
and constraint of Being that I am amazed they ever act properly or look beyond
themselves at all. But enough do so that we have central heat and running water and
infinite computational power and electricity and enough for everyone to eat and even the
capacity to contemplate the fate of broader society and nature, terrible nature, itself. All
that complex machinery that protects us from freezing and starving and dying from lack
of water tends unceasingly towards malfunction through entropy, and it is only the
constant attention of careful people that keeps it working so unbelievably well. Some
people degenerate into the hell of resentment and the hatred of Being, but most refuse to
do so, despite their suffering and disappointments and losses and inadequacies and
ugliness, and again that is a miracle for those with the eyes to see it.

Humanity, in toto, and those who compose it as identifiable people deserve some
sympathy for the appalling burden under which the human individual genuinely staggers;
some sympathy for subjugation to mortal vulnerability, tyranny of the state, and the
depredations of nature. It is an existential situation that no mere animal encounters or
endures, and one of severity such that it would take a God to fully bear it. It is this
sympathy that should be the proper medicament for self-conscious self-contempt, which
has its justification, but is only half the full and proper story. Hatred for self and mankind
must be balanced with gratefulness for tradition and the state and astonishment at what
normal, everyday people accomplish—to say nothing of the staggering achievements of
the truly remarkable.

We deserve some respect. You deserve some respect. You are important to other
people, as much as to yourself. You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny
of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself. You should take
care of, help and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help and be
good to someone you loved and valued. You may therefore have to conduct yourself
habitually in a manner that allows you some respect for your own Being—and fair
enough. But every person is deeply flawed. Everyone falls short of the glory of God. If that
stark fact meant, however, that we had no responsibility to care, for ourselves as much as
others, everyone would be brutally punished all the time. That would not be good. That

would make the shortcomings of the world, which can make everyone who thinks
honestly question the very propriety of the world, worse in every way. That simply cannot
be the proper path forward.

To treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping is, instead, to
consider what would be truly good for you. This is not “what you want.” It is also not
“what would make you happy.” Every time you give a child something sweet, you make
that child happy. That does not mean that you should do nothing for children except feed
them candy. “Happy” is by no means synonymous with “good.” You must get children to
brush their teeth. They must put on their snowsuits when they go outside in the cold,
even though they might object strenuously. You must help a child become a virtuous,
responsible, awake being, capable of full reciprocity—able to take care of himself and
others, and to thrive while doing so. Why would you think it acceptable to do anything
less for yourself?

You need to consider the future and think, “What might my life look like if I were
caring for myself properly? What career would challenge me and render me productive
and helpful, so that I could shoulder my share of the load, and enjoy the consequences?
What should I be doing, when I have some freedom, to improve my health, expand my
knowledge, and strengthen my body?” You need to know where you are, so you can start
to chart your course. You need to know who you are, so that you understand your
armament and bolster yourself in respect to your limitations. You need to know where
you are going, so that you can limit the extent of chaos in your life, restructure order, and
bring the divine force of Hope to bear on the world.

You must determine where you are going, so that you can bargain for yourself, so that
you don’t end up resentful, vengeful and cruel. You have to articulate your own
principles, so that you can defend yourself against others’ taking inappropriate advantage
of you, and so that you are secure and safe while you work and play. You must discipline
yourself carefully. You must keep the promises you make to yourself, and reward yourself,
so that you can trust and motivate yourself. You need to determine how to act toward
yourself so that you are most likely to become and to stay a good person. It would be
good to make the world a better place. Heaven, after all, will not arrive of its own accord.
We will have to work to bring it about, and strengthen ourselves, so that we can
withstand the deadly angels and flaming sword of judgment that God used to bar its
entrance.

Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces,
able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable
pathways and expanding opportunities. Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself.
Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your
destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-century German
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear
almost any how.”—

You could help direct the world, on its careening trajectory, a bit more toward Heaven
and a bit more away from Hell. Once having understood Hell, researched it, so to speak—
particularly your own individual Hell—you could decide against going there or creating
that. You could aim elsewhere. You could, in fact, devote your life to this. That would
give you a Meaning, with a capital M. That would justify your miserable existence. That
would atone for your sinful nature, and replace your shame and self-consciousness with
the natural pride and forthright confidence of someone who has learned once again to
walk with God in the Garden.

You could begin by treating yourself as if you were someone you were responsible for
helping.

/**

RULE 3

MAKE FRIENDS WITH PEOPLE WHO WANT THE BEST FOR

YOU

THE OLD HOMETOWN

The town I grew up in had been scraped only fifty years earlier out of the endless flat
Northern prairie. Fairview, Alberta, was part of the frontier, and had the cowboy bars to
prove it. The Hudson’s Bay Co. department store on Main Street still bought beaver, wolf
and coyote furs directly from the local trappers. Three thousand people lived there, four
hundred miles away from the nearest city. Cable TV, video games and internet did not
exist. It was no easy matter to stay innocently amused in Fairview, particularly during the
five months of winter, when long stretches of forty-below days and even colder nights
were the norm.

The world is a different place when it’s cold like that. The drunks in our town ended
their sad lives early. They passed out in snowbanks at three in the morning and froze to
death. You don’t go outside casually when it’s forty below. On first breath, the arid desert
air constricts your lungs. Ice forms on your eyelashes and they stick together. Long hair,
wet from the shower, freezes solid and then stands on end wraith-like of its own accord
later in a warm house, when it thaws bone dry, charged with electricity. Children only put
their tongues on steel playground equipment once. Smoke from house chimneys doesn’t
rise. Defeated by the cold, it drifts downwards, and collects like fog on snow-covered
rooftops and yards. Cars must be plugged in at night, their engines warmed by block
heaters, or oil will not flow through them in the morning, and they won’t start.
Sometimes they won’t anyway. Then you turn the engine over pointlessly until the starter
clatters and falls silent. Then you remove the frozen battery from the car, loosening bolts
with stiffening fingers in the intense cold, and bring it into the house. It sits there,
sweating for hours, until it warms enough to hold a decent charge. You are not going to
see out of the back window of your car, either. It frosts over in November and stays that
way until May. Scraping it off just dampens the upholstery. Then it’s frozen, too. Late one
night going to visit a friend I sat for two hours on the edge of the passenger seat in a 1970
Dodge Challenger, jammed up against the stick-shift, using a vodka-soaked rag to keep
the inside of the front windshield clear in front of the driver because the car heater had
quit. Stopping wasn’t an option. There was nowhere to stop.

And it was hell on house cats. Felines in Fairview had short ears and tails because they
had lost the tips of both to frostbite. They came to resemble Arctic foxes, which evolved
those features to deal proactively with the intense cold. One day our cat got outside and
no one noticed. We found him, later, fur frozen fast to the cold hard backdoor cement
steps where he sat. We carefully separated cat from concrete, with no lasting damage—
except to his pride. Fairview cats were also at great risk in the winter from cars, but not
for the reasons you think. It wasn’t automobiles sliding on icy roads and running them
over. Only loser cats died that way. It was cars parked immediately after being driven that
were dangerous. A frigid cat might think highly of climbing up under such a vehicle and
sitting on its still-warm engine block. But what if the driver decided to use the car again,
before the engine cooled down and cat departed? Let’s just say that heat-seeking house-
pets and rapidly rotating radiator fans do not coexist happily.

Because we were so far north, the bitterly cold winters were also very dark. By
December, the sun didn’t rise until 9:30 a.m. We trudged to school in the pitch black. It

wasn’t much lighter when we walked home, just before the early sunset. There wasn’t
much for young people to do in Fairview, even in the summer. But the winters were
worse. Then your friends mattered. More than anything.

My Friend Chris and His Cousin

I had a friend at that time. We’ll call him Chris. He was a smart guy. He read a lot. He
liked science fiction of the kind I was attracted to (Bradbury, Heinlein, Clarke). He was
inventive. He was interested in electronic kits and gears and motors. He was a natural
engineer. All this was overshadowed, however, by something that had gone wrong in his
family. I don’t know what it was. His sisters were smart and his father was soft-spoken
and his mother was kind. The girls seemed OK. But Chris had been left unattended to in
some important way. Despite his intelligence and curiosity he was angry, resentful and
without hope.

All this manifested itself in material form in the shape of his 1972 blue Ford pickup
truck. That notorious vehicle had at least one dent in every quarter panel of its damaged
external body. Worse, it had an equivalent number of dents inside. Those were produced
by the impact of the body parts of friends against the internal surfaces during the
continual accidents that resulted in the outer dents. Chris’s truck was the exoskeleton of
a nihilist. It had the perfect bumper sticker: Be Alert—The World Needs More Lerts. The
irony it produced in combination with the dents elevated it nicely to theatre of the
absurd. Very little of that was (so to speak) accidental.

Every time Chris crashed his truck, his father would fix it, and buy him something else.
He had a motorbike and a van for selling ice cream. He did not care for his motorbike. He
sold no ice cream. He often expressed dissatisfaction with his father and their
relationship. But his dad was older and unwell, diagnosed with an illness only after many
years. He didn’t have the energy he should have. Maybe he couldn’t pay enough attention
to his son. Maybe that’s all it took to fracture their relationship.

Chris had a cousin, Ed, who was about two years younger. I liked him, as much as you
can like the younger cousin of a teenage friend. He was a tall, smart, charming, good-
looking kid. He was witty, too. You would have predicted a good future for him, had you
met him when he was twelve. But Ed drifted slowly downhill, into a dropout, semi¬
drifting mode of existence. He didn’t get as angry as Chris, but he was just as confused. If
you knew Ed’s friends, you might say that it was peer pressure that set him on his
downward path. But his peers weren’t obviously any more lost or delinquent than he was,
although they were generally somewhat less bright. It was also the case that Ed’s—and
Chris’s—situation did not appear particularly improved by their discovery of marijuana.
Marijuana isn’t bad for everyone any more than alcohol is bad for everyone. Sometimes it
even appears to improve people. But it didn’t improve Ed. It didn’t improve Chris, either.

To amuse ourselves in the long nights, Chris and I and Ed and the rest of the teenagers
drove around and around in our 1970s cars and pickup trucks. We cruised down Main
Street, along Railroad Avenue, up past the high school, around the north end of town,
over to the west—or up Main Street, around the north end of town, over to the east—and
so on, endlessly repeating the theme. If we weren’t driving in town, we were driving in
the countryside. A century earlier, surveyors had laid out a vast grid across the entire
three-hundred-thousand-square-mile expanse of the great western prairie. Every two
miles north, a plowed gravel road stretched forever, east to west. Every mile west, another
travelled north and south. We never ran out of roads.

Teenage Wasteland

If we weren’t circling around town and countryside we were at a party. Some relatively
young adult (or some relatively creepy older adult) would open his house to friends. It
would then become temporary home to all manner of party crashers, many of whom
started out seriously undesirable or quickly become that way when drinking. A party
might also happen accidentally, when some teenager’s unwitting parents had left town. In
that case, the occupants of the cars or trucks always cruising around would notice house
lights on, but household car absent. This was not good. Things could get seriously out of
hand.

I did not like teenage parties. I do not remember them nostalgically. They were dismal
affairs. The lights were kept low. That kept self-consciousness to a minimum. The over-
loud music made conversation impossible. There was little to talk about in any case.
There were always a couple of the town psychopaths attending. Everybody drank and
smoked too much. A dreary and oppressive sense of aimlessness hung over such
occasions, and nothing ever happened (unless you count the time my too-quiet classmate
drunkenly began to brandish his fully-loaded 12-gauge shotgun, or the time the girl I later
married contemptuously insulted someone while he threatened her with a knife, or the
time another friend climbed a large tree, swung out on a branch, and crashed flat onto his
back, half dead right beside the campfire we had started at its base, followed precisely one
minute later by his halfwit sidekick).

No one knew what the hell they were doing at those parties. Hoping for a cheerleader?
Waiting for Godot? Although the former would have been immediately preferred
(although cheerleading squads were scarce in our town), the latter was closer to the
truth. It would be more romantic, I suppose, to suggest that we would have all jumped at
the chance for something more productive, bored out of our skulls as we were. But it’s
not true. We were all too prematurely cynical and world-weary and leery of responsibility
to stick to the debating clubs and Air Cadets and school sports that the adults around us
tried to organize. Doing anything wasn’t cool. I don’t know what teenage life was like
before the revolutionaries of the late sixties advised everyone young to tune in, turn on
and drop out. Was it OK for a teenager to belong wholeheartedly to a club in 1955?
Because it certainly wasn’t twenty years later. Plenty of us turned on and dropped out.
But not so many tuned in.

I wanted to be elsewhere. I wasn’t the only one. Everyone who eventually left the
Fairview I grew up in knew they were leaving by the age of twelve. I knew. My wife, who
grew up with me on the street our families shared, knew. The friends I had who did and
didn’t leave also knew, regardless of which track they were on. There was an unspoken
expectation in the families of those who were college-bound that such a thing was a
matter of course. For those from less-educated families, a future that included university
was simply not part of the conceptual realm. It wasn’t for lack of money, either. Tuition
for advanced education was very low at that time, and jobs in Alberta were plentiful and
high-paying. I earned more money in 1980 working at a plywood mill than I would again
doing anything else for twenty years. No one missed out on university because of financial
need in oil-rich Alberta in the 1970s.

Some Different Friends—and Some More of the Same

In high school, after my first group of cronies had all dropped out, I made friends with a
couple of newcomers. They came to Fairview as boarders. There was no school after ninth
grade in their even more remote and aptly named hometown, Bear Canyon. They were an
ambitious duo, comparatively speaking; straightforward and reliable, but also cool and
very amusing. When I left town to attend Grande Prairie Regional College, ninety miles
away, one of them became my roommate. The other went off elsewhere to pursue further
education. Both were aiming upward. Their decisions to do so bolstered mine.

I was a happy clam when I arrived at college. I found another, expanded group of like-
minded companions, whom my Bear Canyon comrade also joined. We were all captivated
by literature and philosophy. We ran the Student Union. We made it profitable, for the
first time in its history, hosting college dances. How can you lose money selling beer to
college kids? We started a newspaper. We got to know our professors of political science
and biology and English literature in the tiny seminars that characterized even our first
year. The instructors were thankful for our enthusiasm and taught us well. We were
building a better life.

I sloughed off a lot of my past. In a small town, everyone knows who you are. You drag
your years behind you like a running dog with tin cans tied to its tail. You can’t escape
who you have been. Everything wasn’t online then, and thank God for that, but it was
stored equally indelibly in everyone’s spoken and unspoken expectations and memory.

When you move, everything is up in the air, at least for a while. It’s stressful, but in the
chaos there are new possibilities. People, including you, can’t hem you in with their old
notions. You get shaken out of your ruts. You can make new, better ruts, with people
aiming at better things. I thought this was just a natural development. I thought that
every person who moved would have—and want—the same phoenix-like experience. But
that wasn’t always the case.

One time, when I was about fifteen, I went with Chris and another friend, Carl, to
Edmonton, a city of six hundred thousand. Carl had never been to a city. This was not
uncommon. Fairview to Edmonton was an eight-hundred-mile round trip. I had done it
many times, sometimes with my parents, sometimes without. I liked the anonymity that
the city provided. I liked the new beginnings. I liked the escape from the dismal, cramped
adolescent culture of my home town. So, I convinced my two friends to make the journey.
But they did not have the same experience. As soon as we arrived, Chris and Carl wanted
to buy some pot. We headed for the parts of Edmonton that were exactly like the worst of
Fairview. We found the same furtive street-vending marijuana providers. We spent the
weekend drinking in the hotel room. Although we had travelled a long distance, we had
gone nowhere at all.

I saw an even more egregious example of this a few years later. I had moved to
Edmonton to finish my undergraduate degree. I took an apartment with my sister, who
was studying to be a nurse. She was also an up-and-out-of-there person. (Not too many
years later she would plant strawberries in Norway and run safaris through Africa and
smuggle trucks across the Tuareg-menaced Sahara Desert, and babysit orphan gorillas in
the Congo.) We had a nice place in a new high-rise, overlooking the broad valley of the
North Saskatchewan River. We had a view of the city skyline in the background. I bought
a beautiful new Yamaha upright piano, in a fit of enthusiasm. The place looked good.

I heard through the grapevine that Ed—Chris’s younger cousin—had moved to the city.
I thought that was a good thing. One day he called. I invited him over. I wanted to see
how he was faring. I hoped he was achieving some of the potential I once saw in him.
That is not what happened. Ed showed up, older, balder and stooped. He was a lot more
not-doing-so-well young adult and a lot less youthful possibility. His eyes were the
telltale red slits of the practised stoner. Ed had had taken some job—lawn-mowing and
casual landscaping—which would have been fine for a part-time university student or for
someone who could not do better but which was wretchedly low-end as a career for an
intelligent person.

He was accompanied by a friend.

It was his friend I really remember. He was spaced. He was baked. He was stoned out of
his gourd. His head and our nice, civilized apartment did not easily occupy the same
universe. My sister was there. She knew Ed. She’d seen this sort of thing before. But I still
wasn’t happy that Ed had brought this character into our place. Ed sat down. His friend

sat down, too, although it wasn’t clear he noticed. It was tragicomedy. Stoned as he was,
Ed still had the sense to be embarrassed. We sipped our beer. Ed’s friend looked upwards.
“My particles are scattered all over the ceiling,” he managed. Truer words were never
spoken.

I took Ed aside and told him politely that he had to leave. I said that he shouldn’t have
brought his useless bastard of a companion. He nodded. He understood. That made it
even worse. His older cousin Chris wrote me a letter much later about such things. I
included it in my first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief published in 1999:
“I had friends,” he said. — “Before. Anyone with enough self-contempt that they could
forgive me mine.”

What was it that made Chris and Carl and Ed unable (or, worse, perhaps, unwilling) to
move or to change their friendships and improve the circumstances of their lives? Was it
inevitable—a consequence of their own limitations, nascent illnesses and traumas of the
past? After all, people vary significantly, in ways that seem both structural and
deterministic. People differ in intelligence, which is in large part the ability to learn and
transform. People have very different personalities, as well. Some are active, and some
passive. Others are anxious or calm. For every individual driven to achieve, there is
another who is indolent. The degree to which these differences are immutably part and
parcel of someone is greater than an optimist might presume or desire. And then there is
illness, mental and physical, diagnosed or invisible, further limiting or shaping our lives.

Chris had a psychotic break in his thirties, after flirting with insanity for many years.
Not long afterward, he committed suicide. Did his heavy marijuana use play a magnifying
role, or was it understandable self-medication? Use of physician-prescribed drugs for pain
has, after all, decreased in marijuana-legal states such as Colorado. Maybe the pot made
things better for Chris, not worse. Maybe it eased his suffering, instead of exacerbating
his instability. Was it the nihilistic philosophy he nurtured that paved the way to his
eventual breakdown? Was that nihilism, in turn, a consequence of genuine ill health, or
just an intellectual rationalization of his unwillingness to dive responsibly into life? Why
did he—like his cousin, like my other friends—continually choose people who, and places
that, were not good for him?

Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth—or, perhaps, when
they refuse responsibility for their lives—they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the
type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don’t believe that they deserve any
better—so they don’t go looking for it. Or, perhaps, they don’t want the trouble of better.
Freud called this a “repetition compulsion.” He thought of it as an unconscious drive to
repeat the horrors of the past—sometimes, perhaps, to formulate those horrors more
precisely, sometimes to attempt more active mastery and sometimes, perhaps, because no
alternatives beckon. People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand.
Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the
same faulty results. It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom
themselves to repeat it. It’s partly fate. It’s partly inability. It’s partly ... unwillingness to
learn? Refusal to learn? Motivated refusal to learn?

Rescuing the Damned

People choose friends who aren’t good for them for other reasons, too. Sometimes it’s
because they want to rescue someone. This is more typical of young people, although the
impetus still exists among older folks who are too agreeable or have remained naive or
who are willfully blind. Someone might object, “It is only right to see the best in people.
The highest virtue is the desire to help.” But not everyone who is failing is a victim, and
not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise, although many do, and many manage it.

Nonetheless, people will often accept or even amplify their own suffering, as well as that
of others, if they can brandish it as evidence of the world’s injustice. There is no shortage
of oppressors among the downtrodden, even if, given their lowly positions, many of them
are only tyrannical wannabes. It’s the easiest path to choose, moment to moment,
although it’s nothing but hell in the long run.

Imagine someone not doing well. He needs help. He might even want it. But it is not
easy to distinguish between someone truly wanting and needing help and someone who is
merely exploiting a willing helper. The distinction is difficult even for the person who is
wanting and needing and possibly exploiting. The person who tries and fails, and is
forgiven, and then tries again and fails, and is forgiven, is also too often the person who
wants everyone to believe in the authenticity of all that trying.

When it’s not just naivete, the attempt to rescue someone is often fuelled by vanity and
narcissism. Something like this is detailed in the incomparable Russian author Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s bitter classic, Notes from Underground, which begins with these famous lines:
“I am a sick man ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is
diseased.” It is the confession of a miserable, arrogant sojourner in the underworld of
chaos and despair. He analyzes himself mercilessly, but only pays in this manner for a
hundred sins, despite committing a thousand. Then, imagining himself redeemed, the
underground man commits the worst transgression of the lot. He offers aid to a genuinely
unfortunate person, Liza, a woman on the desperate nineteenth-century road to
prostitution. He invites her for a visit, promising to set her life back on the proper course.
While waiting for her to appear, his fantasies spin increasingly messianic:

One day passed, however, another and another; she did not come and I began to grow calmer. I felt particularly
bold and cheerful after nine o'clock, I even sometimes began dreaming, and rather sweetly: I, for instance,
became the salvation of Liza, simply through her coming to me and my talking to her.... I develop her, educate
her. Finally, I notice that she loves me, loves me passionately. I pretend not to understand (I don’t know,
however, why I pretend, just for effect, perhaps). At last all confusion, transfigured, trembling and sobbing, she
flings herself at my feet and says that 1 am her savior, and that she loves me better than anything in the world.

Nothing but the narcissism of the underground man is nourished by such fantasies.
Liza herself is demolished by them. The salvation he offers to her demands far more in
the way of commitment and maturity than the underground man is willing or able to
offer. He simply does not have the character to see it through—something he quickly
realizes, and equally quickly rationalizes. Liza eventually arrives at his shabby apartment,
hoping desperately for a way out, staking everything she has on the visit. She tells the
underground man that she wants to leave her current life. His response?

“Why have you come to me, tell me that, please?” 1 began, gasping for breath and regardless of logical
connection in my words. I longed to have it all out at once, at one burst; 1 did not even trouble how to begin.

“Why have you come? Answer, answer,” I cried, hardly knowing what I was doing. “I’ll tell you, my good girl,
why you have come. You’ve come because I talked sentimental stuff to you then. So now you are soft as butter
and longing for fine sentiments again. So you may as well know that I was laughing at you then. And I am
laughing at you now. Why are you shuddering? Yes, I was laughing at you! I had been insulted just before, at
dinner, by the fellows who came that evening before me. I came to you, meaning to thrash one of them, an
officer; but I didn’t succeed, I didn’t find him; I had to avenge the insult on someone to get back my own again;
you turned up, I vented my spleen on you and laughed at you. I had been humiliated, so I wanted to humiliate; I
had been treated like a rag, so I wanted to show my power.... That's what it was, and you imagined I had come
there on purpose to save you. Yes? You imagined that? You imagined that?”

I knew that she would perhaps be muddled and not take it all in exactly, but I knew, too, that she would
grasp the gist of it, very well indeed. And so, indeed, she did. She turned white as a handkerchief, tried to say
something, and her lips worked painfully; but she sank on a chair as though she had been felled by an axe. And
all the time afterwards she listened to me with her lips parted and her eyes wide open, shuddering with awful
terror. The cynicism, the cynicism of my words overwhelmed her....

The inflated self-importance, carelessness and sheer malevolence of the underground man
dashes Liza’s last hopes. He understands this well. Worse: something in him was aiming
at this all along. And he knows that too. But a villain who despairs of his villainy has not
become a hero. A hero is something positive, not just the absence of evil.

But Christ himself, you might object, befriended tax-collectors and prostitutes. How
dare I cast aspersions on the motives of those who are trying to help? But Christ was the
archetypal perfect man. And you’re you. How do you know that your attempts to pull
someone up won’t instead bring them—or you—further down? Imagine the case of
someone supervising an exceptional team of workers, all of them striving towards a
collectively held goal; imagine them hard-working, brilliant, creative and unified. But the
person supervising is also responsible for someone troubled, who is performing poorly,
elsewhere. In a fit of inspiration, the well-meaning manager moves that problematic
person into the midst of his stellar team, hoping to improve him by example. What
happens?—and the psychological literature is clear on this point. Does the errant
interloper immediately straighten up and fly right? No. Instead, the entire team
degenerates. The newcomer remains cynical, arrogant and neurotic. He complains. He
shirks. He misses important meetings. His low-quality work causes delays, and must be
redone by others. He still gets paid, however, just like his teammates. The hard workers
who surround him start to feel betrayed. “Why am I breaking myself into pieces striving
to finish this project,” each thinks, “when my new team member never breaks a sweat?”
The same thing happens when well-meaning counsellors place a delinquent teen among
comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability. Down is a lot
easier than up.

Maybe you are saving someone because you’re a strong, generous, well-put-together
person who wants to do the right thing. But it’s also possible—and, perhaps, more likely
—that you just want to draw attention to your inexhaustible reserves of compassion and
good-will. Or maybe you’re saving someone because you want to convince yourself that
the strength of your character is more than just a side effect of your luck and birthplace.
Or maybe it’s because it’s easier to look virtuous when standing alongside someone
utterly irresponsible.

Assume first that you are doing the easiest thing, and not the most difficult.

Your raging alcoholism makes my binge drinking appear trivial. My long serious talks
with you about your badly failing marriage convince both of us that you are doing
everything possible and that I am helping you to my utmost. It looks like effort. It looks
like progress. But real improvement would require far more from both of you. Are you so
sure the person crying out to be saved has not decided a thousand times to accept his lot
of pointless and worsening suffering, simply because it is easier than shouldering any true
responsibility? Are you enabling a delusion? Is it possible that your contempt would be
more salutary than your pity?

Or maybe you have no plan, genuine or otherwise, to rescue anybody. You’re
associating with people who are bad for you not because it’s better for anyone, but
because it’s easier. You know it. Your friends know it. You’re all bound by an implicit
contract—one aimed at nihilism, and failure, and suffering of the stupidest sort. You’ve
all decided to sacrifice the future to the present. You don’t talk about it. You don’t all get
together and say, “Let’s take the easier path. Let’s indulge in whatever the moment might
bring. And let’s agree, further, not to call each other on it. That way, we can more easily
forget what we are doing.” You don’t mention any of that. But you all know what’s really
going on.

Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble. You
shouldn’t merely assume that he or she is a noble victim of unjust circumstances and
exploitation. It’s the most unlikely explanation, not the most probable. In my experience
—clinical and otherwise—it’s just never been that simple. Besides, if you buy the story
that everything terrible just happened on its own, with no personal responsibility on the
part of the victim, you deny that person all agency in the past (and, by implication, in the
present and future, as well). In this manner, you strip him or her of all power.

It is far more likely that a given individual has just decided to reject the path upward,
because of its difficulty. Perhaps that should even be your default assumption, when faced
with such a situation. That’s too harsh, you think. You might be right. Maybe that’s a
step too far. But consider this: failure is easy to understand. No explanation for its
existence is required. In the same manner, fear, hatred, addiction, promiscuity, betrayal
and deception require no explanation. It’s not the existence of vice, or the indulgence in
it, that requires explanation. Vice is easy. Failure is easy, too. It’s easier not to shoulder a
burden. It’s easier not to think, and not to do, and not to care. It’s easier to put off until
tomorrow what needs to be done today, and drown the upcoming months and years in
today’s cheap pleasures. As the infamous father of the Simpson clan puts it, immediately
prior to downing a jar of mayonnaise and vodka, “That’s a problem for Future Homer.
Man, I don’t envy that guy!”—

How do I know that your suffering is not the demand of martyrdom for my resources,
so that you can oh-so-momentarily stave off the inevitable? Maybe you have even moved
beyond caring about the impending collapse, but don’t yet want to admit it. Maybe my
help won’t rectify anything—can’t rectify anything—but it does keep that too-terrible,
too-personal realization temporarily at bay. Maybe your misery is a demand placed on me
so that I fail too, so that the gap you so painfully feel between us can be reduced, while
you degenerate and sink. How do I know that you would refuse to play such a game? How
do I know that I am not myself merely pretending to be responsible, while pointlessly
“helping” you, so that I don’t have to do something truly difficult—and genuinely
possible?

Maybe your misery is the weapon you brandish in your hatred for those who rose
upward while you waited and sank. Maybe your misery is your attempt to prove the
world’s injustice, instead of the evidence of your own sin, your own missing of the mark,
your conscious refusal to strive and to live. Maybe your willingness to suffer in failure is
inexhaustible, given what you use that suffering to prove. Maybe it’s your revenge on
Being. How exactly should I befriend you when you’re in such a place? How exactly could
I?

Success: that’s the mystery. Virtue: that’s what’s inexplicable. To fail, you merely have
to cultivate a few bad habits. You just have to bide your time. And once someone has
spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much
diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated, and much of the less that
they have become is now real. Things fall apart, of their own accord, but the sins of men
speed their degeneration. And then comes the flood.

I am not saying that there is no hope of redemption. But it is much harder to extract
someone from a chasm than to lift him from a ditch. And some chasms are very deep.
And there’s not much left of the body at the bottom.

Maybe I should at least wait, to help you, until it’s clear that you want to be helped.
Carl Rogers, the famous humanistic psychologist, believed it was impossible to start a
therapeutic relationship if the person seeking help did not want to improve. Rogers
believed it was impossible to convince someone to change for the better. The desire to
improve was, instead, the precondition for progress. I’ve had court-mandated
psychotherapy clients. They did not want my help. They were forced to seek it. It did not
work. It was a travesty.

If I stay in an unhealthy relationship with you, perhaps it’s because I’m too weak-willed
and indecisive to leave, but I don’t want to know it. Thus, I continue helping you, and
console myself with my pointless martyrdom. Maybe I can then conclude, about myself,
“Someone that self-sacrificing, that willing to help someone—that has to be a good
person.” Not so. It might be just a person trying to look good pretending to solve what

appears to be a difficult problem instead of actually being good and addressing something
real.

Maybe instead of continuing our friendship I should just go off somewhere, get my act
together, and lead by example.

And none of this is a justification for abandoning those in real need to pursue your
narrow, blind ambition, in case it has to be said.

A Reciprocal Arrangement

Here’s something to consider: If you have a friend whose friendship you wouldn’t
recommend to your sister, or your father, or your son, why would you have such a friend
for yourself? You might say: out of loyalty. Well, loyalty is not identical to stupidity.
Loyalty must be negotiated, fairly and honestly. Friendship is a reciprocal arrangement.
You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place.
Quite the opposite. You should choose people who want things to be better, not worse.
It’s a good thing, not a selfish thing, to choose people who are good for you. It’s
appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if
they saw your life improve.

If you surround yourself with people who support your upward aim, they will not
tolerate your cynicism and destructiveness. They will instead encourage you when you do
good for yourself and others and punish you carefully when you do not. This will help
bolster your resolve to do what you should do, in the most appropriate and careful
manner. People who are not aiming up will do the opposite. They will offer a former
smoker a cigarette and a former alcoholic a beer. They will become jealous when you
succeed, or do something pristine. They will withdraw their presence or support, or
actively punish you for it. They will over-ride your accomplishment with a past action,
real or imaginary, of their own. Maybe they are trying to test you, to see if your resolve is
real, to see if you are genuine. But mostly they are dragging you down because your new
improvements cast their faults in an even dimmer light.

It is for this reason that every good example is a fateful challenge, and every hero, a
judge. Michelangelo’s great perfect marble David cries out to its observer: “You could be
more than you are.” When you dare aspire upward, you reveal the inadequacy of the
present and the promise of the future. Then you disturb others, in the depths of their
souls, where they understand that their cynicism and immobility are unjustifiable. You
play Abel to their Cain. You remind them that they ceased caring not because of life’s
horrors, which are undeniable, but because they do not want to lift the world up on to
their shoulders, where it belongs.

Don’t think that it is easier to surround yourself with good healthy people than with
bad unhealthy people. It’s not. A good, healthy person is an ideal. It requires strength and
daring to stand up near such a person. Have some humility. Have some courage. Use your
judgment, and protect yourself from too-uncritical compassion and pity.

Make friends with people who want the best for you.

RULE 4

COMPARE YOURSELF TO WHO YOU WERE YESTERDAY, NOT
TO WHO SOMEONE ELSE IS TODAY

THE INTERNAL CRITIC

It was easier for people to be good at something when more of us lived in small, rural
communities. Someone could be homecoming queen. Someone else could be spelling-bee
champ, math whiz or basketball star. There were only one or two mechanics and a couple
of teachers. In each of their domains, these local heroes had the opportunity to enjoy the
serotonin-fuelled confidence of the victor. It may be for that reason that people who were
born in small towns are statistically overrepresented among the eminent. If you’re one
in a million now, but originated in modern New York, there’s twenty of you—and most of
us now live in cities. What’s more, we have become digitally connected to the entire
seven billion. Our hierarchies of accomplishment are now dizzyingly vertical.

No matter how good you are at something, or how you rank your accomplishments,
there is someone out there who makes you look incompetent. You’re a decent guitar
player, but you’re not Jimmy Page or Jack White. You’re almost certainly not even going
to rock your local pub. You’re a good cook, but there are many great chefs. Your mother’s
recipe for fish heads and rice, no matter how celebrated in her village of origin, doesn’t
cut it in these days of grapefruit foam and Scotch/tobacco ice-cream. Some Mafia don has
a tackier yacht. Some obsessive CEO has a more complicated self-winding watch, kept in
his more valuable mechanical hardwood-and-steel automatic self-winding watch case.
Even the most stunning Hollywood actress eventually transforms into the Evil Queen, on
eternal, paranoid watch for the new Snow White. And you? Your career is boring and
pointless, your housekeeping skills are second-rate, your taste is appalling, you’re fatter
than your friends, and everyone dreads your parties. Who cares if you are prime minister
of Canada when someone else is the president of the United States?

Inside us dwells a critical internal voice and spirit that knows all this. It’s predisposed
to make its noisy case. It condemns our mediocre efforts. It can be very difficult to quell.
Worse, critics of its sort are necessary. There is no shortage of tasteless artists, tuneless
musicians, poisonous cooks, bureaucratically-personality-disordered middle managers,
hack novelists and tedious, ideology-ridden professors. Things and people differ
importantly in their qualities. Awful music torments listeners everywhere. Poorly
designed buildings crumble in earthquakes. Substandard automobiles kill their drivers
when they crash. Failure is the price we pay for standards and, because mediocrity has
consequences both real and harsh, standards are necessary.

We are not equal in ability or outcome, and never will be. A very small number of
people produce very much of everything. The winners don’t take all, but they take most,
and the bottom is not a good place to be. People are unhappy at the bottom. They get sick
there, and remain unknown and unloved. They waste their lives there. They die there. In
consequence, the self-denigrating voice in the minds of people weaves a devastating tale.
Life is a zero-sum game. Worthlessness is the default condition. What but willful
blindness could possibly shelter people from such withering criticism? It is for such
reasons that a whole generation of social psychologists recommended “positive illusions”
as the only reliable route to mental health. Their credo? Let a lie be your umbrella. A
more dismal, wretched, pessimistic philosophy can hardly be imagined: things are so
terrible that only delusion can save you.

Here is an alternative approach (and one that requires no illusions). If the cards are
always stacked against you, perhaps the game you are playing is somehow rigged (perhaps
by you, unbeknownst to yourself). If the internal voice makes you doubt the value of your
endeavours—or your life, or life itself—perhaps you should stop listening. If the critical
voice within says the same denigrating things about everyone, no matter how successful,
how reliable can it be? Maybe its comments are chatter, not wisdom. There will always be
people better than you —that’s a cliche of nihilism, like the phrase, In a million years, who’s
going to know the difference? The proper response to that statement is not, Well, then,
everything is meaningless. It’s, Any idiot can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters.
Talking yourself into irrelevance is not a profound critique of Being. It’s a cheap trick of
the rational mind.

Many Good Games

Standards of better or worse are not illusory or unnecessary. If you hadn’t decided that
what you are doing right now was better than the alternatives, you wouldn’t be doing it.
The idea of a value-free choice is a contradiction in terms. Value judgments are a
precondition for action. Furthermore, every activity, once chosen, comes with its own
internal standards of accomplishment. If something can be done at all, it can be done
better or worse. To do anything at all is therefore to play a game with a defined and
valued end, which can always be reached more or less efficiently and elegantly. Every
game comes with its chance of success or failure. Differentials in quality are omnipresent.
Furthermore, if there was no better and worse, nothing would be worth doing. There
would be no value and, therefore, no meaning. Why make an effort if it doesn’t improve
anything? Meaning itself requires the difference between better and worse. How, then,
can the voice of critical self-consciousness be stilled? Where are the flaws in the
apparently impeccable logic of its message?

We might start by considering the all-too-black-and-white words themselves: “success”
or “failure.” You are either a success, a comprehensive, singular, over-all good thing, or
its opposite, a failure, a comprehensive, singular, irredeemably bad thing. The words
imply no alternative and no middle ground. However, in a world as complex as ours, such
generalizations (really, such failure to differentiate) are a sign of naive, unsophisticated or
even malevolent analysis. There are vital degrees and gradations of value obliterated by
this binary system, and the consequences are not good.

To begin with, there is not just one game at which to succeed or fail. There are many
games and, more specifically, many good games—games that match your talents, involve
you productively with other people, and sustain and even improve themselves across
time. Lawyer is a good game. So is plumber, physician, carpenter, or schoolteacher. The
world allows for many ways of Being. If you don’t succeed at one, you can try another.
You can pick something better matched to your unique mix of strengths, weaknesses and
situation. Furthermore, if changing games does not work, you can invent a new one. I
recently watched a talent show featuring a mime who taped his mouth shut and did
something ridiculous with oven mitts. That was unexpected. That was original. It seemed
to be working for him.

It’s also unlikely that you’re playing only one game. You have a career and friends and
family members and personal projects and artistic endeavors and athletic pursuits. You
might consider judging your success across all the games you play. Imagine that you are
very good at some, middling at others, and terrible at the remainder. Perhaps that’s how
it should be. You might object: I should be winning at everything! But winning at
everything might only mean that you’re not doing anything new or difficult. You might be
winning but you’re not growing, and growing might be the most important form of

winning. Should victory in the present always take precedence over trajectory across
time?

Finally, you might come to realize that the specifics of the many games you are playing
are so unique to you, so individual, that comparison to others is simply inappropriate.
Perhaps you are overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do. There’s
some real utility in gratitude. It’s also good protection against the dangers of victimhood
and resentment. Your colleague outperforms you at work. His wife, however, is having an
affair, while your marriage is stable and happy. Who has it better? The celebrity you
admire is a chronic drunk driver and bigot. Is his life truly preferable to yours?

When the internal critic puts you down using such comparisons, here’s how it operates:
First, it selects a single, arbitrary domain of comparison (fame, maybe, or power). Then it
acts as if that domain is the only one that is relevant. Then it contrasts you unfavourably
with someone truly stellar, within that domain. It can take that final step even further,
using the unbridgeable gap between you and its target of comparison as evidence for the
fundamental injustice of life. That way your motivation to do anything at all can be most
effectively undermined. Those who accept such an approach to self-evaluation certainly
can’t be accused of making things too easy for themselves. But it’s just as big a problem
to make things too difficult.

When we are very young we are neither individual nor informed. We have not had the
time nor gained the wisdom to develop our own standards. In consequence, we must
compare ourselves to others, because standards are necessary. Without them, there is
nowhere to go and nothing to do. As we mature we become, by contrast, increasingly
individual and unique. The conditions of our lives become more and more personal and
less and less comparable with those of others. Symbolically speaking, this means we must
leave the house ruled by our father, and confront the chaos of our individual Being. We
must take note of our disarray, without completely abandoning that father in the process.
We must then rediscover the values of our culture—veiled from us by our ignorance,
hidden in the dusty treasure-trove of the past—rescue them, and integrate them into our
own lives. This is what gives existence its full and necessary meaning.

Who are you? You think you know, but maybe you don’t. You are, for example, neither
your own master, nor your own slave. You cannot easily tell yourself what to do and
compel your own obedience (any more than you can easily tell your husband, wife, son or
daughter what to do, and compel theirs). You are interested in some things and not in
others. You can shape that interest, but there are limits. Some activities will always
engage you, and others simply will not.

You have a nature. You can play the tyrant to it, but you will certainly rebel. How hard
can you force yourself to work and sustain your desire to work? How much can you
sacrifice to your partner before generosity turns to resentment? What is it that you
actually love? What is it that you genuinely want? Before you can articulate your own
standards of value, you must see yourself as a stranger—and then you must get to know
yourself. What do you find valuable or pleasurable? How much leisure, enjoyment, and
reward do you require, so that you feel like more than a beast of burden? How must you
treat yourself, so you won’t kick over the traces and smash up your corral? You could
force yourself through your daily grind and kick your dog in frustration when you come
home. You could watch the precious days tick by. Or you could learn how to entice
yourself into sustainable, productive activity. Do you ask yourself what you want? Do you
negotiate fairly with yourself? Or are you a tyrant, with yourself as slave?

When do you dislike your parents, your spouse, or your children, and why? What might
be done about that? What do you need and want from your friends and your business
partners? This is not a mere matter of what you should want. I’m not talking about what
other people require from you, or your duties to them. I’m talking about determining the

nature of your moral obligation, to yourself. Should might enter into it, because you are
nested within a network of social obligations. Should is your responsibility, and you
should live up to it. But this does not mean you must take the role of lap-dog, obedient
and harmless. That’s how a dictator wants his slaves.

Dare, instead, to be dangerous. Dare to be truthful. Dare to articulate yourself, and
express (or at least become aware of) what would really justify your life. If you allowed
your dark and unspoken desires for your partner, for example, to manifest themselves—if
you were even willing to consider them—you might discover that they were not so dark,
given the light of day. You might discover, instead, that you were just afraid and, so,
pretending to be moral. You might find that getting what you actually desire would stop
you from being tempted and straying. Are you so sure that your partner would be
unhappy if more of you rose to the surface? The femme fatale and the anti-hero are
sexually attractive for a reason....

How do you need to be spoken to? What do you need to take from people? What are
you putting up with, or pretending to like, from duty or obligation? Consult your
resentment. It’s a revelatory emotion, for all its pathology. It’s part of an evil triad:
arrogance, deceit, and resentment. Nothing causes more harm than this underworld
Trinity. But resentment always means one of two things. Either the resentful person is
immature, in which case he or she should shut up, quit whining, and get on with it, or
there is tyranny afoot—in which case the person subjugated has a moral obligation to
speak up. Why? Because the consequence of remaining silent is worse. Of course, it’s
easier in the moment to stay silent and avoid conflict. But in the long term, that’s deadly.
When you have something to say, silence is a lie—and tyranny feeds on lies. When should
you push back against oppression, despite the danger? When you start nursing secret
fantasies of revenge; when your life is being poisoned and your imagination fills with the
wish to devour and destroy.

I had a client decades ago who suffered from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. He
had to line up his pyjamas just right before he could go to sleep at night. Then he had to
fluff his pillow. Then he had to adjust the bedsheets. Over and over and over and over. I
said, “Maybe that part of you, that insanely persistent part, wants something, inarticulate
though it may be. Let it have its say. What could it be?” He said, “Control.” I said, “Close
your eyes and let it tell you what it wants. Don’t let fear stop you. You don’t have to act it
out, just because you’re thinking it.” He said, “It wants me to take my stepfather by the
collar, put him up against the door, and shake him like a rat.” Maybe it was time to shake
someone like a rat, although I suggested something a bit less primal. But God only knows
what battles must be fought, forthrightly, voluntarily, on the road to peace. What do you
do to avoid conflict, necessary though it may be? What are you inclined to lie about,
assuming that the truth might be intolerable? What do you fake?

The infant is dependent on his parents for almost everything he needs. The child—the
successful child—can leave his parents, at least temporarily, and make friends. He gives
up a little of himself to do that, but gains much in return. The successful adolescent must
take that process to its logical conclusion. He has to leave his parents and become like
everyone else. He has to integrate with the group so he can transcend his childhood
dependency. Once integrated, the successful adult then must learn how to be just the
right amount different from everyone else.

Be cautious when you’re comparing yourself to others. You’re a singular being, once
you’re an adult. You have your own particular, specific problems—financial, intimate,
psychological, and otherwise. Those are embedded in the unique broader context of your
existence. Your career or job works for you in a personal manner, or it does not, and it
does so in a unique interplay with the other specifics of your life. You must decide how

much of your time to spend on this, and how much on that. You must decide what to let
go, and what to pursue.

The Point of Our Eyes (or, Take Stock)

Our eyes are always pointing at things we are interested in approaching, or investigating,
or looking for, or having. We must see, but to see, we must aim, so we are always aiming.
Our minds are built on the hunting-and-gathering platforms of our bodies. To hunt is to
specify a target, track it, and throw at it. To gather is to specify and to grasp. We fling
stones, and spears, and boomerangs. We toss balls through hoops, and hit pucks into
nets, and curl carved granite rocks down the ice onto horizontal bull’s-eyes. We launch
projectiles at targets with bows, guns, rifles and rockets. We hurl insults, launch plans,
and pitch ideas. We succeed when we score a goal or hit a target. We fail, or sin, when we
do not (as the word sin means to miss the mark-). We cannot navigate, without
something to aim at and, while we are in this world, we must always navigate. -•

We are always and simultaneously at point “a” (which is less desirable than it could
be), moving towards point “b” (which we deem better, in accordance with our explicit and
implicit values). We always encounter the world in a state of insufficiency and seek its
correction. We can imagine new ways that things could be set right, and improved, even if
we have everything we thought we needed. Even when satisfied, temporarily, we remain
curious. We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the
future as eternally better. If we did not see things this way, we would not act at all. We
wouldn’t even be able to see, because to see we must focus, and to focus we must pick
one thing above all else on which to focus.

But we can see. We can even see things that aren’t there. We can envision new ways
that things could be better. We can construct new, hypothetical worlds, where problems
we weren’t even aware of can now show themselves and be addressed. The advantages of
this are obvious: we can change the world so that the intolerable state of the present can
be rectified in the future. The disadvantage to all this foresight and creativity is chronic
unease and discomfort. Because we always contrast what is with what could be, we have
to aim at what could be. But we can aim too high. Or too low. Or too chaotically. So we
fail and live in disappointment, even when we appear to others to be living well. How can
we benefit from our imaginativeness, our ability to improve the future, without
continually denigrating our current, insufficiently successful and worthless lives?

The first step, perhaps, is to take stock. Who are you? When you buy a house and
prepare to live in it, you hire an inspector to list all its faults—as it is, in reality, now, not
as you wish it could be. You’ll even pay him for the bad news. You need to know. You
need to discover the home’s hidden flaws. You need to know whether they are cosmetic
imperfections or structural inadequacies. You need to know because you can’t fix
something if you don’t know it’s broken—and you’re broken. You need an inspector. The
internal critic—it could play that role, if you could get it on track; if you and it could
cooperate. It could help you take stock. But you must walk through your psychological
house with it and listen judiciously to what it says. Maybe you’re a handy-man’s dream, a
real fixer-upper. How can you start your renovations without being demoralized, even
crushed, by your internal critic’s lengthy and painful report of your inadequacies?

Here’s a hint. The future is like the past. But there’s a crucial difference. The past is
fixed, but the future—it could be better. It could be better, some precise amount—the
amount that can be achieved, perhaps, in a day, with some minimal engagement. The
present is eternally flawed. But where you start might not be as important as the direction
you are heading. Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the

fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak. Much of happiness is hope, no matter
how deep the underworld in which that hope was conceived.

Called upon properly, the internal critic will suggest something to set in order, which
you could set in order, which you would set in order—voluntarily, without resentment,
even with pleasure. Ask yourself: is there one thing that exists in disarray in your life or
your situation that you could, and would, set straight? Could you, and would you, fix that
one thing that announces itself humbly in need of repair? Could you do it now? Imagine
that you are someone with whom you must negotiate. Imagine further that you are lazy,
touchy, resentful and hard to get along with. With that attitude, it’s not going to be easy
to get you moving. You might have to use a little charm and playfulness. “Excuse me,”
you might say to yourself, without irony or sarcasm. “I’m trying to reduce some of the
unnecessary suffering around here. I could use some help.” Keep the derision at bay. “I’m
wondering if there is anything that you would be willing to do? I’d be very grateful for
your service.” Ask honestly and with humility. That’s no simple matter.

You might have to negotiate further, depending on your state of mind. Maybe you don’t
trust yourself. You think that you’ll ask yourself for one thing and, having delivered,
immediately demand more. And you’ll be punitive and hurtful about it. And you’ll
denigrate what was already offered. Who wants to work for a tyrant like that? Not you.
That’s why you don’t do what you want yourself to do. You’re a bad employee—but a
worse boss. Maybe you need to say to yourself, “OK. I know we haven’t gotten along very
well in the past. I’m sorry about that. I’m trying to improve. I’ll probably make some
more mistakes along the way, but I’ll try to listen if you object. I’ll try to learn. I noticed,
just now, today, that you weren’t really jumping at the opportunity to help when I asked.
Is there something I could offer in return for your cooperation? Maybe if you did the
dishes, we could go for coffee. You like espresso. How about an espresso—maybe a
double shot? Or is there something else you want?” Then you could listen. Maybe you’ll
hear a voice inside (maybe it’s even the voice of a long-lost child). Maybe it will reply,
“Really? You really want to do something nice for me? You’ll really do it? It’s not a
trick?”

This is where you must be careful.

That little voice—that’s the voice of someone once burnt and twice shy. So, you could
say, very carefully, “Really. I might not do it very well, and I might not be great company,
but I will do something nice for you. I promise.” A little careful kindness goes a long way,
and judicious reward is a powerful motivator. Then you could take that small bit of
yourself by the hand and do the damn dishes. And then you better not go clean the
bathroom and forget about the coffee or the movie or the beer or it will be even harder to
call those forgotten parts of yourself forth from the nooks and crannies of the underworld.

You might ask yourself, “What could I say to someone else—my friend, my brother, my
boss, my assistant—that would set things a bit more right between us tomorrow? What
bit of chaos might I eradicate at home, on my desk, in my kitchen, tonight, so that the
stage could be set for a better play? What snakes might I banish from my closet—and my
mind?” Five hundred small decisions, five hundred tiny actions, compose your day, today,
and every day. Could you aim one or two of these at a better result? Better, in your own
private opinion, by your own individual standards? Could you compare your specific
personal tomorrow with your specific personal yesterday? Could you use your own
judgment, and ask yourself what that better tomorrow might be?

Aim small. You don’t want to shoulder too much to begin with, given your limited
talents, tendency to deceive, burden of resentment, and ability to shirk responsibility.
Thus, you set the following goal: by the end of the day, I want things in my life to be a
tiny bit better than they were this morning. Then you ask yourself, “What could I do, that
I would do, that would accomplish that, and what small thing would I like as a reward?”

Then you do what you have decided to do, even if you do it badly. Then you give yourself
that damn coffee, in triumph. Maybe you feel a bit stupid about it, but you do it anyway.
And you do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. And, with each
day, your baseline of comparison gets a little higher, and that’s magic. That’s compound
interest. Do that for three years, and your life will be entirely different. Now you’re
aiming for something higher. Now you’re wishing on a star. Now the beam is
disappearing from your eye, and you’re learning to see. And what you aim at determines
what you see. That’s worth repeating. What you aim at determines what you see.

What You Want and What You See

The dependency of sight on aim (and, therefore, on value—because you aim at what you
value) was demonstrated unforgettably by the cognitive psychologist Daniel Simons more
than fifteen years ago. Simons was investigating something called “sustained
inattentional blindness.” He would sit his research subjects in front of a video monitor
and show them, for example, a field of wheat. Then he would transform the photo slowly,
secretly, while they watched. He would slowly fade in a road cutting through the wheat.
He didn’t insert some little easy-to-miss footpath, either. It was a major trail, occupying a
good third of the image. Remarkably, the observers would frequently fail to take notice.

The demonstration that made Dr. Simons famous was of the same kind, but more
dramatic—even unbelievable. First, he produced a video of two teams of three people.
One team was wearing white shirts, the other, black. (The two teams were not off in the
distance, either, or in any way difficult to see. The six of them filled much of the video
screen, and their facial features were close enough to see clearly.) Each team had its own
ball, which they bounced or threw to their other team members, as they moved and
feinted in the small space in front of the elevators where the game was filmed. Once Dan
had his video, he showed it to his study participants. He asked each of them to count the
number of times the white shirts threw the ball back and forth to one another. After a few
minutes, his subjects were asked to report the number of passes. Most answered “15.”
That was the correct answer. Most felt pretty good about that. Ha! They passed the test!
But then Dr. Simons asked, “Did you see the gorilla?”

Was this a joke? What gorilla?

So, he said, “Watch the video again. But this time, don’t count.” Sure enough, a minute
or so in, a man dressed in a gorilla suit waltzes right into the middle of the game for a few
long seconds, stops, and then beats his chest in the manner of stereotyped gorillas
everywhere. Right in the middle of the screen. Large as life. Painfully and irrefutably
evident. But one out of every two of his research subjects missed it, the first time they
saw the video. It gets worse. Dr. Simons did another study. This time, he showed his
subjects a video of someone being served at a counter. The server dips behind the counter
to retrieve something, and pops back up. So what? Most of his participants don’t detect
anything amiss. But it was a different person who stood up in the original server’s place!
“No way,” you think. “I’d notice.” But it’s “yes way.” There’s a high probability you
wouldn’t detect the change, even if the gender or race of the person is switched at the
same time. You’re blind too.

This is partly because vision is expensive—psychophysiologically expensive;
neurologically expensive. Very little of your retina is high-resolution fovea—the very
central, high-resolution part of the eye, used to do such things as identify faces. Each of
the scarce foveal cells needs 10,000 cells in the visual cortex merely to manage the first
part of the multi-stage processing of seeing. Then each of those 10,000 requires 10,000
more just to get to stage two. If all your retina was fovea you would require the skull of a
B-movie alien to house your brain. In consequence, we triage, when we see. Most of our

vision is peripheral, and low resolution. We save the fovea for things of importance. We
point our high-resolution capacities at the few specific things we are aiming at. And we
let everything else—which is almost everything—fade, unnoticed, into the background.

If something you’re not attending to pops its ugly head up in a manner that directly
interferes with your narrowly focused current activity, you will see it. Otherwise, it’s just
not there. The ball on which Simons’s research subjects were focused was never obscured
by the gorilla or by any of the six players. Because of that—because the gorilla did not
interfere with the ongoing, narrowly defined task—it was indistinguishable from
everything else the participants didn’t see, when they were looking at that ball. The big
ape could be safely ignored. That’s how you deal with the overwhelming complexity of
the world: you ignore it, while you concentrate minutely on your private concerns. You
see things that facilitate your movement forward, toward your desired goals. You detect
obstacles, when they pop up in your path. You’re blind to everything else (and there’s a
lot of everything else—so you’re very blind). And it has to be that way, because there is
much more of the world than there is of you. You must shepherd your limited resources
carefully. Seeing is very difficult, so you must choose what to see, and let the rest go.

There’s a profound idea in the ancient Vedic texts (the oldest scriptures of Hinduism,
and part of the bedrock of Indian culture): the world, as perceived, is maya —appearance or
illusion. This means, in part, that people are blinded by their desires (as well as merely
incapable of seeing things as they truly are). This is true, in a sense that transcends the
metaphorical. Your eyes are tools. They are there to help you get what you want. The
price you pay for that utility, that specific, focused direction, is blindness to everything
else. This doesn’t matter so much when things are going well, and we are getting what we
want (although it can be a problem, even then, because getting what we currently want
can make blind us to higher callings). But all that ignored world presents a truly terrible
problem when we’re in crisis, and nothing whatsoever is turning out the way we want it
to. Then, there can be far too much to deal with. Happily, however, that problem contains
within it the seeds of its own solution. Since you’ve ignored so much, there is plenty of
possibility left where you have not yet looked.

Imagine that you’re unhappy. You’re not getting what you need. Perversely, this may be
because of what you want. You are blind, because of what you desire. Perhaps what you
really need is right in front of your eyes, but you cannot see it because of what you are
currently aiming for. And that brings us to something else: the price that must be paid
before you, or anyone, can get what they want (or, better yet, what they need). Think
about it this way. You look at the world in your particular, idiosyncratic manner. You use
a set of tools to screen most things out and let some things in. You have spent a lot of
time building those tools. They’ve become habitual. They’re not mere abstract thoughts.
They’re built right into you. They orient you in the world. They’re your deepest and often
implicit and unconscious values. They’ve become part of your biological structure.
They’re alive. And they don’t want to disappear, or transform, or die. But sometimes their
time has come, and new things need to be born. For this reason (although not only for
this reason) it is necessary to let things go during the journey uphill. If things are not
going well for you—well, that might be because, as the most cynical of aphorisms has it,
life sucks, and then you die. Before your crisis impels you to that hideous conclusion,
however, you might consider the following: life doesn’t have the problem. You do. At least
that realization leaves you with some options. If your life is not going well, perhaps it is
your current knowledge that is insufficient, not life itself. Perhaps your value structure
needs some serious retooling. Perhaps what you want is blinding you to what else could
be. Perhaps you are holding on to your desires, in the present, so tightly that you cannot
see anything else—even what you truly need.

Imagine that you are thinking, enviously, “I should have my boss’s job.” If your boss
sticks to his post, stubbornly and competently, thoughts like that will lead you into in a
state of irritation, unhappiness and disgust. You might realize this. You think, “I am
unhappy. However, I could be cured of this unhappiness if I could just fulfill my
ambition.” But then you might think further. “Wait,” you think. “Maybe I’m not unhappy
because I don’t have my boss’s job. Maybe I’m unhappy because I can’t stop wanting that
job.” That doesn’t mean you can just simply and magically tell yourself to stop wanting
that job, and then listen and transform. You won’t—can’t, in fact—just change yourself
that easily. You have to dig deeper. You must change what you are after more profoundly.

So, you might think, “I don’t know what to do about this stupid suffering. I can’t just
abandon my ambitions. That would leave me nowhere to go. But my longing for a job that
I can’t have isn’t working.” You might decide to take a different tack. You might ask,
instead, for the revelation of a different plan: one that would fulfill your desires and
gratify your ambitions in a real sense, but that would remove from your life the bitterness
and resentment with which you are currently affected. You might think, “I will make a
different plan. I will try to want whatever it is that would make my life better —whatever that
might be—and I will start working on it now. If that turns out to mean something other
than chasing my boss’s job, I will accept that and I will move forward.”

Now you’re on a whole different kind of trajectory. Before, what was right, desirable,
and worthy of pursuit was something narrow and concrete. But you became stuck there,
tightly jammed and unhappy. So you let go. You make the necessary sacrifice, and allow a
whole new world of possibility, hidden from you because of your previous ambition, to
reveal itself. And there’s a lot there. What would your life look like, if it were better? What
would Life Itself look like? What does “better” even mean? You don’t know. And it
doesn’t matter that you don’t know, exactly, right away, because you will start to slowly
see what is “better,” once you have truly decided to want it. You will start to perceive
what remained hidden from you by your presuppositions and preconceptions—by the
previous mechanisms of your vision. You will begin to learn.

This will only work, however, if you genuinely want your life to improve. You can’t fool
your implicit perceptual structures. Not even a bit. They aim where you point them. To
retool, to take stock, to aim somewhere better, you have to think it through, bottom to
top. You have to scour your psyche. You have to clean the damned thing up. And you
must be cautious, because making your life better means adopting a lot of responsibility,
and that takes more effort and care than living stupidly in pain and remaining arrogant,
deceitful and resentful.

What if it was the case that the world revealed whatever goodness it contains in precise
proportion to your desire for the best? What if the more your conception of the best has
been elevated, expanded and rendered sophisticated the more possibility and benefit you
could perceive? This doesn’t mean that you can have what you want merely by wishing it,
or that everything is interpretation, or that there is no reality. The world is still there,
with its structures and limits. As you move along with it, it cooperates or objects. But you
can dance with it, if your aim is to dance—and maybe you can even lead, if you have
enough skill and enough grace. This is not theology. It’s not mysticism. It’s empirical
knowledge. There is nothing magical here—or nothing more than the already-present
magic of consciousness. We only see what we aim at. The rest of the world (and that’s
most of it) is hidden. If we start aiming at something different—something like “I want
my life to be better”—our minds will start presenting us with new information, derived
from the previously hidden world, to aid us in that pursuit. Then we can put that
information to use and move, and act, and observe, and improve. And, after doing so,
after improving, we might pursue something different, or higher—something like, “I want

whatever might be better than just my life being better.” And then we enter a more
elevated and more complete reality.

In that place, what might we focus on? What might we see?

Think about it like this. Start from the observation that we indeed desire things—even
that we need them. That’s human nature. We share the experience of hunger, loneliness,
thirst, sexual desire, aggression, fear and pain. Such things are elements of Being—
primordial, axiomatic elements of Being. But we must sort and organize these primordial
desires, because the world is a complex and obstinately real place. We can’t just get the
one particular thing we especially just want now, along with everything else we usually
want, because our desires can produce conflict with our other desires, as well as with
other people, and with the world. Thus, we must become conscious of our desires, and
articulate them, and prioritize them, and arrange them into hierarchies. That makes them
sophisticated. That makes them work with each other, and with the desires of other
people, and with the world. It is in that manner that our desires elevate themselves. It is
in that manner that they organize themselves into values and become moral. Our values,
our morality—they are indicators of our sophistication.

The philosophical study of morality—of right and wrong—is ethics. Such study can
render us more sophisticated in our choices. Even older and deeper than ethics, however,
is religion. Religion concerns itself not with (mere) right and wrong but with good and
evil themselves—with the archetypes of right and wrong. Religion concerns itself with
domain of value, ultimate value. That is not the scientific domain. It’s not the territory of
empirical description. The people who wrote and edited the Bible, for example, weren’t
scientists. They couldn’t have been scientists, even if they had wanted to be. The
viewpoints, methods and practices of science hadn’t been formulated when the Bible was
written.

Religion is instead about proper behaviour. It’s about what Plato called “the Good.” A
genuine religious acolyte isn’t trying to formulate accurate ideas about the objective
nature of the world (although he may be trying to do that to). He’s striving, instead, to be
a “good person.” It may be the case that to him “good” means nothing but “obedient”—
even blindly obedient. Hence the classic liberal Western enlightenment objection to
religious belief: obedience is not enough. But it’s at least a start (and we have forgotten
this): You cannot aim yourself at anything if you are completely undisciplined and untutored. You
will not know what to target, and you won’t fly straight, even if you somehow get your
aim right. And then you will conclude, “There is nothing to aim for.” And then you will
be lost.

It is therefore necessary and desirable for religions to have a dogmatic element. What
good is a value system that does not provide a stable structure? What good is a value
system that does not point the way to a higher order? And what good can you possibly be
if you cannot or do not internalize that structure, or accept that order—not as a final
destination, necessarily, but at least as a starting point? Without that, you’re nothing but
an adult two-year-old, without the charm or the potential. That is not to say (to say it
again) that obedience is sufficient. But a person capable of obedience—let’s say, instead, a
properly disciplined person—is at least a well-forged tool. At least that (and that is not
nothing). Of course, there must be vision, beyond discipline; beyond dogma. A tool still
needs a purpose. It is for such reasons that Christ said, in the Gospel of Thomas, “The
Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, but men do not see it.”

Does that mean that what we see is dependent on our religious beliefs? Yes! And what
we don’t see, as well! You might object, “But I’m an atheist.” No, you’re not (and if you
want to understand this, you could read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, perhaps the
greatest novel ever written, in which the main character, Raskolnikov, decides to take his
atheism with true seriousness, commits what he has rationalized as a benevolent murder,

and pays the price). You’re simply not an atheist in your actions, and it is your actions
that most accurately reflect your deepest beliefs—those that are implicit, embedded in
your being, underneath your conscious apprehensions and articulable attitudes and
surface-level self-knowledge. You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than
what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don’t know what you
believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.

It takes careful observation, and education, and reflection, and communication with
others, just to scratch the surface of your beliefs. Everything you value is a product of
unimaginably lengthy developmental processes, personal, cultural and biological. You
don’t understand how what you want—and, therefore, what you see—is conditioned by
the immense, abysmal, profound past. You simply don’t understand how every neural
circuit through which you peer at the world has been shaped (and painfully) by the
ethical aims of millions of years of human ancestors and all of the life that was lived for
the billions of years before that.

You don’t understand anything.

You didn’t even know that you were blind.

Some of our knowledge of our beliefs has been documented. We have been watching
ourselves act, reflecting on that watching, and telling stories distilled through that
reflection, for tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. That is all part of our
attempts, individual and collective, to discover and articulate what it is that we believe.
Part of the knowledge so generated is what is encapsulated in the fundamental teachings
of our cultures, in ancient writings such as the Tao te Ching, or the aforementioned Vedic
scriptures, or the Biblical stories. The Bible is, for better or worse, the foundational
document of Western civilization (of Western values, Western morality, and Western
conceptions of good and evil). It’s the product of processes that remain fundamentally
beyond our comprehension. The Bible is a library composed of many books, each written
and edited by many people. It’s a truly emergent document—a selected, sequenced and
finally coherent story written by no one and everyone over many thousands of years. The
Bible has been thrown up, out of the deep, by the collective human imagination, which is
itself a product of unimaginable forces operating over unfathomable spans of time. Its
careful, respectful study can reveal things to us about what we believe and how we do and
should act that can be discovered in almost no other manner.

Old Testament God and New Testament God

The God of the Old Testament can appear harsh, judgmental, unpredictable and
dangerous, particularly on cursory reading. The degree to which this is true has arguably
been exaggerated by Christian commentators, intent on magnifying the distinction
between the older and newer divisions of the Bible. There has been a price paid, however,
for such plotting (and I mean that in both senses of the word): the tendency for modern
people to think, when confronted with Jehovah, “I would never believe in a God like
that.” But Old Testament God doesn’t much care what modern people think. He often
didn’t care what Old Testament people thought, either (although He could be bargained
with, to a surprising degree, as is particularly evident in the Abrahamic stories).
Nonetheless, when His people strayed from the path—when they disobeyed His
injunctions, violated His covenants, and broke His commandments—trouble was certain
to follow. If you did not do what Old Testament God demanded—whatever that might
have been and however you might have tried to hide from it—you and your children and
your children’s children were in terrible, serious trouble.

It was realists who created, or noticed, Old Testament God. When the denizens of
those ancient societies wandered carelessly down the wrong path, they ended up enslaved

and miserable—sometimes for centuries—when they were not obliterated completely.
Was that reasonable? Was that just? Was that fair? The authors of the Old Testament
asked such questions with extreme caution and under very limited conditions. They
assumed, instead, that the Creator of Being knew what he was doing, that all power was
essentially with Him, and that His dictates should be carefully followed. They were wise.
He was a Force of Nature. Is a hungry lion reasonable, fair or just? What kind of
nonsensical question is that? The Old Testament Israelites and their forebears knew that
God was not to be trifled with, and that whatever Hell the angry Deity might allow to be
engendered if he was crossed was real. Having recently passed through a century defined
by the bottomless horrors of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, we might realize the same thing.

New Testament God is often presented as a different character (although the Book of
Revelation, with its Final Judgment, warns against any excessively naive complacency).
He is more the kindly Geppetto, master craftsman and benevolent father. He wants
nothing for us but the best. He is all-loving and all-forgiving. Sure, He’ll send you to Hell,
if you misbehave badly enough. Fundamentally, however, he’s the God of Love. That
seems more optimistic, more naively welcoming, but (in precise proportion to that) less
believable. In a world such as this—this hothouse of doom—who could buy such a story?
The all-good God, in a post-Auschwitz world? It was for such reasons that the
philosopher Nietzsche, perhaps the most astute critic ever to confront Christianity,
considered New Testament God the worst literary crime in Western history. In Beyond
Good and Evil, he wrote:

In the Jewish ‘Old Testament’, the book of divine justice, there are men, things and speeches on such a grand
style that Greek and Indian literature has nothing to compare with it. One stands with fear and reverence before
those stupendous remains of what man was formerly, and one has sad thoughts about old Asia and its little out-
pushed peninsula Europe.... To have bound up this New Testament (a kind of ROCOCO of taste in every
respect) along with the Old Testament into one book, as the “Bible,” as “The Book in Itself’ is perhaps the
greatest audacity and “sin against the spirit” which literary Europe has on its conscience.

Who but the most naive among us could posit that such an all-good, merciful Being ruled
this so-terrible world? But something that seems incomprehensible to someone unseeing
might be perfectly evident to someone who had opened his eyes.

Let’s return to the situation where your aim is being determined by something petty—
your aforementioned envy of your boss. Because of that envy, the world you inhabit
reveals itself as a place of bitterness, disappointment and spite. Imagine that you come to
notice, and contemplate, and reconsider your unhappiness. Further, you determine to
accept responsibility for it, and dare to posit that it might be something at least partly
under your control. You crack open one eye, for a moment, and look. You ask for
something better. You sacrifice your pettiness, repent of your envy, and open your heart.
Instead of cursing the darkness, you let in a little light. You decide to aim for a better life
—instead of a better office.

But you don’t stop there. You realize that it’s a mistake to aim for a better life, if it
comes at the cost of worsening someone else’s. So, you get creative. You decide to play a
more difficult game. You decide that you want a better life, in a manner that will also
make the life of your family better. Or the life of your family, and your friends. Or the life
of your family, and your friends, and the strangers who surround them. What about your
enemies? Do you want to include them, too? You bloody well don’t know how to manage
that. But you’ve read some history. You know how enmity compounds. So, you start to
wish even your enemies well, at least in principle, although you are by no means yet a
master of such sentiments.

And the direction of your sight changes. You see past the limitations that hemmed you
in, unknowingly. New possibilities for your life emerge, and you work toward their
realization. Your life indeed improves. And then you start to think, further: “Better?
Perhaps that means better for me, and my family, and my friends—even for my enemies.

But that’s not all it means. It means better today, in a manner that makes everything
better tomorrow, and next week, and next year, and a decade from now, and a hundred
years from now. And a thousand years from now. And forever.”

And then “better” means to aim at the Improvement of Being, with a capital and a
capital “B.” Thinking all of this—realizing all of this—you take a risk. You decide that you
will start treating Old Testament God, with all His terrible and oft-arbitrary-seeming
power, as if He could also be New Testament God (even though you understand the many
ways in which that is absurd). In other words, you decide to act as if existence might be
justified by its goodness—if only you behaved properly. And it is that decision, that
declaration of existential faith, that allows you to overcome nihilism, and resentment, and
arrogance. It is that declaration of faith that keeps hatred of Being, with all its attendant
evils, at bay. And, as for such faith: it is not at all the will to believe things that you know
perfectly well to be false. Faith is not the childish belief in magic. That is ignorance or
even willful blindness. It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life
must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness
of Being. It is simultaneously the will to dare set your sights at the unachievable, and to
sacrifice everything, including (and most importantly) your life. You realize that you have,
literally, nothing better to do. But how can you do all this?—assuming you are foolish
enough to try.

You might start by not thinking —or, more accurately, but less trenchantly, by refusing to
subjugate your faith to your current rationality, and its narrowness of view. This doesn’t
mean “make yourself stupid.” It means the opposite. It means instead that you must quit
manoeuvring and calculating and conniving and scheming and enforcing and demanding
and avoiding and ignoring and punishing. It means you must place your old strategies
aside. It means, instead, that you must pay attention, as you may never have paid
attention before.

Pay Attention

Pay attention. Focus on your surroundings, physical and psychological. Notice something
that bothers you, that concerns you, that will not let you be, which you could fix, that you
would fix. You can find such somethings by asking yourself (as if you genuinely want to
know) three questions: “What is it that is bothering me?” “Is that something I could fix?”
and “Would I actually be willing to fix it?” If you find that the answer is “no,” to any or
all of the questions, then look elsewhere. Aim lower. Search until you find something that
bothers you, that you could fix, that you would fix, and then fix it. That might be enough
for the day.

Maybe there is a stack of paper on your desk, and you have been avoiding it. You won’t
even really look at it, when you walk into your room. There are terrible things lurking
there: tax forms, and bills and letters from people wanting things you aren’t sure you can
deliver. Notice your fear, and have some sympathy for it. Maybe there are snakes in that
pile of paper. Maybe you’ll get bitten. Maybe there are even hydras lurking there. You’ll
cut off one head, and seven more will grow. How could you possibly cope with that?

You could ask yourself, “Is there anything at all that I might be willing to do about that
pile of paper? Would I look, maybe, at one part of it? For twenty minutes?” Maybe the
answer will be, “No!” But you might look for ten, or even for five (and if not that, for
one). Start there. You will soon find that the entire pile shrinks in significance, merely
because you have looked at part of it. And you’ll find that the whole thing is made of
parts. What if you allowed yourself a glass of wine with dinner, or curled up on the sofa
and read, or watched a stupid movie, as a reward? What if you instructed your wife, or
your husband, to say “good job” after you fixed whatever you fixed? Would that motivate

you? The people from whom thanks you want might not be very proficient in offering it,
to begin with, but that shouldn’t stop you. People can learn, even if they are very
unskilled at the beginning. Ask yourself what you would require to be motivated to
undertake the job, honestly, and listen to the answer. Don’t tell yourself, “I shouldn’t
need to do that to motivate myself.” What do you know about yourself? You are, on the
one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who
can’t even set the clock on your microwave. Don’t over-estimate your self-knowledge.

Let the tasks for the day announce themselves for your contemplation. Maybe you can
do this in the morning, as you sit on the edge of your bed. Maybe you can try, the night
before, when you are preparing to sleep. Ask yourself for a voluntary contribution. If you
ask nicely, and listen carefully, and don’t try any treachery, you might be offered one. Do
this every day, for a while. Then do it for the rest of your life. Soon you will find yourself
in a different situation. Now you will be asking yourself, habitually, “What could I do,
that I would do, to make Life a little better?” You are not dictating to yourself what
“better” must be. You are not being a totalitarian, or a utopian, even to yourself, because
you have learned from the Nazis and the Soviets and the Maoists and from your own
experience that being a totalitarian is a bad thing. Aim high. Set your sights on the
betterment of Being. Align yourself, in your soul, with Truth and the Highest Good. There
is habitable order to establish and beauty to bring into existence. There is evil to
overcome, suffering to ameliorate, and yourself to better.

It is this, in my reading, that is the culminating ethic of the canon of the West. It is
this, furthermore, that is communicated by those eternally confusing, glowing stanzas
from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, the essence, in some sense, of the wisdom of the
New Testament. This is the attempt of the Spirit of Mankind to transform the
understanding of ethics from the initial, necessary Thou Shalt Not of the child and the
Ten Commandments into the fully articulated, positive vision of the true individual. This
is the expression not merely of admirable self-control and self-mastery but of the
fundamental desire to set the world right. This is not the cessation of sin, but sin’s
opposite, good itself. The Sermon on the Mount outlines the true nature of man, and the
proper aim of mankind: concentrate on the day, so that you can live in the present, and
attend completely and properly to what is right in front of you—but do that only after you
have decided to let what is within shine forth, so that it can justify Being and illuminate
the world. Do that only after you have determined to sacrifice whatever it is that must be
sacrificed so that you can pursue the highest good.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall
he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be
clothed?

(For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all
these things.

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. (Luke 12: 22-34)

Realization is dawning. Instead of playing the tyrant, therefore, you are paying attention.
You are telling the truth, instead of manipulating the world. You are negotiating, instead
of playing the martyr or the tyrant. You no longer have to be envious, because you no
longer know that someone else truly has it better. You no longer have to be frustrated,
because you have learned to aim low, and to be patient. You are discovering who you are,
and what you want, and what you are willing to do. You are finding that the solutions to
your particular problems have to be tailored to you, personally and precisely. You are less
concerned with the actions of other people, because you have plenty to do yourself.

Attend to the day, but aim at the highest good.

Now, your trajectory is heavenward. That makes you hopeful. Even a man on a sinking
ship can be happy when he clambers aboard a lifeboat! And who knows where he might
go, in the future. To journey happily may well be better than to arrive successfully....

Ask, and ye shall receive. Knock, and the door will open. If you ask, as if you want, and
knock, as if you want to enter, you may be offered the chance to improve your life, a little;
a lot; completely—and with that improvement, some progress will be made in Being
itself.

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.

m THE COMMON LAW m

HERE THE COMMON LAW OF ENGLAND WAS ESTABLISHED
ON THIS CONTINENT WITH THE ARRIVAL OF THE FIRST
SETTLERS ON MAY 13.1607. THE FIRST CHARTER CRANTED
BY JAMES I TO THE VIRCINJA COMPANY IN 1606 DECLARFD
THAT THE INHABITANTS OF THE COLONY"...SHALL HAVE
AND ENJOY ALL LIBERTIES. FRANCHISES AW IMMUNITIES...
AS IF THEY HAD BEEN ABIDING AND BORNE WITHIN THIS
OUR REALME OF ENCLANDE..." SINCE MAGNA CARTA THE
COMMON LAW HAS BFEN THE CORNERSTONE OF INDIVIDUAL
LIBERTIES. EVEN AS AGAINST THE CROWN. SUMMARIZED
LATER IN THE BILL OF RIGHTS ITS PRINCIPLES HAVF
INSPIRED THE DEVELOPMENT OF OUR SYSTEM OF FREEDOM
UNDER LAW. WHICH IS AT ONCE OUR DEAREST
POSSESSION AND PROUDEST ACHIEVEMENT.

RULE 5

DO NOT LET YOUR CHILDREN DO ANYTHING THAT MAKES

YOU DISLIKE THEM

ACTUALLY, IT’S NOT OK

Recently, I watched a three-year-old boy trail his mother and father slowly through a
crowded airport. He was screaming violently at five-second intervals—and, more
important, he was doing it voluntarily. He wasn’t at the end of this tether. As a parent, I
could tell from the tone. He was irritating his parents and hundreds of other people to
gain attention. Maybe he needed something. But that was no way to get it, and his
parents should have let him know that. You might object that “perhaps they were worn
out, and jet-lagged, after a long trip.” But thirty seconds of carefully directed problem¬
solving would have brought the shameful episode to a halt. More thoughtful parents
would not have let someone they truly cared for become the object of a crowd’s contempt.

I have also watched a couple, unable or unwilling to say no to their two-year-old,
obliged to follow closely behind him everywhere he went, every moment of what was
supposed to be an enjoyable social visit, because he misbehaved so badly when not micro-
managed that he could not be given a second of genuine freedom without risk. The desire
of his parents to let their child act without correction on every impulse perversely
produced precisely the opposite effect: they deprived him instead of every opportunity to
engage in independent action. Because they did not dare to teach him what “No” means,
he had no conception of the reasonable limits enabling maximal toddler autonomy. It was
a classic example of too much chaos breeding too much order (and the inevitable
reversal). I have, similarly, seen parents rendered unable to engage in adult conversation
at a dinner party because their children, four and five, dominated the social scene, eating
the centres out of all the sliced bread, subjecting everyone to their juvenile tyranny, while
mom and dad watched, embarrassed and bereft of the ability to intervene.

When my now-adult daughter was a child, another child once hit her on the head with
a metal toy truck. I watched that same child, one year later, viciously push his younger
sister backwards over a fragile glass-surfaced coffee table. His mother picked him up,
immediately afterward (but not her frightened daughter), and told him in hushed tones
not to do such things, while she patted him comfortingly in a manner clearly indicative of
approval. She was out to produce a little God-Emperor of the Universe. That’s the
unstated goal of many a mother, including many who consider themselves advocates for
full gender equality. Such women will object vociferously to any command uttered by an
adult male, but will trot off in seconds to make their progeny a peanut-butter sandwich if
he demands it while immersed self-importantly in a video game. The future mates of such
boys have every reason to hate their mothers-in-law. Respect for women? That’s for other
boys, other men—not for their dear sons.

Something of the same sort may underlie, in part, the preference for male children seen
most particularly in places such as India, Pakistan and China, where sex-selective
abortion is widely practised. The Wikipedia entry for that practice attributes its existence
to “cultural norms” favouring male over female children. (I cite Wikipedia because it is
collectively written and edited and, therefore, the perfect place to find accepted wisdom.)
But there’s no evidence that such ideas are strictly cultural. There are plausible psycho-
biological reasons for the evolution of such an attitude, and they’re not pretty, from a
modern, egalitarian perspective. If circumstances force you to put all your eggs into one

basket, so to speak, a son is a better bet, by the strict standards of evolutionary logic,
where the proliferation of your genes is all that matters. Why?

Well, a reproductively successful daughter might gain you eight or nine children. The
Holocaust survivor Yitta Schwartz, a star in this regard, had three generations of direct
descendants who matched such performance. She was the ancestor of almost two
thousand people by the time of her death in 2010. But the sky is truly the limit with a
reproductively successful son. Sex with multiple female partners is his ticket to
exponential reproduction (given our species’ practical limitation to single births).
Rumour has it that the actor Warren Beatty and the athlete Wilt Chamberlain each
bedded multiple thousands of women (something not unknown, as well, among rock
stars). They didn’t produce children in those numbers. Modern birth control limits that.
But similar celebrity types in the past have done so. The forefather of the Qing dynasty,
Giocangga (circa 1550), for example, is the male-line ancestor of a million and a half
people in northeastern China. The medieval Ui Neill dynasty produced up to three
million male descendants, localized mainly in northwestern Ireland and the US, through
Irish emigration.— And the king of them all, Genghis Khan, conqueror of much of Asia, is
forefather of 8 percent of the men in Central Asia—sixteen million male descendants, 34
generations later. So, from a deep, biological perspective there are reasons why parents
might favour sons sufficiently to eliminate female fetuses, although I am not claiming
direct causality, nor suggesting a lack of other, more culturally-dependent reasons.

Preferential treatment awarded a son during development might even help produce an
attractive, well-rounded, confident man. This happened in the case of the father of
psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, by his own account: “A man who has been the
indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that
confidence of success that often induces real success.”' Fair enough. But “feeling of a
conqueror” can all too easily become “actual conqueror.” Genghis Khan’s outstanding
reproductive success certainly came at the cost of any success whatsoever for others
(including the dead millions of Chinese, Persians, Russians and Hungarians). Spoiling a
son might therefore work well from the standpoint of the “selfish gene” (allowing the
favoured child’s genes to replicate themselves in innumerable offspring), to use the
evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ famous expression. But it can make for a dark,
painful spectacle in the here and now, and mutate into something indescribably
dangerous.

None of this means that all mothers favour all sons over their daughters (or that
daughters are not sometimes favoured over sons, or that fathers don’t sometimes favor
their sons). Other factors can clearly dominate. Sometimes, for example, unconscious
hatred (sometimes not-so-unconscious, either) overrides any concern a parent might have
for any child, regardless of gender or personality or situation. I saw a four-year old boy
allowed to go hungry on a regular basis. His nanny had been injured, and he was being
cycled through the neighbours for temporary care. When his mother dropped him off at
our house, she indicated that he wouldn’t eat at all, all day. “That’s OK,” she said. It
wasn’t OK (in case that’s not obvious). This was the same four-year-old boy who clung to
my wife for hours in absolute desperation and total commitment, when she tenaciously,
persistently and mercifully managed to feed him an entire lunch-time meal, rewarding
him throughout for his cooperation, and refusing to let him fail. He started out with a
closed mouth, sitting with all of us at the dining room table, my wife and I, our two kids,
and two neighbourhood kids we looked after during the day. She put the spoon in front of
him, waiting patiently, persistently, while he moved his head back and forth, refusing it
entry, using defensive methods typical of a recalcitrant and none-too-well-attended two-
year old.

She didn’t let him fail. She patted him on the head every time he managed a mouthful,
telling him sincerely that he was a “good boy” when he did so. She did think he was a
good boy. He was a cute, damaged kid. Ten not-too-painful minutes later he finished his
meal. We were all watching intently. It was a drama of life and death.

“Look,” she said, holding up his bowl. “You finished all of it.” This boy, who was
standing in the corner, voluntarily and unhappily, when I first saw him; who wouldn’t
interact with the other kids, who frowned chronically, who wouldn’t respond to me when
I tickled and prodded him, trying to get him to play—this boy broke immediately into a
wide, radiant smile. It brought joy to everyone at the table. Twenty years later, writing it
down today, it still brings me to tears. Afterward, he followed my wife around like a
puppy for the rest of the day, refusing to let her out of his sight. When she sat down, he
jumped in her lap, cuddling in, opening himself back up to the world, searching
desperately for the love he had been continually denied. Later in the day, but far too soon,
his mother reappeared. She came down the stairs into the room we all occupied. “Oh,
SuperMom,” she uttered, resentfully, seeing her son curled up in my wife’s lap. Then she
departed, black, murderous heart unchanged, doomed child in hand. She was a
psychologist. The things you can see, with even a single open eye. It’s no wonder that
people want to stay blind.

Everybody Hates Arithmetic

My clinical clients frequently come to me to discuss their day-to-day familial problems.
Such quotidian concerns are insidious. Their habitual and predictable occurrence makes
them appear trivial. But that appearance of triviality is deceptive: it is the things that
occur every single day that truly make up our lives, and time spent the same way over and
again adds up at an alarming rate. One father recently spoke with me about the trouble he
was having putting his son to sleep at night —a ritual that typically involved about
three-quarters of an hour of fighting. We did the arithmetic. Forty-five minutes a day,
seven days a week—that’s three hundred minutes, or five hours, a week. Five hours for
each of the four weeks of a month—that’s twenty hours per month. Twenty hours a
month for twelve months is two hundred and forty hours a year. That’s a month and a
half of standard forty-hour work weeks.

My client was spending a month and a half of work weeks per year fighting ineffectually
and miserably with his son. Needless to say, both were suffering for it. No matter how
good your intentions, or how sweet and tolerant your temperament, you will not maintain
good relations with someone you fight with for a month and a half of work weeks per
year. Resentment will inevitably build. Even if it doesn’t, all that wasted, unpleasant time
could clearly be spent in more productive and useful and less stressful and more enjoyable
activity. How are such situations to be understood? Where does the fault lie, in child or in
parent? In nature or society? And what, if anything, is to be done?

Some localize all such problems in the adult, whether in the parent or broader society.
“There are no bad children,” such people think, “only bad parents.” When the idealized
image of an unsullied child is brought to mind, this notion appears fully justified. The
beauty, openness, joy, trust and capacity for love characterizing children makes it easy to
attribute full culpability to the adults on the scene. But such an attitude is dangerously
and naively romantic. It’s too one-sided, in the case of parents granted a particularly
difficult son or daughter. It’s also not for the best that all human corruption is uncritically
laid at society’s feet. That conclusion merely displaces the problem, back in time. It
explains nothing, and solves no problems. If society is corrupt, but not the individuals
within it, then where did the corruption originate? How is it propagated? It’s a one-sided,
deeply ideological theory.

Even more problematic is the insistence logically stemming from this presumption of
social corruption that all individual problems, no matter how rare, must be solved by
cultural restructuring, no matter how radical. Our society faces the increasing call to
deconstruct its stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people
who do not or will not fit into the categories upon which even our perceptions are based.
This is not a good thing. Each person’s private trouble cannot be solved by a social
revolution, because revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous. We have learned to live
together and organize our complex societies slowly and incrementally, over vast stretches
of time, and we do not understand with sufficient exactitude why what we are doing
works. Thus, altering our ways of social being carelessly in the name of some ideological
shibboleth (diversity springs to mind) is likely to produce far more trouble than good,
given the suffering that even small revolutions generally produce.

Was it really a good thing, for example, to so dramatically liberalize the divorce laws in
the 1960s? It’s not clear to me that the children whose lives were destabilized by the
hypothetical freedom this attempt at liberation introduced would say so. Horror and
terror lurk behind the walls provided so wisely by our ancestors. We tear them down at
our peril. We skate, unconsciously, on thin ice, with deep, cold waters below, where
unimaginable monsters lurk.

I see today’s parents as terrified by their children, not least because they have been
deemed the proximal agents of this hypothetical social tyranny, and simultaneously
denied credit for their role as benevolent and necessary agents of discipline, order and
conventionality. They dwell uncomfortably and self-consciously in the shadow of the all-
too-powerful shadow of the adolescent ethos of the 1960s, a decade whose excesses led to
a general denigration of adulthood, an unthinking disbelief in the existence of competent
power, and the inability to distinguish between the chaos of immaturity and responsible
freedom. This has increased parental sensitivity to the short-term emotional suffering of
their children, while heightening their fear of damaging their children to a painful and
counterproductive degree. Better this than the reverse, you might argue—but there are
catastrophes lurking at the extremes of every moral continuum.

The Ignoble Savage

It has been said that every individual is the conscious or unconscious follower of some
influential philosopher. The belief that children have an intrinsically unsullied spirit,
damaged only by culture and society, is derived in no small part from the eighteenth-
century Genevan French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau was a fervent
believer in the corrupting influence of human society and private ownership alike. He
claimed that nothing was so gentle and wonderful as man in his pre-civilized state. At
precisely the same time, noting his inability as a father, he abandoned five of his children
to the tender and fatal mercies of the orphanages of the time.

The noble savage Rousseau described, however, was an ideal—an abstraction,
archetypal and religious—and not the flesh-and-blood reality he supposed. The
mythologically perfect Divine Child permanently inhabits our imagination. He’s the
potential of youth, the newborn hero, the wronged innocent, and the long-lost son of the
rightful king. He’s the intimations of immortality that accompany our earliest
experiences. He’s Adam, the perfect man, walking without sin with God in the Garden
before the Fall. But human beings are evil, as well as good, and the darkness that dwells
forever in our souls is also there in no small part in our younger selves. In general, people
improve with age, rather than worsening, becoming kinder, more conscientious, and more
emotionally stable as they mature. Bullying at the sheer and often terrible intensity of

the schoolyard rarely manifests itself in grown-up society. William Golding’s dark and
anarchistic Lord of the Flies is a classic for a reason.

Furthermore, there is plenty of direct evidence that the horrors of human behaviour
cannot be so easily attributed to history and society. This was discovered most painfully,
perhaps, by the primatologist Jane Goodall, beginning in 1974, when she learned that her
beloved chimpanzees were capable of and willing to murder each other (to use the
terminology appropriate to humans). Because of its shocking nature and great
anthropological significance, she kept her observations secret for years, fearing that her
contact with the animals had led them to manifest unnatural behaviour. Even after she
published her account, many refused to believe it. It soon became obvious, however, that
what she observed was by no means rare.

Bluntly put: chimpanzees conduct inter-tribal warfare. Furthermore, they do it with
almost unimaginable brutality. The typical full-grown chimp is more than twice as strong
as a comparable human being, despite their smaller size. Goodall reported with some
terror the proclivity of the chimps she studied to snap strong steel cables and levers.
Chimps can literally tear each other to pieces—and they do. Human societies and their
complex technologies cannot be blamed for that. “Often when I woke in the night,” she
wrote, “horrific pictures sprang unbidden to my mind—Satan [a long-observed chimp]
cupping his hand below Sniffs chin to drink the blood that welled from a great wound in
his face ... Jomeo tearing a strip of skin from De’s thigh; Figan, charging and hitting,
again and again, the stricken, quivering body of Goliath, one of his childhood heroes.”—
Small gangs of adolescent chimps, mostly male, roam the borders of their territory. If they
encounter foreigners (even chimps they once knew, who had broken away from the now-
too-large group) and, if they outnumber them, the gang will mob and destroy them,
without mercy. Chimps don’t have much of a super-ego, and it is prudent to remember
that the human capacity for self-control may also be overestimated. Careful perusal of
book as shocking and horrific as Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking, 1 which describes the
brutal decimation of that Chinese city by the invading Japanese, will disenchant even a
committed romantic. And the less said about Unit 731, a covert Japanese biological
warfare research unit established at that time, the better. Read about it at your peril. You
have been warned.

Hunter-gatherers, too, are much more murderous than their urban, industrialized
counterparts, despite their communal lives and localized cultures. The yearly rate of
homicide in the modern UK is about 1 per 100,000. -• It’s four to five times higher in the
US, and about ninety times higher in Honduras, which has the highest rate recorded of
any modern nation. But the evidence strongly suggests that human beings have become
more peaceful, rather than less so, as time has progressed and societies became larger and
more organized. The !Kung bushmen of Africa, romanticized in the 1950s by Elizabeth
Marshall Thomas as “the harmless people,”; had a yearly murder rate of 40 per 100,000,
which declined by more than 30% once they became subject to state authority. This is a
very instructive example of complex social structures serving to reduce, not exacerbate,
the violent tendencies of human beings. Yearly rates of 300 per 100,000 have been
reported for the Yanomami of Brazil, famed for their aggression—but the stats don’t max
out there. The denizens of Papua, New Guinea, kill each other at yearly rates ranging
from 140 to 1000 per 100,000. However, the record appears to be held by the Kato, an
indigeneous people of California, 1450 of whom per 100,000 met a violent death circa
1840.—

Because children, like other human beings, are not only good, they cannot simply be
left to their own devices, untouched by society, and bloom into perfection. Even dogs
must be socialized if they are to become acceptable members of the pack—and children

are much more complex than dogs. This means that they are much more likely to go
complexly astray if they are not trained, disciplined and properly encouraged. This means
that it is not just wrong to attribute all the violent tendencies of human beings to the
pathologies of social structure. It’s wrong enough to be virtually backward. The vital
process of socialization prevents much harm and fosters much good. Children must be
shaped and informed, or they cannot thrive. This fact is reflected starkly in their behavior:
kids are utterly desperate for attention from both peers and adults because such attention,
which renders them effective and sophisticated communal players, is vitally necessary.

Children can be damaged as much or more by a lack of incisive attention as they are by
abuse, mental or physical. This is damage by omission, rather than commission, but it is
no less severe and long-lasting. Children are damaged when their “mercifully” inattentive
parents fail to make them sharp and observant and awake and leave them, instead, in an
unconscious and undifferentiated state. Children are damaged when those charged with
their care, afraid of any conflict or upset, no longer dare to correct them, and leave them
without guidance. I can recognize such children on the street. They are doughy and
unfocused and vague. They are leaden and dull instead of golden and bright. They are
uncarved blocks, trapped in a perpetual state of waiting-to-be.

Such children are chronically ignored by their peers. This is because they are not fun to
play with. Adults tend to manifest the same attitude (although they will deny it
desperately when pressed). When I worked in daycare centres, early in my career, the
comparatively neglected children would come to me desperately, in their fumbling, half-
formed manner, with no sense of proper distance and no attentive playfulness. They
would flop, nearby—or directly on my lap, no matter what I was doing—driven inexorably
by the powerful desire for adult attention, the necessary catalyst for further development.
It was very difficult not to react with annoyance, even disgust, to such children and their
too-prolonged infantilism—difficult not to literally push them aside—even though I felt
very badly for them, and understood their predicament well. I believe that response, harsh
and terrible though it may be, was an almost universally-experienced internal warning
signal indicating the comparative danger of establishing a relationship with a poorly
socialized child: the likelihood of immediate and inappropriate dependence (which should
have been the responsibility of the parent) and the tremendous demand of time and
resources that accepting such dependence would necessitate. Confronted with such a
situation, potentially friendly peers and interested adults are much more likely to turn
their attention to interacting with other children whose cost/benefit ratio, to speak
bluntly, would be much lower.

Parent or Friend

The neglect and mistreatment that is part and parcel of poorly structured or even entirely
absent disciplinary approaches can be deliberate—motivated by explicit, conscious (if
misguided) parental motives. But more often than not, modern parents are simply
paralyzed by the fear that they will no longer be liked or even loved by their children if
they chastise them for any reason. They want their children’s friendship above all, and are
willing to sacrifice respect to get it. This is not good. A child will have many friends, but
only two parents—if that—and parents are more, not less, than friends. Friends have very
limited authority to correct. Every parent therefore needs to learn to tolerate the
momentary anger or even hatred directed towards them by their children, after necessary
corrective action has been taken, as the capacity of children to perceive or care about long¬
term consequences is very limited. Parents are the arbiters of society. They teach children
how to behave so that other people will be able to interact meaningfully and productively
with them.

It is an act of responsibility to discipline a child. It is not anger at misbehavior. It is not
revenge for a misdeed. It is instead a careful combination of mercy and long-term
judgment. Proper discipline requires effort—indeed, is virtually synonymous with effort.
It is difficult to pay careful attention to children. It is difficult to figure out what is wrong
and what is right and why. It is difficult to formulate just and compassionate strategies of
discipline, and to negotiate their application with others deeply involved in a child’s care.
Because of this combination of responsibility and difficulty, any suggestion that all
constraints placed on children are damaging can be perversely welcome. Such a notion,
once accepted, allows adults who should know better to abandon their duty to serve as
agents of enculturation and pretend that doing so is good for children. It’s a deep and
pernicious act of self-deception. It’s lazy, cruel and inexcusable. And our proclivity to
rationalize does not end there.

We assume that rules will irremediably inhibit what would otherwise be the boundless
and intrinsic creativity of our children, even though the scientific literature clearly
indicates, first, that creativity beyond the trivial is shockingly rare and, second, that
strict limitations facilitate rather than inhibit creative achievement. Belief in the purely
destructive element of rules and structure is frequently conjoined with the idea that
children will make good choices about when to sleep and what to eat, if their perfect
natures are merely allowed to manifest themselves. These are equally ungrounded
assumptions. Children are perfectly capable of attempting to subsist on hot dogs, chicken
fingers and Froot Loops if doing so will attract attention, provide power, or shield them
from trying anything new. Instead of going to bed wisely and peacefully, children will
fight night-time unconsciousness until they are staggered by fatigue. They are also
perfectly willing to provoke adults, while exploring the complex contours of the social
environment, just like juvenile chimps harassing the adults in their troupes. Observing
the consequences of teasing and taunting enables chimp and child alike to discover the
limits of what might otherwise be a too-unstructured and terrifying freedom. Such limits,
when discovered, provide security, even if their detection causes momentary
disappointment or frustration.

I remember taking my daughter to the playground once when she was about two. She
was playing on the monkey bars, hanging in mid-air. A particularly provocative little
monster of about the same age was standing above her on the same bar she was gripping.
I watched him move towards her. Our eyes locked. He slowly and deliberately stepped on
her hands, with increasing force, over and over, as he stared me down. He knew exactly
what he was doing. Up yours, Daddy-O—that was his philosophy. He had already
concluded that adults were contemptible, and that he could safely defy them. (Too bad,
then, that he was destined to become one.) That was the hopeless future his parents had
saddled him with. To his great and salutary shock, I picked him bodily off the playground
structure, and threw him thirty feet down the field.

No, I didn’t. I just took my daughter somewhere else. But it would have been better for
him if I had.

Imagine a toddler repeatedly striking his mother in the face. Why would he do such a
thing? It’s a stupid question. It’s unacceptably naive. The answer is obvious. To dominate
his mother. To see if he can get away with it. Violence, after all, is no mystery. It’s peace
that’s the mystery. Violence is the default. It’s easy. It’s peace that is difficult: learned,
inculcated, earned. (People often get basic psychological questions backwards. Why do
people take drugs? Not a mystery. It’s why they don’t take them all the time that’s the
mystery. Why do people suffer from anxiety? That’s not a mystery. How is that people
can ever be calm? There’s the mystery. We’re breakable and mortal. A million things can
go wrong, in a million ways. We should be terrified out of our skulls at every second. But
we’re not. The same can be said for depression, laziness and criminality.)

If I can hurt and overpower you, then I can do exactly what I want, when I want, even
when you’re around. I can torment you, to appease my curiosity. I can take the attention
away from you, and dominate you. I can steal your toy. Children hit first because
aggression is innate, although more dominant in some individuals and less in others, and,
second, because aggression facilitates desire. It’s foolish to assume that such behaviour
must be learned. A snake does not have to be taught to strike. It’s in the nature of the
beast. Two-year-olds, statistically speaking, are the most violent of people. They kick,
hit and bite, and they steal the property of others. They do so to explore, to express
outrage and frustration, and to gratify their impulsive desires. More importantly, for our
purposes, they do so to discover the true limits of permissible behaviour. How else are
they ever going to puzzle out what is acceptable? Infants are like blind people, searching
for a wall. They have to push forward, and test, to see where the actual boundaries lie
(and those are too-seldom where they are said to be).

Consistent correction of such action indicates the limits of acceptable aggression to the
child. Its absence merely heightens curiosity—so the child will hit and bite and kick, if he
is aggressive and dominant, until something indicates a limit. How hard can I hit
Mommy? Until she objects. Given that, correction is better sooner than later (if the
desired end result of the parent is not to be hit). Correction also helps the child learn that
hitting others is a sub-optimal social strategy. Without that correction, no child is going
to undergo the effortful process of organizing and regulating their impulses, so that those
impulses can coexist, without conflict, within the psyche of the child, and in the broader
social world. It is no simple matter to organize a mind.

My son was particularly ornery when he was a toddler. When my daughter was little, I
could paralyze her into immobility with an evil glance. Such an intervention had no effect
at all on my son. He had my wife (who is no pushover) stymied at the dinner table by the
time he was nine months of age. He fought her for control over the spoon. “Good!” we
thought. We didn’t want to feed him one more minute than necessary anyway. But the
little blighter would only eat three or four mouthfuls. Then he would play. He would stir
his food around in his bowl. He would drop bits of it over the high chair table top, and
watch as it fell on the floor below. No problem. He was exploring. But then he wasn’t
eating enough. Then, because he wasn’t eating enough, he wasn’t sleeping enough. Then
his midnight crying was waking his parents. Then they were getting grumpy and out of
sorts. He was frustrating his mother, and she was taking it out on me. The trajectory
wasn’t good.

After a few days of this degeneration, I decided to take the spoon back. I prepared for
war. I set aside sufficient time. A patient adult can defeat a two-year-old, hard as that is to
believe. As the saying goes: “Old age and treachery can always overcome youth and skill.”
This is partly because time lasts forever, when you’re two. Half an hour for me was a
week for my son. I assured myself of victory. He was stubborn and horrible. But I could be
worse. We sat down, face to face, bowl in front of him. It was High Noon. He knew it, and
I knew it. He picked up the spoon. I took it from him, and spooned up a delicious
mouthful of mush. I moved it deliberately towards his mouth. He eyed me in precisely the
same manner as the playground foot monster. He curled his lips downward into a tight
frown, rejecting all entry. I chased his mouth around with the spoon as he twisted his
head around in tight circles.

But I had more tricks up my sleeve. I poked him in the chest, with my free hand, in a
manner calculated to annoy. He didn’t budge. I did it again. And again. And again. Not
hard—but not in a manner to be ignored, either. Ten or so pokes letter, he opened his
mouth, planning to emit a sound of outrage. Hah! His mistake. I deftly inserted the
spoon. He tried, gamely, to force out the offending food with his tongue. But I know how
to deal with that, too. I just placed my forefinger horizontally across his lips. Some came

out. But some was swallowed, too. Score one for Dad. I gave him a pat on the head, and
told him that he was a good boy. And I meant it. When someone does something you are
trying to get them to do, reward them. No grudge after victory. An hour later, it was all
over. There was outrage. There was some wailing. My wife had to leave the room. The
stress was too much. But food was eaten by child. My son collapsed, exhausted, on my
chest. We had a nap together. And he liked me a lot better when he woke up than he had
before he was disciplined.

This was something I commonly observed when we went head to head—and not only
with him. A little later we entered into a babysitting swap with another couple. All the
kids would get together at one house. Then one pair of parents would go out to dinner, or
a movie, and leave the other pair to watch the children, who were all under three. One
evening, another set of parents joined us. I was unfamiliar with their son, a large, strong
boy of two.

“He won’t sleep,” said his father. “After you put him to bed, he will crawl out of his
bed, and come downstairs. We usually put on an Elmo video and let him watch it.”

“There’s no damn way I’m rewarding a recalcitrant child for unacceptable behaviour,” I
thought, “and I’m certainly not showing anyone any Elmo video.” I always hated that
creepy, whiny puppet. He was a disgrace to Jim Henson’s legacy. So reward-by-Elmo was
not on the table. I didn’t say anything, of course. There is just no talking to parents about
their children—until they are ready to listen.

Two hours later, we put the kids to bed. Four of the five went promptly to sleep—but
not the Muppet aficionado. I had placed him in a crib, however, so he couldn’t escape. But
he could still howl, and that’s exactly what he did. That was tricky. It was good strategy
on his part. It was annoying, and it threatened to wake up all the other kids, who would
then also start to howl. Score one for the kid. So, I journeyed into the bedroom. “Lie
down,” I said. That produced no effect. “Lie down,” I said, “or I will lay you down.”
Reasoning with kids isn’t often of too much use, particularly under such circumstances,
but I believe in fair warning. Of course, he didn’t lie down. He howled again, for effect.

Kids do this frequently. Scared parents think that a crying child is always sad or hurt.
This is simply not true. Anger is one of the most common reasons for crying. Careful
analysis of the musculature patterns of crying children has confirmed this.— Anger-
crying and fear-or-sadness crying do not look the same. They also don’t sound the same,
and can be distinguished with careful attention. Anger-crying is often an act of
dominance, and should be dealt with as such. I lifted him up, and laid him down. Gently.
Patiently. But firmly. He got up. I laid him down. He got up. I laid him down. He got up.
This time, I laid him down, and kept my hand on his back. He struggled, mightily, but
ineffectually. He was, after all, only one-tenth my size. I could take him with one hand.
So, I kept him down and spoke calmly to him and told him he was a good boy and that he
should relax. I gave him a soother and pounded gently on his back. He started to relax.
His eyes began to close. I removed my hand.

He promptly got to his feet. I was impressed. The kid had spirit! I lifted him up, and
laid him down, again. “Lie down, monster,” I said. I pounded his back gently some more.
Some kids find that soothing. He was getting tired. He was ready to capitulate. He closed
his eyes. I got to my feet, and headed quietly and quickly to the door. I glanced back, to
check his position, one last time. He was back on his feet. I pointed my finger at him.
“Down, monster,” I said, and I meant it. He went down like a shot. I closed the door. We
liked each other. Neither my wife nor I heard a peep out of him for the rest of the night.

“How was the kid?” his father asked me when he got home, much later that night.
“Good,” I said. “No problem at all. He’s asleep right now.”

“Did he get up?” said his father.

“No,” I said. “He slept the whole time.”

Dad looked at me. He wanted to know. But he didn’t ask. And I didn’t tell.

Don’t cast pearls before swine, as the old saying goes. And you might think that’s
harsh. But training your child not to sleep, and rewarding him with the antics of a creepy
puppet? That’s harsh too. You pick your poison, and I’ll pick mine.

Discipline and Punish

Modern parents are terrified of two frequently juxtaposed words: discipline and punish.
They evoke images of prisons, soldiers and jackboots. The distance between disciplinarian
and tyrant or punishment and torture is, indeed, easily traversed. Discipline and punish
must be handled with care. The fear is unsurprising. But both are necessary. They can be
applied unconsciously or consciously, badly or well, but there is no escaping their use.

It’s not that it’s impossible to discipline with reward. In fact, rewarding good behaviour
can be very effective. The most famous of all behavioural psychologists, B.F. Skinner, was
a great advocate of this approach. He was expert at it. He taught pigeons to play ping-
pong, although they only rolled the ball back and forth by pecking it with their beaks.
But they were pigeons. So even though they played badly, it was still pretty good. Skinner
even taught his birds to pilot missiles during the Second World War, in Project Pigeon
(later Orcon). He got a long way, before the invention of electronic guidance systems
rendered his efforts obsolete.

Skinner observed the animals he was training to perform such acts with exceptional
care. Any actions that approximated what he was aiming at were immediately followed by
a reward of just the right size: not small enough to be inconsequential, and not so large
that it devalued future rewards. Such an approach can be used with children, and works
very well. Imagine that you would like your toddler to help set the table. It’s a useful skill.
You’d like him better if he could do it. It would be good for his (shudder) self-esteem. So,
you break the target behaviour down into its component parts. One element of setting the
table is carrying a plate from the cupboard to the table. Even that might be too complex.
Perhaps your child has only been walking a few months. He’s still wobbly and unreliable.
So, you start his training by handing him a plate and having him hand it back. A pat on
the head could follow. You might turn it into a game. Pass with your left. Switch to your
right. Circle around your back. Then you might give him a plate and take a few steps
backward so that he has to traverse a few steps before giving it back. Train him to become
a plate-handling virtuoso. Don’t leave him trapped in his klutz-dom.

You can teach virtually anyone anything with such an approach. First, figure out what
you want. Then, watch the people around you like a hawk. Finally, whenever you see
anything a bit more like what you want, swoop in (hawk, remember) and deliver a
reward. Your daughter has been very reserved since she became a teenager. You wish she
would talk more. That’s the target: more communicative daughter. One morning, over
breakfast, she shares an anecdote about school. That’s an excellent time to pay attention.
That’s the reward. Stop texting and listen. Unless you don’t want her to tell you anything
ever again.

Parental interventions that make children happy clearly can and should be used to
shape behaviour. The same goes for husbands, wives, co-workers and parents. Skinner,
however, was a realist. He noted that use of reward was very difficult: the observer had to
attend patiently until the target spontaneously manifested the desired behaviour, and
then reinforce. This required a lot of time, and a lot of waiting, and that’s a problem. He
also had to starve his animals down to three-quarters of their normal body weight before
they would become interested enough in food reward to truly pay attention. But these are
not the only shortcomings of the purely positive approach.

100

Negative emotions, like their positive counterparts, help us learn. We need to learn,
because we’re stupid and easily damaged. We can die. That’s not good, and we don’t feel
good about it. If we did, we would seek death, and then we would die. We don’t even feel
good about dying if it only might happen. And that’s all the time. In that manner, negative
emotions, for all their unpleasantness, protect us. We feel hurt and scared and ashamed
and disgusted so we can avoid damage. And we’re susceptible to feeling such things a lot.
In fact, we feel more negative about a loss of a given size than we feel good about the
same-sized gain. Pain is more potent than pleasure, and anxiety more than hope.

Emotions, positive and negative, come in two usefully differentiated variants.
Satisfaction (technically, satiation) tells us that what we did was good, while hope
(technically, incentive reward) indicates that something pleasurable is on the way. Pain
hurts us, so we won’t repeat actions that produced personal damage or social isolation (as
loneliness is also, technically, a form of pain). Anxiety makes us stay away from hurtful
people and bad places so we don’t have to feel pain. All these emotions must be balanced
against each other, and carefully judged in context, but they’re all required to keep us
alive and thriving. We therefore do our children a disservice by failing to use whatever is
available to help them learn, including negative emotions, even though such use should
occur in the most merciful possible manner.

Skinner knew that threats and punishments could stop unwanted behaviours, just as
reward reinforces what is desirable. In a world paralyzed at the thought of interfering
with the hypothetically pristine path of natural child development, it can be difficult even
to discuss the former techniques. However, children would not have such a lengthy
period of natural development, prior to maturity, if their behaviour did not have to be
shaped. They would just leap out of the womb, ready to trade stocks. Children also
cannot be fully sheltered from fear and pain. They are small and vulnerable. They don’t
know much about the world. Even when they are doing something as natural as learning
to walk, they’re constantly being walloped by the world. And this is to say nothing of the
frustration and rejection they inevitably experience when dealing with siblings and peers
and uncooperative, stubborn adults. Given this, the fundamental moral question is not
how to shelter children completely from misadventure and failure, so they never
experience any fear or pain, but how to maximize their learning so that useful knowledge
may be gained with minimal cost.

In the Disney movie Sleeping Beauty, the King and Queen have a daughter, the princess
Aurora, after a long wait. They plan a great christening, to introduce her to the world.
They welcome everyone who loves and honours their new daughter. But they fail to invite
Maleficent (malicious, malevolent), who is essentially Queen of the Underworld, or
Nature in her negative guise. This means, symbolically, that the two monarchs are
overprotecting their beloved daughter, by setting up a world around her that has nothing
negative in it. But this does not protect her. It makes her weak. Maleficent curses the
princess, sentencing her to death at the age of sixteen, caused by the prick of a spinning
wheel’s needle. The spinning wheel is the wheel of fate; the prick, which produces blood,
symbolizes the loss of virginity, a sign of the emergence of the woman from the child.

Fortunately, a good fairy (the positive element of Nature) reduces the punishment to
unconsciousness, redeemable with love’s first kiss. The panicked King and Queen get rid
of all the spinning wheels in the land, and turn their daughter over to the much-too-nice
good fairies, of whom there are three. They continue with their strategy of removing all
dangerous things—but in doing so they leave their daughter naive, immature and weak.
One day, just before Aurora’s sixteenth birthday, she meets a prince in the forest, and
falls in love, the same day. By any reasonable standard, that’s a bit much. Then she loudly
bemoans the fact that she is to be wed to Prince Philip, to whom she was betrothed as a
child, and collapses emotionally when she is brought back to her parents’ castle for her

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birthday. It is at that moment that Maleficent’s curse manifests itself. A portal opens up
in the castle, a spinning wheel appears, and Aurora pricks her finger and falls
unconscious. She becomes Sleeping Beauty. In doing so (again, symbolically speaking)
she chooses unconsciousness over the terror of adult life. Something existentially similar
to this often occurs very frequently with overprotected children, who can be brought low
—and then desire the bliss of unconsciousness—by their first real contact with failure or,
worse, genuine malevolence, which they do not or will not understand and against which
they have no defence.

Take the case of the three-year-old who has not learned to share. She displays her
selfish behaviour in the presence of her parents, but they’re too nice to intervene. More
truthfully, they refuse to pay attention, admit to what is happening, and teach her how to
act properly. They’re annoyed, of course, when she won’t share with her sister, but they
pretend everything is OK. It’s not OK. They’ll snap at her later, for something totally
unrelated. She will be hurt by that, and confused, but learn nothing. Worse: when she
tries to make friends, it won’t go well, because of her lack of social sophistication.
Children her own age will be put off by her inability to cooperate. They’ll fight with her,
or wander off and find someone else to play with. The parents of those children will
observe her awkwardness and misbehaviour, and won’t invite her back to play with their
kids. She will be lonely and rejected. That will produce anxiety, depression and
resentment. That will produce the turning from life that is equivalent to the wish for
unconsciousness.

Parents who refuse to adopt the responsibility for disciplining their children think they
can just opt out of the conflict necessary for proper child-rearing. They avoid being the
bad guy (in the short term). But they do not at all rescue or protect their children from
fear and pain. Quite the contrary: the judgmental and uncaring broader social world will
mete out conflict and punishment far greater than that which would have been delivered
by an awake parent. You can discipline your children, or you can turn that responsibility
over to the harsh, uncaring judgmental world—and the motivation for the latter decision
should never be confused with love.

You might object, as modern parents sometimes do: why should a child even be subject
to the arbitrary dictates of a parent? In fact, there is a new variant of politically correct
thinking that presumes that such an idea is “adultism:”L a form of prejudice and
oppression analogous to, say, sexism or racism. The question of adult authority must be
answered with care. That requires a thorough examination of the question itself.
Accepting an objection as formulated is halfway to accepting its validity, and that can be
dangerous if the question is ill-posed. Let’s break it down.

First, why should a child be subject? That’s easy. Every child must listen to and obey
adults because he or she is dependent on the care that one or more imperfect grown-ups
is willing to bestow. Given this, it is better for the child to act in a manner that invites
genuine affection and goodwill. Something even better might be imagined. The child
could act in a manner that simultaneously ensures optimal adult attention, in a manner
that benefits his or her present state of being and future development. That’s a very high
standard, but it’s in the best interests of the child, so there is every reason to aspire to it.

Every child should also be taught to comply gracefully with the expectations of civil
society. This does not mean crushed into mindless ideological conformity. It means
instead that parents must reward those attitudes and actions that will bring their child
success in the world outside the family, and use threat and punishment when necessary
to eliminate behaviours that will lead to misery and failure. There’s a tight window of
opportunity for this, as well, so getting it right quickly matters. If a child has not been
taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to
make friends. The research literature is quite clear on this. This matters, because peers

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are the primary source of socialization after the age of four. Rejected children cease to
develop, because they are alienated from their peers. They fall further and further behind,
as the other children continue to progress. Thus, the friendless child too often becomes
the lonely, antisocial or depressed teenager and adult. This is not good. Much more of our
sanity than we commonly realize is a consequence of our fortunate immersion in a social
community. We must be continually reminded to think and act properly. When we drift,
people that care for and love us nudge us in small ways and large back on track. So, we
better have some of those people around.

It’s also not the case (back to the question) that adult dictates are all arbitrary. That’s
only true in a dysfunctional totalitarian state. But in civilized, open societies, the majority
abide by a functional social contract, aimed at mutual betterment—or at least at existence
in close proximity without too much violence. Even a system of rules that allows for only
that minimum contract is by no means arbitrary, given the alternatives. If a society does
not adequately reward productive, pro-social behavior, insists upon distributing resources
in a markedly arbitrary and unfair manner, and allows for theft and exploitation, it will
not remain conflict-free for long. If its hierarchies are based only (or even primarily) on
power, instead of the competence necessary to get important and difficult things done, it
will be prone to collapse, as well. This is even true, in simpler form, of the hierarchies of
chimpanzees, which is an indication of its fundamental, biological and non-arbitrary
emergent truth.

Poorly socialized children have terrible lives. Thus, it is better to socialize them
optimally. Some of this can be done with reward, but not all of it. The issue is therefore
not whether to use punishment and threat. The issue is whether to do it consciously and
thoughtfully. How, then, should children be disciplined? This is a very difficult question,
because children (and parents) differ vastly in their temperaments. Some children are
agreeable. They deeply want to please, but pay for that with a tendency to be conflict-
averse and dependent. Others are tougher-minded and more independent. Those kids
want to do what they want, when they want, all the time. They can be challenging, non-
compliant and stubborn. Some children are desperate for rules and structure, and are
content even in rigid environments. Others, with little regard for predictability and
routine, are immune to demands for even minimal necessary order. Some are wildly
imaginative and creative, and others more concrete and conservative. These are all deep,
important differences, heavily influenced by biological factors and difficult to modify
socially. It is fortunate indeed that in the face of such variability we are the beneficiaries
of much thoughtful meditation on the proper use of social control.

Minimum Necessary Force

Here’s a straightforward initial idea: rules should not be multiplied beyond necessity.
Alternatively stated, bad laws drive out respect for good laws. This is the ethical—even
legal—equivalent of Occam’s razor, the scientist’s conceptual guillotine, which states that
the simplest possible hypothesis is preferable. So, don’t encumber children—or their
disciplinarians—with too many rules. That path leads to frustration.

Limit the rules. Then, figure out what to do when one of them gets broken. A general,
context-independent rule for punishment severity is hard to establish. However, a helpful
norm has already been enshrined in English common law, one of the great products of
Western civilization. Its analysis can help us establish a second useful principle.

English common law allows you to defend your rights, but only in a reasonable manner.
Someone breaks into your house. You have a loaded pistol. You have a right to defend
yourself, but it’s better to do it in stages. What if it’s a drunk and confused neighbour?
“Shoot 'em!” you think. But it’s not that simple. So, you say, instead, “Stop! I have a

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gun.” If that produces neither explanation nor retreat, you might consider a warning shot.
Then, if the perpetrator still advances, you might take aim at his leg. (Don’t mistake any
of this for legal advice. It’s an example.) A single brilliantly practical principle can be used
to generate all these incrementally more severe reactions: that of minimum necessary
force. So now we have two general principles of discipline. The first: limit the rules. The
second: Use the least force necessary to enforce those rules.

About the first principle, you might ask, “Limit the rules to what, exactly?” Here are
some suggestions. Do not bite, kick or hit, except in self-defence. Do not torture and
bully other children, so you don’t end up in jail. Eat in a civilized and thankful manner, so
that people are happy to have you at their house, and pleased to feed you. Learn to share,
so other kids will play with you. Pay attention when spoken to by adults, so they don’t
hate you and might therefore deign to teach you something. Go to sleep properly, and
peaceably, so that your parents can have a private life and not resent your existence. Take
care of your belongings, because you need to learn how and because you’re lucky to have
them. Be good company when something fun is happening, so that you’re invited for the
fun. Act so that other people are happy you’re around, so that people will want you
around. A child who knows these rules will be welcome everywhere.

About the second, equally important principle, your question might be: What is
minimum necessary force? This must be established experimentally, starting with the
smallest possible intervention. Some children will be turned to stone by a glare. A verbal
command will stop another. A thumb-cocked flick of the index finger on a small hand
might be necessary for some. Such a strategy is particularly useful in public places such as
restaurants. It can be administered suddenly, quietly and effectively, without risking
escalation. What’s the alternative? A child who is crying angrily, demanding attention, is
not making himself popular. A child who is running from table to table and disrupting
everyone’s peace is bringing disgrace (an old word, but a good one) on himself and his
parents. Such outcomes are far from optimal, and children will definitely misbehave more
in public, because they are experimenting: trying to establish if the same old rules also
apply in the new place. They don’t sort that out verbally, not when they are under three.

When our children were little and we took them to restaurants, they attracted smiles.
They sat nicely and ate politely. They couldn’t keep it up for long, but we didn’t keep
them there too long. When they started to get antsy, after sitting for forty-five minutes,
we knew it was time to go. That was part of the deal. Nearby diners would tell us how
nice it was to see a happy family. We weren’t always happy, and our children weren’t
always properly behaved. But they were most of the time, and it was wonderful to see
people responding so positively to their presence. It was truly good for the kids. They
could see that people liked them. This also reinforced their good behaviour. That was the
reward.

People will really like your kids if you give them the chance. This is something I learned
as soon as we had our first baby, our daughter, Mikhaila. When we took her down the
street in her little foldup stroller in our French Montreal working-class neighbourhood,
rough-looking heavy-drinking lumberjack types would stop in their tracks and smile at
her. They would coo and giggle and make stupid faces. Watching people respond to
children restores your faith in human nature. All that’s multiplied when your kids behave
in public. To ensure that such things happen, you have to discipline your children
carefully and effectively—and to do that, you have to know something about reward, and
about punishment, instead of shying away from the knowledge.

Part of establishing a relationship with your son or daughter is learning how that small
person responds to disciplinary intervention—and then intervening effectively. It’s very
easy to mouth cliches instead, such as: “There is no excuse for physical punishment,” or,
“Hitting children merely teaches them to hit.” Let’s start with the former claim: there is no

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excuse for physical punishment. First, we should note the widespread consensus around the
idea that some forms of misbehavior, particularly those associated with theft and assault,
are both wrong and should be subject to sanction. Second, we should note that almost all
those sanctions involve punishment in its many psychological and more directly physical
forms. Deprivation of liberty causes pain in a manner essentially similar to that of
physical trauma. The same can be said of the use of social isolation (including time out).
We know this neurobiologically. The same brain areas mediate response to all three, and
all are ameliorated by the same class of drugs, opiates. Jail is clearly physical
punishment—particularly solitary confinement—even when nothing violent happens.
Third, we should note that some misbegotten actions must be brought to a halt both
effectively and immediately, not least so that something worse doesn’t happen. What’s
the proper punishment for someone who will not stop poking a fork into an electrical
socket? Or who runs away laughing in a crowded supermarket parking lot? The answer is
simple: whatever will stop it fastest, within reason. Because the alternative could be fatal.

That’s pretty obvious, in the case of parking lot or outlet. But the same thing applies in
the social realm, and that brings us to the fourth point regarding excuses for physical
punishment. The penalties for misbehavior (of the sort that could have been effectively
halted in childhood) become increasingly severe as children get older—and it is
disproportionately those who remain unsocialized effectively by age four who end up
punished explicitly by society in their later youth and early adulthood. Those
unconstrained four-year-olds, in turn, are often those who were unduly aggressive, by
nature, at age two. They were statistically more likely than their peers to kick, hit, bite
and take away toys (later known as stealing). They comprise about five per cent of boys,
and a much smaller percentage of girls. To unthinkingly parrot the magic line “There is
no excuse for physical punishment” is also to foster the delusion that teenage devils
magically emerge from once-innocent little child-angels. You’re not doing your child any
favors by overlooking any misbehavior (particularly if he or she is temperamentally more
aggressive).

To hold the no excuse for physical punishment theory is also (fifth) to assume that the
word no can be effectively uttered to another person in the absence of the threat of
punishment. A woman can say no to a powerful, narcissistic man only because she has
social norms, the law and the state backing her up. A parent can only say no to a child
who wants a third piece of cake because he or she is larger, stronger and more capable
than the child (and is additionally backed up in his authority by law and state). What no
means, in the final analysis, is always “If you continue to do that, something you do not
like will happen to you.” Otherwise it means nothing. Or, worse, it means “another
nonsensical nothing muttered by ignorable adults.” Or, worse still, it means, “all adults
are ineffectual and weak.” This is a particularly bad lesson, when every child’s destiny is
to become an adult, and when most things that are learned without undue personal pain
are modelled or explicitly taught by adults). What does a child who ignores adults and
holds them in contempt have to look forward to? Why grow up at all? And that’s the
story of Peter Pan, who thinks all adults are variants of Captain Hook, tyrannical and
terrified of his own mortality (think hungry crocodile with clock in his stomach). The
only time no ever means no in the absence of violence is when it is uttered by one civilized
person to another.

And what about the idea that hitting a child merely teaches them to hit ? First: No. Wrong.
Too simple. For starters, “hitting” is a very unsophisticated word to describe the
disciplinary act of an effective parent. If “hitting” accurately described the entire range of
physical force, then there would be no difference between rain droplets and atom bombs.
Magnitude matters—and so does context, if we’re not being wilfully blind and naive about
the issue. Every child knows the difference between being bitten by a mean, unprovoked

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dog and being nipped by his own pet when he tries playfully but too carelessly to take its
bone. How hard someone is hit, and why they are hit, cannot merely be ignored when
speaking of hitting. Timing, part of context, is also of crucial importance. If you flick your
two-year-old with your finger just after he smacks the baby on the head with a wooden
block, he will get the connection, and be at least somewhat less willing to smack her
again in the future. That seems like a good outcome. He certainly won’t conclude that he
should hit her more, using the flick of his mother’s finger as an example. He’s not stupid.
He’s just jealous, impulsive and not very sophisticated. And how else are you going to
protect his younger sibling? If you discipline ineffectively, then the baby will suffer.
Maybe for years. The bullying will continue, because you won’t do a damn thing to stop
it. You’ll avoid the conflict that’s necessary to establish peace. You’ll turn a blind eye.
And then later, when the younger child confronts you (maybe even in adulthood), you’ll
say, “I never knew it was like that.” You just didn’t want to know. So, you didn’t. You just
rejected the responsibility of discipline, and justified it with a continual show of your
niceness. Every gingerbread house has a witch inside it that devours children.

So where does all that leave us? With the decision to discipline effectively, or to
discipline ineffectively (but never the decision to forego discipline altogether, because
nature and society will punish in a draconian manner whatever errors of childhood
behavior remain uncorrected). So here are a few practical hints: time out can be an
extremely effective form of punishment, particularly if the misbehaving child is welcome
as soon as he controls his temper. An angry child should sit by himself until he calms
down. Then he should be allowed to return to normal life. That means the child wins—
instead of his anger. The rule is “Come be with us as soon as you can behave properly.”
This is a very good deal for child, parent and society. You’ll be able to tell if your child has
really regained control. You’ll like him again, despite his earlier misbehaviour. If you’re
still mad, maybe he hasn’t completely repented—or maybe you should do something
about your tendency to hold a grudge.

If your child is the kind of determined varmint who simply runs away, laughing, when
placed on the steps or in his room, physical restraint might have to be added to the time
out routine. A child can be held carefully but firmly by the upper arms, until he or she
stops squirming and pays attention. If that fails, being turned over a parent’s knee might
be required. For the child who is pushing the limits in a spectacularly inspired way, a
swat across the backside can indicate requisite seriousness on the part of a responsible
adult. There are some situations in which even that will not suffice, partly because some
children are very determined, exploratory, and tough, or because the offending behaviour
is truly severe. And if you’re not thinking such things through, then you’re not acting
responsibly as a parent. You’re leaving the dirty work to someone else, who will be much
dirtier doing it.

A Summary of Principles

Disciplinary principle 1: limit the rules. Principle 2: use minimum necessary force. Here’s a
third: parents should come in pairs.— Raising young children is demanding and exhausting.
Because of this, it’s easy for a parent to make a mistake. Insomnia, hunger, the aftermath
of an argument, a hangover, a bad day at work—any of these things singly can make a
person unreasonable, while in combination they can produce someone dangerous. Under
such circumstances, it is necessary to have someone else around, to observe, and step in,
and discuss. This will make it less likely that a whiny provocative child and her fed-up
cranky parent will excite each other to the point of no return. Parents should come in
pairs so the father of a newborn can watch the new mother so she won’t get worn out and
do something desperate after hearing her colicky baby wail from eleven in the evening

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until five in the morning for thirty nights in a row. I am not saying we should be mean to
single mothers, many of whom struggle impossibly and courageously—and a proportion
of whom have had to escape, singly, from a brutal relationship—but that doesn’t mean we
should pretend that all family forms are equally viable. They’re not. Period.

Here’s a fourth principle, one that is more particularly psychological: parents should
understand their own capacity to be harsh, vengeful, arrogant, resentful, angry and deceitful. Very
few people set out, consciously, to do a terrible job as father or mother, but bad parenting
happens all the time. This is because people have a great capacity for evil, as well as good
—and because they remain willfully blind to that fact. People are aggressive and selfish, as
well as kind and thoughtful. For this reason, no adult human being—no hierarchical,
predatory ape—can truly tolerate being dominated by an upstart child. Revenge will come.
Ten minutes after a pair of all-too-nice-and-patient parents have failed to prevent a public
tantrum at the local supermarket, they will pay their toddler back with the cold shoulder
when he runs up, excited, to show mom and dad his newest accomplishment. Enough
embarrassment, disobedience, and dominance challenge, and even the most
hypothetically selfless parent will become resentful. And then the real punishment will
begin. Resentment breeds the desire for vengeance. Fewer spontaneous offers of love will
be offered, with more rationalizations for their absence. Fewer opportunities for the
personal development of the child will be sought out. A subtle turning away will begin.
And this is only the beginning of the road to total familial warfare, conducted mostly in
the underworld, underneath the false facade of normality and love.

This frequently-travelled path is much better avoided. A parent who is seriously aware
of his or her limited tolerance and capacity for misbehaviour when provoked can therefore
seriously plan a proper disciplinary strategy—particularly if monitored by an equally
awake partner—and never let things degenerate to the point where genuine hatred
emerges. Beware. There are toxic families everywhere. They make no rules and limit no
misbehaviour. The parents lash out randomly and unpredictably. The children live in that
chaos and are crushed, if they’re timid, or rebel, counterproductively, if they’re tough. It’s
not good. It can get murderous.

Here’s a fifth and final and most general principle. Parents have a duty to act as proxies
for the real world—merciful proxies, caring proxies—but proxies, nonetheless. This
obligation supersedes any responsibility to ensure happiness, foster creativity, or boost
self-esteem. It is the primary duty of parents to make their children socially desirable.
That will provide the child with opportunity, self-regard, and security. It’s more important
even than fostering individual identity. That Holy Grail can only be pursued, in any case,
after a high degree of social sophistication has been established.

The Good Child—and the Responsible Parent

A properly socialized three-year-old is polite and engaging. She’s also no pushover. She
evokes interest from other children and appreciation from adults. She exists in a world
where other kids welcome her and compete for her attention, and where adults are happy
to see her, instead of hiding behind false smiles. She will be introduced to the world by
people who are pleased to do so. This will do more for her eventual individuality than any
cowardly parental attempt to avoid day-to-day conflict and discipline.

Discuss your likes and dislikes with regards to your children with your partner or,
failing that, a friend. But do not be afraid to have likes and dislikes. You can judge
suitable from unsuitable, and wheat from chaff. You realize the difference between good
and evil. Having clarified your stance—having assessed yourself for pettiness, arrogance
and resentment—you take the next step, and you make your children behave. You take
responsibility for their discipline. You take responsibility for the mistakes you will

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inevitably make while disciplining. You can apologize, when you’re wrong, and learn to
do better.

You love your kids, after all. If their actions make you dislike them, think what an effect
they will have on other people, who care much less about them than you. Those other
people will punish them, severely, by omission or commission. Don’t allow that to
happen. Better to let your little monsters know what is desirable and what is not, so they
become sophisticated denizens of the world outside the family.

A child who pays attention, instead of drifting, and can play, and does not whine, and is
comical, but not annoying, and is trustworthy—that child will have friends wherever he
goes. His teachers will like him, and so will his parents. If he attends politely to adults, he
will be attended to, smiled at and happily instructed. He will thrive, in what can so easily
be a cold, unforgiving and hostile world. Clear rules make for secure children and calm,
rational parents. Clear principles of discipline and punishment balance mercy and justice
so that social development and psychological maturity can be optimally promoted. Clear
rules and proper discipline help the child, and the family, and society, establish, maintain
and expand the order that is all that protects us from chaos and the terrors of the
underworld, where everything is uncertain, anxiety-provoking, hopeless and depressing.
There are no greater gifts that a committed and courageous parent can bestow.

Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.

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/**

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RULE 6

SET YOUR HOUSE IN PERFECT ORDER BEFORE YOU
CRITICIZE THE WORLD

A RELIGIOUS PROBLEM

It does not seem reasonable to describe the young man who shot twenty children and six
staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 as a
religious person. This is equally true for the Colorado theatre gunman and the Columbine
High School killers. But these murderous individuals had a problem with reality that
existed at a religious depth. As one of the members of the Columbine duo wrote:

The human race isn’t worth fighting for, only worth killing. Give the Earth back to the animals. They deserve it
infinitely more than we do. Nothing means anything anymore.

People who think such things view Being itself as inequitable and harsh to the point of
corruption, and human Being, in particular, as contemptible. They appoint themselves
supreme adjudicators of reality and find it wanting. They are the ultimate critics. The
deeply cynical writer continues:

If you recall your history, the Nazis came up with a “final solution” to the Jewish problem.... Kill them all. Well,
in case you haven’t figured it out, I say “KILL MANKIND.” No one should survive.

For such individuals, the world of experience is insufficient and evil—so to hell with
everything!

What is happening when someone comes to think in this manner? A great German
play, Faust: A Tragedy, written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, addresses that issue. The
play’s main character, a scholar named Heinrich Faust, trades his immortal soul to the
devil, Mephistopheles. In return, he receives whatever he desires while still alive on
Earth. In Goethe’s play, Mephistopheles is the eternal adversary of Being. He has a
central, defining credo:

I am the spirit who negates

and rightly so, for all that comes to be

deserves to perish, wretchedly.

It were better nothing would begin!

Thus everything that your terms sin,
destruction, evil represent —
that is my proper element.

Goethe considered this hateful sentiment so important—so key to the central element of
vengeful human destructiveness—that he had Mephistopheles say it a second time,
phrased somewhat differently, in Part II of the play, written many years later.

People think often in the Mephistophelean manner, although they seldom act upon
their thoughts as brutally as the mass murderers of school, college and theatre. Whenever
we experience injustice, real or imagined; whenever we encounter tragedy or fall prey to
the machinations of others; whenever we experience the horror and pain of our own
apparently arbitrary limitations—the temptation to question Being and then to curse it
rises foully from the darkness. Why must innocent people suffer so terribly? What kind of
bloody, horrible planet is this, anyway?

Life is in truth very hard. Everyone is destined for pain and slated for destruction.
Sometimes suffering is clearly the result of a personal fault such as willful blindness, poor
decision-making or malevolence. In such cases, when it appears to be self-inflicted, it may
even seem just. People get what they deserve, you might contend. That’s cold comfort,

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however, even when true. Sometimes, if those who are suffering changed their behaviour,
then their lives would unfold less tragically. But human control is limited. Susceptibility
to despair, disease, aging and death is universal. In the final analysis, we do not appear to
be the architects of our own fragility. Whose fault is it, then?

People who are very ill (or, worse, who have a sick child) will inevitably find
themselves asking this question, whether they are religious believers or not. The same is
true of someone who finds his shirtsleeve caught in the gears of a giant bureaucracy—
who is suffering through a tax audit, or fighting an interminable lawsuit or divorce. And
it’s not only the obviously suffering who are tormented by the need to blame someone or
something for the intolerable state of their Being. At the height of his fame, influence and
creative power, for example, the towering Leo Tolstoy himself began to question the value
of human existence. He reasoned in this way:

My position was terrible. I knew that I could find nothing in the way of rational knowledge except a denial of
life; and in faith I could find nothing except a denial of reason, and this was even more impossible than a denial
of life. According to rational knowledge, it followed that life is evil, and people know it. They do not have to
live, yet they have lived and they do live, just as I myself had lived, even though I had known for a long time
that life is meaningless and evil.

Try as he might, Tolstoy could identify only four means of escaping from such thoughts.
One was retreating into childlike ignorance of the problem. Another was pursuing
mindless pleasure. The third was “continuing to drag out a life that is evil and
meaningless, knowing beforehand that nothing can come of it.” He identified that
particular form of escape with weakness: “The people in this category know that death is
better than life, but they do not have the strength to act rationally and quickly put an end
to the delusion by killing themselves....”

Only the fourth and final mode of escape involved “strength and energy. It consists of
destroying life, once one has realized that life is evil and meaningless.” Tolstoy
relentlessly followed his thoughts:

Only unusually strong and logically consistent people act in this manner. Having realized all the stupidity of the
joke that is being played on us and seeing that the blessings of the dead are greater than those of the living and
that it is better not to exist, they act and put an end to this stupid joke; and they use any means of doing it: a
rope around the neck, water, a knife in the heart, a train.

Tolstoy wasn’t pessimistic enough. The stupidity of the joke being played on us does not
merely motivate suicide. It motivates murder—mass murder, often followed by suicide.
That is a far more effective existential protest. By June of 2016, unbelievable as it may
seem, there had been one thousand mass killings (defined as four or more people shot in
a single incident, excluding the shooter) in the US in twelve hundred and sixty days.
That’s one such event on five of every six days for more than three years. Everyone says,
“We don’t understand.” How can we still pretend that? Tolstoy understood, more than a
century ago. The ancient authors of the biblical story of Cain and Abel understood, as
well, more than twenty centuries ago. They described murder as the first act of post-
Edenic history: and not just murder, but fratricidal murder—murder not only of someone
innocent but of someone ideal and good, and murder done consciously to spite the creator
of the universe. Today’s killers tell us the same thing, in their own words. Who would
dare say that this is not the worm at the core of the apple? But we will not listen, because
the truth cuts too close to the bone. Even for a mind as profound as that of the celebrated
Russian author, there was no way out. How can the rest of us manage, when a man of
Tolstoy’s stature admits defeat? For years, he hid his guns from himself and would not
walk with a rope in hand, in case he hanged himself.

How can a person who is awake avoid outrage at the world?

Vengeance or Transformation

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A religious man might shake his fist in desperation at the apparent injustice and
blindness of God. Even Christ Himself felt abandoned before the cross, or so the story
goes. A more agnostic or atheistic individual might blame fate, or meditate bitterly on the
brutality of chance. Another might tear himself apart, searching for the character flaws
underlying his suffering and deterioration. These are all variations on a theme. The name
of the target changes, but the underlying psychology remains constant. Why? Why is
there so much suffering and cruelty?

Well, perhaps it really is God’s doing—or the fault of blind, pointless fate, if you are
inclined to think that way. And there appears to be every reason to think that way. But,
what happens if you do? Mass murderers believe that the suffering attendant upon
existence justifies judgment and revenge, as the Columbine boys so clearly indicated:

I will sooner die than betray my own thoughts. Before I leave this worthless place, I will kill who ever I deem
unfit for anything, especially life. If you pissed me off in the past, you will die if I see you. You might be able to
piss off others, and have it eventually all blow over, but not me. I don’t forget people who wronged me.

One of the most vengeful murderers of the twentieth century, the terrible Carl Panzram,
was raped, brutalized and betrayed in the Minnesota institution responsible for his
“rehabilitation” when he was a delinquent juvenile. He emerged, enraged beyond
measure, as burglar, arsonist, rapist and serial killer. He aimed consciously and
consistently at destruction, even keeping track of the dollar value of the property he
burned. He started by hating the individuals who had hurt him. His resentment grew,
until his hatred encompassed all of mankind, and he didn’t stop there. His
destructiveness was aimed in some fundamental manner at God Himself. There is no
other way of phrasing it. Panzram raped, murdered and burned to express his outrage at
Being. He acted as if Someone was responsible. The same thing happens in the story of
Cain and Abel. Cain’s sacrifices are rejected. He exists in suffering. He calls out God and
challenges the Being He created. God refuses his plea. He tells Cain that his trouble is
self-induced. Cain, in his rage, kills Abel, God’s favourite (and, truth be known, Cain’s
idol). Cain is jealous, of course, of his successful brother. But he destroys Abel primarily
to spite God. This is the truest version of what happens when people take their vengeance
to the ultimate extreme.

Panzram’s response was (and this is what was so terrible) perfectly understandable.
The details of his autobiography reveal that he was one of Tolstoy’s strong and logically
consistent people. He was a powerful, consistent, fearless actor. He had the courage of his
convictions. How could someone like him be expected to forgive and forget, given what
had happened to him? Truly terrible things happen to people. It’s no wonder they’re out
for revenge. Under such conditions, vengeance seems a moral necessity. How can it be
distinguished from the demand for justice? After the experience of terrible atrocity, isn’t
forgiveness just cowardice, or lack of willpower? Such questions torment me. But people
emerge from terrible pasts to do good, and not evil, although such an accomplishment can
seem superhuman.

I have met people who managed to do it. I know a man, a great artist, who emerged
from just such a “school” as the one described by Panzram—only this man was thrown
into it as an innocent five-year-old, fresh from a long stretch in a hospital, where he had
suffered measles, mumps and chicken pox, simultaneously. Incapable of speaking the
language of the school, deliberately isolated from his family, abused, starved and
otherwise tormented, he emerged an angry, broken young man. He hurt himself badly in
the aftermath with drugs and alcohol and other forms of self-destructive behaviour. He
detested everyone—God, himself and blind fate included. But he put an end to all of that.
He stopped drinking. He stopped hating (although it still emerges in flashes). He
revitalized the artistic culture of his Native tradition, and trained young men to continue
in his footsteps. He produced a fifty-foot totem pole memorializing the events of his life,

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and a canoe, forty feet long, from a single log, of a kind rarely if ever produced now. He
brought his family together, and held a great potlatch, with sixteen hours of dancing and
hundreds of people in attendance, to express his grief, and make peace with the past. He
decided to be a good person, and then did the impossible things required to live that way.

I had a client who did not have good parents. Her mother died when she was very
young. Her grandmother, who raised her, was a harridan, bitter and over-concerned with
appearances. She mistreated her granddaughter, punishing her for her virtues: creativity,
sensitivity, intelligence—unable to resist acting out her resentment for an admittedly hard
life on her granddaughter. She had a better relationship with her father, but he was an
addict who died, badly, while she cared for him. My client had a son. She perpetuated
none of this with him. He grew up truthful, and independent, and hard-working, and
smart. Instead of widening the tear in the cultural fabric she inherited, and transmitting
it, she sewed it up. She rejected the sins of her forefathers. Such things can be done.

Distress, whether psychic, physical, or intellectual, need not at all produce nihilism (that is, the radical rejection

of value, meaning and desirability). Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations.

Nietzsche wrote those words. What he meant was this: people who experience evil
may certainly desire to perpetuate it, to pay it forward. But it is also possible to learn
good by experiencing evil. A bullied boy can mimic his tormentors. But he can also learn
from his own abuse that it is wrong to push people around and make their lives
miserable. Someone tormented by her mother can learn from her terrible experiences how
important it is to be a good parent. Many, perhaps even most, of the adults who abuse
children were abused themselves as children. However, the majority of people who were
abused as children do not abuse their own children. This is a well-established fact, which
can be demonstrated, simply, arithmetically, in this way: if one parent abused three
children, and each of those children had three children, and so on, then there would be
three abusers the first generation, nine the second, twenty-seven the third, eighty-one the
fourth—and so on exponentially. After twenty generations, more than ten billion would
have suffered childhood abuse: more people than currently inhabit the planet. But
instead, abuse disappears across generations. People constrain its spread. That’s a
testament to the genuine dominance of good over evil in the human heart.

The desire for vengeance, however justified, also bars the way to other productive
thoughts. The American/English poet T. S. Eliot explained why, in his play, The Cocktail
Party. One of his characters is not having a good time of it. She speaks of her profound
unhappiness to a psychiatrist. She says she hopes that all her suffering is her own fault.
The psychiatrist is taken aback. He asks why. She has thought long and hard about this,
she says, and has come to the following conclusion: if it’s her fault, she might be able to
do something about it. If it’s God’s fault, however—if reality itself is flawed, hell-bent on
ensuring her misery—then she is doomed. She couldn’t change the structure of reality
itself. But maybe she could change her own life.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had every reason to question the structure of existence when
he was imprisoned in a Soviet labour camp, in the middle of the terrible twentieth
century. He had served as a soldier on the ill-prepared Russian front lines in the face of a
Nazi invasion. He had been arrested, beaten and thrown into prison by his own people.
Then he was struck by cancer. He could have become resentful and bitter. His life had
been rendered miserable by both Stalin and Hitler, two of the worst tyrants in history. He
lived in brutal conditions. Vast stretches of his precious time were stolen from him and
squandered. He witnessed the pointless and degrading suffering and death of his friends
and acquaintances. Then he contracted an extremely serious disease. Solzhenitsyn had
cause to curse God. Job himself barely had it as hard.

But the great writer, the profound, spirited defender of truth, did not allow his mind to
turn towards vengeance and destruction. He opened his eyes, instead. During his many

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trials, Solzhenitsyn encountered people who comported themselves nobly, under horrific
circumstances. He contemplated their behaviour deeply. Then he asked himself the most
difficult of questions: had he personally contributed to the catastrophe of his life? If so,
how? He remembered his unquestioning support of the Communist Party in his early
years. He reconsidered his whole life. He had plenty of time in the camps. How had he
missed the mark, in the past? How many times had he acted against his own conscience,
engaging in actions that he knew to be wrong? How many times had he betrayed himself,
and lied? Was there any way that the sins of his past could be rectified, atoned for, in the
muddy hell of a Soviet gulag?

Solzhenitsyn pored over the details of his life, with a fine-toothed comb. He asked
himself a second question, and a third. Can I stop making such mistakes, now? Can I
repair the damage done by my past failures, now? He learned to watch and to listen. He
found people he admired; who were honest, despite everything. He took himself apart,
piece by piece, let what was unnecessary and harmful die, and resurrected himself. Then
he wrote The Gulag Archipelago, a history of the Soviet prison camp system. It’s a
forceful, terrible book, written with the overwhelming moral force of unvarnished truth.
Its sheer outrage screamed unbearably across hundreds of pages. Banned (and for good
reason) in the USSR, it was smuggled to the West in the 1970s, and burst upon the
world. Solzhenitsyn’s writing utterly and finally demolished the intellectual credibility of
communism, as ideology or society. He took an axe to the trunk of the tree whose bitter
fruits had nourished him so poorly—and whose planting he had witnessed and supported.

One man’s decision to change his life, instead of cursing fate, shook the whole
pathological system of communist tyranny to its core. It crumbled entirely, not so many
years later, and Solzhenitsyn’s courage was not the least of the reasons why. He was not
the only such person to perform such a miracle. Vaclav Havel, the persecuted writer who
later, impossibly, became the president of Czechoslovakia, then of the new Czech
Republic, comes to mind, as does Mahatma Gandhi.

Things Fall Apart

Whole peoples have adamantly refused to judge reality, to criticize Being, to blame God.
It’s interesting to consider the Old Testament Hebrews in this regard. Their travails
followed a consistent pattern. The stories of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and Noah
and the Tower of Babel are truly ancient. Their origins vanish into the mysteries of time.
It’s not until after the flood story in Genesis that something like history, as we
understand it, truly starts. It starts with Abraham. Abraham’s descendants become the
Hebrew people of the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew Bible. They enter a
covenant with Yahweh—with God—and begin their recognizably historical adventures.

Under the leadership of a great man, the Hebrews organize themselves into a society,
and then an empire. As their fortunes rise, success breeds pride and arrogance.
Corruption raises its ugly head. The increasingly hubristic state becomes obsessed with
power, begins to forget its duty to the widows and orphans, and deviates from its age-old
agreement with God. A prophet arises. He brazenly and publicly reviles the authoritarian
king and faithless country for their failures before God—an act of blind courage—telling
them of the terrible judgment to come. When his wise words are not completely ignored,
they are heeded too late. God smites his wayward people, dooming them to abject defeat
in battle and generations of subjugation. The Hebrews repent, at length, blaming their
misfortune on their own failure to adhere to God’s word. They insist to themselves that
they could have done better. They rebuild their state, and the cycle begins again.

This is life. We build structures to live in. We build families, and states, and countries.
We abstract the principles upon which those structures are founded and formulate

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systems of belief. At first we inhabit those structures and beliefs like Adam and Eve in
Paradise. But success makes us complacent. We forget to pay attention. We take what we
have for granted. We turn a blind eye. We fail to notice that things are changing, or that
corruption is taking root. And everything falls apart. Is that the fault of reality—of God?
Or do things fall apart because we have not paid sufficient attention?

When the hurricane hit New Orleans, and the town sank under the waves, was that a
natural disaster? The Dutch prepare their dikes for the worst storm in ten thousand years.
Had New Orleans followed that example, no tragedy would have occurred. It’s not that no
one knew. The Flood Control Act of 1965 mandated improvements in the levee system
that held back Lake Pontchartrain. The system was to be completed by 1978. Forty years
later, only 60 percent of the work had been done. Willful blindness and corruption took
the city down.

A hurricane is an act of God. But failure to prepare, when the necessity for preparation
is well known—that’s sin. That’s failure to hit the mark. And the wages of sin is death
(Romans 6:23). The ancient Jews always blamed themselves when things fell apart. They
acted as if God’s goodness—the goodness of reality—was axiomatic, and took
responsibility for their own failure. That’s insanely responsible. But the alternative is to
judge reality as insufficient, to criticize Being itself, and to sink into resentment and the
desire for revenge.

If you are suffering—well, that’s the norm. People are limited and life is tragic. If your
suffering is unbearable, however, and you are starting to become corrupted, here’s
something to think about.

Clean Up Your Life

Consider your circumstances. Start small. Have you taken full advantage of the
opportunities offered to you? Are you working hard on your career, or even your job, or
are you letting bitterness and resentment hold you back and drag you down? Have you
made peace with your brother? Are you treating your spouse and your children with
dignity and respect? Do you have habits that are destroying your health and well-being?
Are you truly shouldering your responsibilities? Have you said what you need to say to
your friends and family members? Are there things that you could do, that you know you
could do, that would make things around you better?

Have you cleaned up your life?

If the answer is no, here’s something to try: Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong.
Start stopping today. Don’t waste time questioning how you know that what you’re doing
is wrong, if you are certain that it is. Inopportune questioning can confuse, without
enlightening, as well as deflecting you from action. You can know that something is
wrong or right without knowing why. Your entire Being can tell you something that you
can neither explain nor articulate. Every person is too complex to know themselves
completely, and we all contain wisdom that we cannot comprehend.

So, simply stop, when you apprehend, however dimly, that you should stop. Stop acting
in that particular, despicable manner. Stop saying those things that make you weak and
ashamed. Say only those things that make you strong. Do only those things that you
could speak of with honour.

You can use your own standards of judgment. You can rely on yourself for guidance.
You don’t have to adhere to some external, arbitrary code of behaviour (although you
should not overlook the guidelines of your culture. Life is short, and you don’t have time
to figure everything out on your own. The wisdom of the past was hard-earned, and your
dead ancestors may have something useful to tell you).

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Don’t blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. Don’t
reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If
you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city? Let your own
soul guide you. Watch what happens over the days and weeks. When you are at work you
will begin to say what you really think. You will start to tell your wife, or your husband,
or your children, or your parents, what you really want and need. When you know that
you have left something undone, you will act to correct the omission. Your head will start
to clear up, as you stop filling it with lies. Your experience will improve, as you stop
distorting it with inauthentic actions. You will then begin to discover new, more subtle
things that you are doing wrong. Stop doing those, too. After some months and years of
diligent effort, your life will become simpler and less complicated. Your judgment will
improve. You will untangle your past. You will become stronger and less bitter. You will
move more confidently into the future. You will stop making your life unnecessarily
difficult. You will then be left with the inevitable bare tragedies of life, but they will no
longer be compounded with bitterness and deceit.

Perhaps you will discover that your now less-corrupted soul, much stronger than it
might otherwise have been, is now able to bear those remaining, necessary, minimal,
inescapable tragedies. Perhaps you will even learn to encounter them so that they stay
tragic—merely tragic—instead of degenerating into outright hellishness. Maybe your
anxiety, and hopelessness, and resentment, and anger—however murderous, initially—
will recede. Perhaps your uncorrupted soul will then see its existence as a genuine good,
as something to celebrate, even in the face of your own vulnerability. Perhaps you will
become an ever-more-powerful force for peace and whatever is good.

Perhaps you will then see that if all people did this, in their own lives, the world might
stop being an evil place. After that, with continued effort, perhaps it could even stop
being a tragic place. Who knows what existence might be like if we all decided to strive
for the best? Who knows what eternal heavens might be established by our spirits,
purified by truth, aiming skyward, right here on the fallen Earth?

Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.

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RULE 7

PURSUE WHAT IS MEANINGFUL (NOT WHAT IS EXPEDIENT)

GET WHILE THE GETTING’S GOOD

Life is suffering. That’s clear. There is no more basic, irrefutable truth. It’s basically what
God tells Adam and Eve, immediately before he kicks them out of Paradise.

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth
children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree,
of which I commanded thee, saying. Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt
thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken;
for dust you are and to dust you will return.” (Genesis 3:16-19. KJV)

What in the world should be done about that?

The simplest, most obvious, and most direct answer? Pursue pleasure. Follow your
impulses. Live for the moment. Do what’s expedient. Lie, cheat, steal, deceive,
manipulate—but don’t get caught. In an ultimately meaningless universe, what possible
difference could it make? And this is by no means a new idea. The fact of life’s tragedy
and the suffering that is part of it has been used to justify the pursuit of immediate selfish
gratification for a very long time.

Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no remedy when a man comes to his end, and no one has been
known to return from Hades.

Because we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been; because the
breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts.

When it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes, and the spirit will dissolve like empty air. Our name will
be forgotten in time and no one will remember our works; our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud, and
be scattered like mist that is chased by the rays of the sun and overcome by its heat.

For our allotted time is the passing of a shadow, and there is no return from our death, because it is sealed up
and no one turns back.

Come, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that exist, and make use of the creation to the full as in youth.

Let us take our fill of costly wine and perfumes, and let no flower of spring pass by us.

Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither.

Let none of us fail to share in our revelry, everywhere let us leave signs of enjoyment, because this is our
portion, and this our lot.

Let us oppress the righteous poor man; let us not spare the widow nor regard the gray hairs of the aged.

But let our might be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless. (Wisdom 2:1-11, RSV).

The pleasure of expediency may be fleeting, but it’s pleasure, nonetheless, and that’s
something to stack up against the terror and pain of existence. Every man for himself, and
the devil take the hindmost, as the old proverb has it. Why not simply take everything
you can get, whenever the opportunity arises? Why not determine to live in that manner?

Or is there an alternative, more powerful and more compelling?

Our ancestors worked out very sophisticated answers to such questions, but we still
don’t understand them very well. This is because they are in large part still implicit—
manifest primarily in ritual and myth and, as of yet, incompletely articulated. We act
them out and represent them in stories, but we’re not yet wise enough to formulate them
explicitly. We’re still chimps in a troupe, or wolves in a pack. We know how to behave.
We know who’s who, and why. We’ve learned that through experience. Our knowledge
has been shaped by our interaction with others. We’ve established predictable routines
and patterns of behavior—but we don’t really understand them, or know where they
originated. They’ve evolved over great expanses of time. No one was formulating them
explicitly (at least not in the dimmest reaches of the past), even though we’ve been telling

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each other how to act forever. One day, however, not so long ago, we woke up. We were
already doing, but we started noticing what we were doing. We started using our bodies as
devices to represent their own actions. We started imitating and dramatizing. We
invented ritual. We started acting out our own experiences. Then we started to tell
stories. We coded our observations of our own drama in these stories. In this manner, the
information that was first only embedded in our behaviour became represented in our
stories. But we didn’t and still don’t understand what it all means.

The Biblical narrative of Paradise and the Fall is one such story, fabricated by our
collective imagination, working over the centuries. It provides a profound account of the
nature of Being, and points the way to a mode of conceptualization and action well-
matched to that nature. In the Garden of Eden, prior to the dawn of self-consciousness—
so goes the story—human beings were sinless. Our primordial parents, Adam and Eve,
walked with God. Then, tempted by the snake, the first couple ate from the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, discovered Death and vulnerability, and turned away from
God. Mankind was exiled from Paradise, and began its effortful mortal existence. The idea
of sacrifice enters soon afterward, beginning with the account of Cain and Abel, and
developing through the Abrahamic adventures and the Exodus: After much
contemplation, struggling humanity learns that God’s favour could be gained, and his
wrath averted, through proper sacrifice—and, also, that bloody murder might be
motivated among those unwilling or unable to succeed in this manner.

The Delay of Gratification

When engaging in sacrifice, our forefathers began to act out what would be considered a
proposition, if it were stated in words: that something better might be attained in the future by
giving up something of value in the present. Recall, if you will, that the necessity for work is
one of the curses placed by God upon Adam and his descendants in consequence of
Original Sin. Adam’s waking to the fundamental constraints of his Being—his
vulnerability, his eventual death—is equivalent to his discovery of the future. The future:
that’s where you go to die (hopefully, not too soon). Your demise might be staved off
through work; through the sacrifice of the now to gain benefit later. It is for this reason—
among others, no doubt—that the concept of sacrifice is introduced in the Biblical chapter
immediately following the drama of the Fall. There is little difference between sacrifice
and work. They are also both uniquely human. Sometimes, animals act as if they are
working, but they are really only following the dictates of their nature. Beavers build
dams. They do so because they are beavers, and beavers build dams. They don’t think,
“Yeah, but I’d rather be on a beach in Mexico with my girlfriend,” while they’re doing it.

Prosaically, such sacrifice—work—is delay of gratification, but that’s a very mundane
phrase to describe something of such profound significance. The discovery that
gratification could be delayed was simultaneously the discovery of time and, with it,
causality (at least the causal force of voluntary human action). Long ago, in the dim mists
of time, we began to realize that reality was structured as if it could be bargained with. We
learned that behaving properly now, in the present—regulating our impulses, considering
the plight of others—could bring rewards in the future, in a time and place that did not
yet exist. We began to inhibit, control and organize our immediate impulses, so that we
could stop interfering with other people and our future selves. Doing so was
indistinguishable from organizing society: the discovery of the causal relationship
between our efforts today and the quality of tomorrow motivated the social contract—the
organization that enables today’s work to be stored, reliably (mostly in the form of
promises from others).

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Understanding is often acted out before it can be articulated (just as a child acts out
what it means to be “mother” or “father” before being able to give a spoken account of
what those roles mean). The act of making a ritual sacrifice to God was an early and
sophisticated enactment of the idea of the usefulness of delay. There is a long conceptual
journey between merely feasting hungrily and learning to set aside some extra meat,
smoked by the fire, for the end of the day, or for someone who isn’t present. It takes a
long time to learn to keep anything later for yourself, or to share it with someone else
(and those are very much the same thing as, in the former case, you are sharing with your
future self). It is much easier and far more likely to selfishly and immediately wolf down
everything in sight. There are similar long journeys between every leap in sophistication
with regard to delay and its conceptualization: short-term sharing, storing away for the
future, representation of that storage in the form of records and, later, in the form of
currency—and, ultimately, the saving of money in a bank or other social institution. Some
conceptualizations had to serve as intermediaries, or the full range of our practices and
ideas surrounding sacrifice and work and their representation could have never emerged.

Our ancestors acted out a drama, a fiction: they personified the force that governs fate
as a spirit that can be bargained with, traded with, as if it were another human being. And
the amazing thing is that it worked. This was in part because the future is largely
composed of other human beings—often precisely those who have watched and evaluated
and appraised the tiniest details of your past behavior. It’s not very far from that to God,
sitting above on high, tracking your every move and writing it down for further reference
in a big book. Here’s a productive symbolic idea: the future is a judgmental father. That’s a
good start. But two additional, archetypal, foundational questions arose, because of the
discovery of sacrifice, of work. Both have to do with the ultimate extension of the logic of
work—which is sacrifice now, to gain later.

First question. What must be sacrificed? Small sacrifices may be sufficient to solve
small, singular problems. But it is possible that larger, more comprehensive sacrifices
might solve an array of large and complex problems, all at the same time. That’s harder,
but it might be better. Adapting to the necessary discipline of medical school will, for
example, fatally interfere with the licentious lifestyle of a hardcore undergraduate party
animal. Giving that up is a sacrifice. But a physician can—to paraphrase George W.—
really put food on his family. That’s a lot of trouble dispensed with, over a very long
period of time. So, sacrifices are necessary, to improve the future, and larger sacrifices can
be better.

Second question (set of related questions, really): We’ve already established the basic
principle— sacrifice will improve the future. But a principle, once established, has to be
fleshed out. Its full extension or significance has to be understood. What is implied by the
idea that sacrifice will improve the future, in the most extreme and final of cases? Where
does that basic principle find its limits? We must ask, to begin, “What would be the
largest, most effective—most pleasing—of all possible sacrifices?” and then “How good
might the best possible future be, if the most effective sacrifice could be made?”

The biblical story of Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve’s sons, immediately follows the
story of the expulsion from Paradise, as mentioned previously. Cain and Abel are really
the first humans, since their parents were made directly by God, and not born in the
standard manner. Cain and Abel live in history, not in Eden. They must work. They must
make sacrifices, to please God, and they do so, with altar and proper ritual. But things get
complicated. Abel’s offerings please God, but Cain’s do not. Abel is rewarded, many times
over, but Cain is not. It’s not precisely clear why (although the text strongly hints that
Cain’s heart is just not in it). Maybe the quality of what Cain put forward was low. Maybe
his spirit was begrudging. Or maybe God was vexed, for some secret reasons of His own.
And all of this is realistic, including the text’s vagueness of explanation. Not all sacrifices

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are of equal quality. Furthermore, it often appears that sacrifices of apparently high
quality are not rewarded with a better future—and it’s not clear why. Why isn’t God
happy? What would have to change to make Him so? Those are difficult questions—and
everyone asks them, all the time, even if they don’t notice.

Asking such questions is indistinguishable from thinking.

The realization that pleasure could be usefully forestalled dawned on us with great
difficulty. It runs absolutely contrary to our ancient, fundamental animal instincts, which
demand immediate satisfaction (particularly under conditions of deprivation, which are
both inevitable and commonplace). And, to complicate the matter, such delay only
becomes useful when civilization has stabilized itself enough to guarantee the existence
of the delayed reward, in the future. If everything you save will be destroyed or, worse,
stolen, there is no point in saving. It is for this reason that a wolf will down twenty
pounds of raw meat in a single meal. He isn’t thinking, “Man, I hate it when I binge. I
should save some of this for next week.” So how was it that those two impossible and
necessarily simultaneous accomplishments (delay and the stabilization of society into the
future) could possibly have manifested themselves?

Here is a developmental progression, from animal to human. It’s wrong, no doubt, in
the details. But it’s sufficiently correct, for our purposes, in theme: First, there is excess
food. Large carcasses, mammoths or other massive herbivores, might provide that. (We
ate a lot of mammoths. Maybe all of them.) After a kill, with a large animal, there is some
left for later. That’s accidental, at first—but, eventually, the utility of “for later” starts to
be appreciated. Some provisional notion of sacrifice develops at the same time: “If I leave
some, even if I want it now, I won’t have to be hungry later.” That provisional notion
develops, to the next level (“If I leave some for later, I won’t have to go hungry, and
neither will those I care for”) and then to the next (“I can’t possibly eat all of this
mammoth, but I can’t store the rest for too long, either. Maybe I should feed some to
other people. Maybe they’ll remember, and feed me some of their mammoth, when they
have some and I have none. Then I’ll get some mammoth now, and some mammoth later.
That’s a good deal. And maybe those I’m sharing with will come to trust me, more
generally. Maybe then we could trade forever”). In such a manner, “mammoth” becomes
“future mammoth,” and “future mammoth” becomes “personal reputation.” That’s the
emergence of the social contract.

To share does not mean to give away something you value, and get nothing back. That
is instead only what every child who refuses to share fears it means. To share means,
properly, to initiate the process of trade. A child who can’t share—who can’t trade—can’t
have any friends, because having friends is a form of trade. Benjamin Franklin once
suggested that a newcomer to a neighbourhood ask a new neighbour to do him or her a
favour, citing an old maxim: He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you
another than he whom you yourself have obliged. In Franklin’s opinion, asking someone for
something (not too extreme, obviously) was the most useful and immediate invitation to
social interaction. Such asking on the part of the newcomer provided the neighbour with
an opportunity to show him- or herself as a good person, at first encounter. It also meant
that the latter could now ask the former for a favour, in return, because of the debt
incurred, increasingly their mutual familiarity and trust. In that manner both parties
could overcome their natural hesitancy and mutual fear of the stranger.

It is better to have something than nothing. It’s better yet to share generously the
something you have. It’s even better than that, however, to become widely known for
generous sharing. That’s something that lasts. That’s something that’s reliable. And, at
this point of abstraction, we can observe how the groundwork for the conceptions reliable,
honest and generous has been laid. The basis for an articulated morality has been put in
place. The productive, truthful sharer is the prototype for the good citizen, and the good

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man. We can see in this manner how from the simple notion that “leftovers are a good
idea” the highest moral principles might emerge.

It’s as if something like the following happened as humanity developed. First were the
endless tens or hundreds of thousands of years prior to the emergence of written history
and drama. During this time, the twin practices of delay and exchange begin to emerge,
slowly and painfully. Then they become represented, in metaphorical abstraction, as
rituals and tales of sacrifice, told in a manner such as this: “It’s as if there is a powerful
Figure in the Sky, who sees all, and is judging you. Giving up something you value seems
to make Him happy—and you want to make Him happy, because all Hell breaks loose if
you don’t. So, practise sacrificing, and sharing, until you become expert at it, and things
will go well for you.” No one said any of this, at least not so plainly and directly. But it
was implicit in the practice and then in the stories.

Action came first (as it had to, as the animals we once were could act but could not
think). Implicit, unrecognized value came first (as the actions that preceded thought embodied
value, but did not make that value explicit). People watched the successful succeed and
the unsuccessful fail for thousands and thousands of years. We thought it over, and drew
a conclusion: The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the
future. A great idea begins to emerge, taking ever-more-clearly-articulated form, in ever
more-clearly-articulated stories: What’s the difference between the successful and the
unsuccessful? The successful sacrifice. Things get better, as the successful practise their
sacrifices. The questions become increasingly precise and, simultaneously, broader: What
is the greatest possible sacrifice? For the greatest possible good? And the answers become
increasingly deeper and profound.

The God of Western tradition, like so many gods, requires sacrifice. We have already
examined why. But sometimes He goes even further. He demands not only sacrifice, but
the sacrifice of precisely what is loved best. This is most starkly portrayed (and most
confusingly evident) in the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham, beloved of God, long
wanted a son—and God promised him exactly that, after many delays, and under the
apparently impossible conditions of old age and a long-barren wife. But not so long
afterward, when the miraculously-borne Isaac is still a child, God turns around and in
unreasonable and apparently barbaric fashion demands that His faithful servant offer his
son as a sacrifice. The story ends happily: God sends an angel to stay Abraham’s obedient
hand and accepts a ram in Isaac’s stead. That’s a good thing, but it doesn’t really address
the issue at hand: Why is God’s going further necessary? Why does He—why does life—
impose such demands?

We’ll start our analysis with a truism, stark, self-evident and understated: Sometimes
things do not go well. That seems to have much to do with the terrible nature of the world,
with its plagues and famines and tyrannies and betrayals. But here’s the rub: sometimes,
when things are not going well, it’s not the world that’s the cause. The cause is instead that which is
currently most valued, subjectively and personally. Why? Because the world is revealed, to an
indeterminate degree, through the template of your values (much more on this in Rule
10). If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore, it’s time to examine
your values. It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It’s time to let go. It
might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you
might become, instead of staying who you are.

There’s an old and possibly apocryphal story about how to catch a monkey that
illustrates this set of ideas very well. First, you must find a large, narrow-necked jar, just
barely wide enough in diameter at the top for a monkey to put its hand inside. Then you
must fill the jar part way with rocks, so it is too heavy for a monkey to carry. Then you
must to scatter some treats, attractive to monkeys, near the jar, to attract one, and put
some more inside the jar. A monkey will come along, reach into the narrow opening, and

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grab while the grabbing’s good. But now he won’t be able to extract his fist, now full of
treats, from the too-narrow opening of the jar. Not without unclenching his hand. Not
without relinquishing what he already has. And that’s just what he won’t do. The
monkey-catcher can just walk over to the jar and pick up the monkey. The animal will not
sacrifice the part to preserve the whole.

Something valuable, given up, ensures future prosperity. Something valuable,
sacrificed, pleases the Lord. What is most valuable, and best sacrificed?—or, what is at
least emblematic of that? A choice cut of meat. The best animal in a flock. A most valued
possession. What’s above even that? Something intensely personal and painful to give up.
That’s symbolized, perhaps, in God’s insistence on circumcision as part of Abraham’s
sacrificial routine, where the part is offered, symbolically, to redeem the whole. What’s
beyond that? What pertains more closely to the whole person, rather than the part? What
constitutes the ultimate sacrifice—for the gain of the ultimate prize?

It’s a close race between child and self. The sacrifice of the mother, offering her child to
the world, is exemplified profoundly by Michelangelo’s great sculpture, the Pieta,
illustrated at the beginning of this chapter. Michelangelo crafted Mary contemplating her
Son, crucified and ruined. It’s her fault. It was through her that He entered the world and
its great drama of Being. Is it right to bring a baby into this terrible world? Every woman asks
herself that question. Some say no, and they have their reasons. Mary answers yes,
voluntarily, knowing full well what’s to come—as do all mothers, if they allow themselves
to see. It’s an act of supreme courage, when undertaken voluntarily.

In turn, Mary’s son, Christ, offers Himself to God and the world, to betrayal, torture
and death—to the very point of despair on the cross, where he cries out those terrible
words: my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? (Matthew 27:46). That is the archetypal
story of the man who gives his all for the sake of the better—who offers up his life for the
advancement of Being—who allows God’s will to become manifest fully within the
confines of a single, mortal life. That is the model for the honourable man. In Christ’s
case, however—as He sacrifices Himself—God, His Father, is simultaneously sacrificing
His son. It is for this reason that the Christian sacrificial drama of Son and Self is
archetypal. It’s a story at the limit, where nothing more extreme—nothing greater—can
be imagined. That’s the very definition of “archetypal.” That’s the core of what
constitutes “religious.”

Pain and suffering define the world. Of that, there can be no doubt. Sacrifice can hold
pain and suffering in abeyance, to a greater or lesser degree—and greater sacrifices can do
that more effectively than lesser. Of that, there can be no doubt. Everyone holds this
knowledge in their soul. Thus, the person who wishes to alleviate suffering—who wishes
to rectify the flaws in Being; who wants to bring about the best of all possible futures;
who wants to create Heaven on Earth—will make the greatest of sacrifices, of self and
child, of everything that is loved, to live a life aimed at the Good. He will forego
expediency. He will pursue the path of ultimate meaning. And he will in that manner
bring salvation to the ever-desperate world.

But is such a thing even possible? Is this simply not asking too much of the individual?
It’s all well and good for Christ, it might be objected—but He was the veritable Son of
God. But we do have other examples, some much less mythologized and archetypal.
Consider, for example, the case of Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher. After a
lifetime of seeking the truth and educating his countrymen, Socrates faced a trial for
crimes against the city-state of Athens, his hometown. His accusers provided him with
plenty of opportunity to simply leave, and avoid the trouble. But the great sage had
already considered and rejected this course of action. His companion Hermogenes
observed him at this time discussing “any and every subject” 1 other than his trial, and
asked him why he appeared so unconcerned. Socrates first answered that he had been

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preparing his whole life to defend himself, but then said something more mysterious
and significant: When he attempted specifically to consider strategies that would produce
acquittal “by fair means or foul” —or even when merely considering his potential
actions at the trial —he found himself interrupted by his divine sign: his internal spirit,
voice or daemon. Socrates discussed this voice at the trial itself. He said that one of the
factors distinguishing him from other men was his absolute willingness to listen to its
warnings—to stop speaking and cease acting when it objected. The Gods themselves had
deemed him wise above other men, not least for this reason, according to the Delphic
Oracle herself, held to be a reliable judge of such things.”

Because his ever-reliable internal voice objected to fleeing (or even to defending
himself) Socrates radically altered his view of the significance of his trial. He began to
consider that it might be a blessing, rather than a curse. He told Hermogenes of his
realization that the spirit to whom he had always listened might be offering him a way
out of life, in a manner “easiest but also the least irksome to one’s friends,” with
“sound body and a spirit capable of showing kindliness”- 1 and absent the “throes of
illness” and vexations of extreme old age. Socrates’ decision to accept his fate allowed
him to put away mortal terror in the face of death itself, prior to and during the trial, after
the sentence was handed down, and even later, during his execution. He saw that
his life had been so rich and full that he could let it go, gracefully. He was given the
opportunity to put his affairs in order. He saw that he could escape the terrible slow
degeneration of the advancing years. He came to understand all that was happening to
him as a gift from the gods. He was not therefore required to defend himself against his
accusers—at least not with the aim of pronouncing his innocence, and escaping his fate.
Instead, he turned the tables, addressing his judges in a manner that makes the reader
understand precisely why the town council wanted this man dead. Then he took his
poison, like a man.

Socrates rejected expediency, and the necessity for manipulation that accompanied it.
He chose instead, under the direst of conditions, to maintain his pursuit of the
meaningful and the true. Twenty-five hundred years later, we remember his decision and
take comfort from it. What can we learn from this? If you cease to utter falsehoods and
live according to the dictates of your conscience, you can maintain your nobility, even
when facing the ultimate threat; if you abide, truthfully and courageously, by the highest
of ideals, you will be provided with more security and strength than will be offered by any
short-sighted concentration on your own safety; if you live properly, fully, you can
discover meaning so profound that it protects you even from the fear of death.

Could all that possibly be true?

Death, Toil and Evil

The tragedy of self-conscious Being produces suffering, inevitable suffering. That
suffering in turn motivates the desire for selfish, immediate gratification—for expediency.
But sacrifice—and work—serves far more effectively than short-term impulsive pleasure
at keeping suffering at bay. However, tragedy itself (conceived of as the arbitrary
harshness of society and nature, set against the vulnerability of the individual) is not the
only—and perhaps not even the primary—source of suffering. There is also the problem
of evil to consider. The world is set hard against us, of a certainty, but man’s inhumanity
to man is something even worse. Thus, the problem of sacrifice is compounded in its
complexity: it is not only privation and mortal limitation that must be addressed by work
—by the willingness to offer, and to give up. It is the problem of evil as well.

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Consider, once again, the story of Adam and Eve. Life becomes very hard for their
children (that’s us) after the fall and awakening of our archetypal parents. First is the
terrible fate awaiting us in the post-Paradisal world—in the world of history. Not the least
of this is what Goethe called “our creative, endless toil.”- Humans work, as we have
seen. We work because we have awakened to the truth of our own vulnerability, our
subjugation to disease and death, and wish to protect ourselves for as long as possible.
Once we can see the future, we must prepare for it, or live in denial and terror. We
therefore sacrifice the pleasures of today for the sake of a better tomorrow. But the
realization of mortality and the necessity of work is not the only revelation to Adam and
Eve when they eat the forbidden Fruit, wake up, and open their eyes. They were also
granted (or cursed by) the knowledge of Good and Evil.

It took me decades to understand what that means (to understand even part of what
that means). It’s this: once you become consciously aware that you, yourself, are
vulnerable, you understand the nature of human vulnerability, in general. You understand
what it’s like to be fearful, and angry, and resentful, and bitter. You understand what pain
means. And once you truly understand such feelings in yourself, and how they’re
produced, you understand how to produce them in others. It is in this manner that the self-
conscious beings that we are become voluntarily and exquisitely capable of tormenting
others (and ourselves, of course—but it’s the others we are concerned about right now).
We see the consequences of this new knowledge manifest themselves when we meet Cain
and Abel, the sons of Adam and Eve.

By the time of their appearance, mankind has learned to make sacrifices to God. On
altars of stone, designed for that purpose, a communal ritual is performed: the
immolation of something valuable, a choice animal or portion thereof, and its
transformation through fire to the smoke (to the spirit) that rises to Heaven above. In
this manner, the idea of delay is dramatized, so that the future might improve. Abel’s
sacrifices are accepted by God, and he flourishes. Cain’s, however, are rejected. He
becomes jealous and bitter—and it’s no wonder. If someone fails and is rejected because
he refused to make any sacrifices at all—well, that’s at least understandable. He may still
feel resentful and vengeful, but knows in his heart that he is personally to blame. That
knowledge generally places a limit on his outrage. It’s much worse, however, if he had
actually foregone the pleasures of the moment—if he had strived and toiled and things
still didn’t work out—if he was rejected, despite his efforts. Then he’s lost the present and
the future. Then his work—his sacrifice—has been pointless. Under such conditions, the
world darkens, and the soul rebels.

Cain is outraged by his rejection. He confronts God, accuses Him, and curses His
creation. That proves to be a very poor decision. God responds, in no uncertain terms,
that the fault is all with Cain—and worse: that Cain has knowingly and creatively dallied
with sin, and reaped the consequences. This is not at all what Cain wanted to hear. It’s
by no means an apology on God’s part. Instead, it’s insult, added to injury. Cain,
embittered to the core by God’s response, plots revenge. He defies the creator,
audaciously. It’s daring. Cain knows how to hurt. He’s self-conscious, after all—and has
become even more so, in his suffering and shame. So, he murders Abel in cold blood. He
kills his brother, his own ideal (as Abel is everything Cain wishes to be). He commits this
most terrible of crimes to spite himself, all of mankind, and God Himself, all at once. He
does it to wreak havoc and gain his vengeance. He does it to register his fundamental
opposition to existence—to protest the intolerable vagaries of Being itself. And Cain’s
children—the offspring, as it were of both his body and his decision—are worse. In his
existential fury, Cain kills once. Lamech, his descendant, goes much further. “I have slain
a man to my wounding,” says Lamech,” and a young man to my hurt. If Cain shall be
avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold” (Genesis 4:23-24). Tubulcain, an

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instructor of “every artificer in brass and iron” (Genesis 4:22), is by tradition seven
generations from Cain—and the first creator of weapons of war. And next, in the Genesis
stories, comes the flood. The juxtaposition is by no means accidental.

Evil enters the world with self-consciousness. The toil with which God curses Adam—that’s
bad enough. The trouble in childbirth with which Eve is burdened and her consequent
dependence on her husband are no trivial matters, either. They are indicative of the
implicit and oft-agonizing tragedies of insufficiency, privation, brute necessity and
subjugation to illness and death that simultaneously define and plague existence. Their
mere factual reality is sometimes sufficient to turn even a courageous person against life.
It has been my experience, however, that human beings are strong enough to tolerate the
implicit tragedies of Being without faltering—without breaking or, worse, breaking bad. I
have seen evidence of this repeatedly in my private life, in my work as a professor, and in
my role as a clinical practitioner. Earthquakes, floods, poverty, cancer—we’re tough
enough to take on all of that. But human evil adds a whole new dimension of misery to
the world. It is for this reason that the rise of self-consciousness and its attendant
realization of mortality and knowledge of Good and Evil is presented in the early chapters
of Genesis (and in the vast tradition that surrounds them) as a cataclysm of cosmic
magnitude.

Conscious human malevolence can break the spirit even tragedy could not shake. I
remember discovering (with her) that one of my clients had been shocked into years of
serious post-traumatic stress disorder—daily physical shaking and terror, and chronic
nightly insomnia—by the mere expression on her enraged, drunken boyfriend’s face. His
“fallen countenance” (Genesis 4:5) indicated his clear and conscious desire to do her
harm. She was more naive than she should have been, and that predisposed her to the
trauma, but that’s not the point: the voluntary evil we do one another can be profoundly
and permanently damaging, even to the strong. And what is it, precisely, that motivates
such evil?

It doesn’t make itself manifest merely in consequence of the hard lot of life. It doesn’t
even emerge, simply, because of failure itself, or because of the disappointment and
bitterness that failure often and understandably engenders. But the hard lot of life,
magnified by the consequence of continually rejected sacrifices (however poorly
conceptualized; however half-heartedly executed)? That will bend and twist people into
the truly monstrous forms who then begin, consciously, to work evil; who then begin to
generate for themselves and others little besides pain and suffering (and who do it for the
sake of that pain and suffering). In that manner, a truly vicious circle takes hold:
begrudging sacrifice, half-heartedly undertaken; rejection of that sacrifice by God or by
reality (take your pick); angry resentment, generated by that rejection; descent into
bitterness and the desire for revenge; sacrifice undertaken even more begrudgingly, or
refused altogether. And it’s Hell itself that serves as the destination place of that
downward spiral.

Life is indeed “nasty, brutish and short,” as the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes so
memorably remarked. But man’s capacity for evil makes it worse. This means that the
central problem of life—the dealing with its brute facts—is not merely what and how to
sacrifice to diminish suffering, but what and how to sacrifice to diminish suffering and evil
—the conscious and voluntary and vengeful source of the worst suffering. The story of Cain and
Abel is one manifestation of the archetypal tale of the hostile brothers, hero and
adversary: the two elements of the individual human psyche, one aimed up, at the Good,
and the other, down, at Hell itself. Abel is a hero, true: but a hero who is ultimately
defeated by Cain. Abel could please God—a non-trivial and unlikely accomplishment—but
he could not overcome human evil. For this reason, Abel is archetypally incomplete.
Perhaps he was naive, although a vengeful brother can be inconceivably treacherous and

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subtil, like the snake in Genesis 3:1. But excuses—even reasons—even understandable
reasons—don’t matter; not in the final analysis. The problem of evil remained unsolved
even by the divinely acceptable sacrifices of Abel. It took thousands of additional years for
humanity to come up with anything else resembling a solution. The same issue emerges
again, in its culminating form, the story of Christ and his temptation by Satan. But this
time it’s expressed more comprehensively—and the hero wins.

Evil, Confronted

Jesus was led into the wilderness, according to the story, “to be tempted by the Devil”
(Matthew 4:1), prior to his crucifixion. This is the story of Cain, restated abstractly. Cain
is neither content nor happy, as we have seen. He’s working hard, or so he thinks, but
God is not pleased. Meanwhile, Abel is, by all appearances, dancing his way through life.
His crops flourish. Women love him. Worst of all, he’s a genuinely good man. Everyone
knows it. He deserves his good fortune. All the more reason to envy and hate him. Things
do not progress well for Cain, by contrast, and he broods on his misfortune, like a vulture
on an egg. He strives, in his misery, to give birth to something hellish and, in doing so,
enters the desert wilderness of his own mind. He obsesses over his ill fortune; his
betrayal by God. He nourishes his resentment. He indulges in ever more elaborate
fantasies of revenge. And as he does so, his arrogance grows to Luciferian proportions.
“I’m ill-used and oppressed,” he thinks. “This is a stupid bloody planet. As far as I’m
concerned, it can go to Hell.” And with that, Cain encounters Satan in the wilderness, for
all intents and purposes, and falls prey to his temptations. And he does what he can to
make things as bad as possible, motivated by (in John Milton’s imperishable words):

So deep a malice, to confound the Race
Of Mankind in one Root, and Earth with Hell
to mingle and involve—done all to spite
the Great Creator..™

Cain turns to Evil to obtain what Good denied him, and he does it voluntarily, self¬
consciously and with malice aforethought.

Christ takes a different path. His sojourn in the desert is the dark night of the soul—a
deeply human and universal human experience. It’s the journey to that place each of us
goes when things fall apart, friends and family are distant, hopelessness and despair reign,
and black nihilism beckons. And, let us suggest, in testament to the exactitude of the
story: forty days and nights starving alone in the wilderness might take you exactly to that
place. It is in such a manner that the objective and subjective worlds come crashing,
synchronistically, together. Forty days is a deeply symbolic period of time, echoing the
forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the desert after escaping the tyranny of
Pharaoh and Egypt. Forty days is a long time in the underworld of dark assumptions,
confusion and fear—long enough to journey to the very center, which is Hell itself. A
journey there to see the sights can be undertaken by anyone—anyone, that is, who is
willing to take the evil of self and Man with sufficient seriousness. A bit of familiarity
with history can help. A sojourn through the totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century,
with its concentration camps, forced labor and murderous ideological pathologies is as
good a place as any to start—that, and some consideration of the fact that worst of the
concentration camp guards were human, all-too-human, too. That’s all part of making the
desert story real again; part of updating it, for the modern mind.

“After Auschwitz,” said Theodor Adorno, student of authoritarianism, “there should be
no poetry.” He was wrong. But the poetry should be about Auschwitz. In the grim wake
of the last ten decades of the previous millennium, the terrible destructiveness of man has
become a problem whose seriousness self-evidently dwarfs even the problem of
unredeemed suffering. And neither one of those problems is going to be solved in the

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absence of a solution to the other. This is where the idea of Christ’s taking on the sins of
mankind as if they were His own becomes key, opening the door to deep understanding of
the desert encounter with the devil himself. “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,”
said the Roman playwright Terence: nothing human is alien to me.

“No tree can grow to Heaven,” adds the ever-terrifying Carl Gustav Jung, psychoanalyst
extraordinaire, “unless its roots reach down to Hell.”! Such a statement should give
everyone who encounters it pause. There was no possibility for movement upward, in
that great psychiatrist’s deeply considered opinion, without a corresponding move down.
It is for this reason that enlightenment is so rare. Who is willing to do that? Do you really
want to meet who’s in charge, at the very bottom of the most wicked thoughts? What did
Eric Harris, mass murderer of the Columbine high school, write so incomprehensibly the
very day prior to massacring his classmates? It’s interesting, when I’m in my human form,
knowing I’m going to die. Everything has a touch of triviality to it. Who would dare explain
such a missive?—or, worse, explain it away?

In the desert, Christ encounters Satan (see Luke 4:1-13 and Matthew 4:1-11). This
story has a clear psychological meaning—a metaphorical meaning—in addition to
whatever else material and metaphysical alike it might signify. It means that Christ is
forever He who determines to take personal responsibility for the full depth of human depravity. It
means that Christ is eternally He who is willing to confront and deeply consider and risk
the temptations posed by the most malevolent elements of human nature. It means that
Christ is always he who is willing to confront evil—consciously, fully and voluntarily—in
the form that dwelt simultaneously within Him and in the world. This is nothing merely
abstract (although it is abstract); nothing to be brushed over. It’s no merely intellectual
matter.

Soldiers who develop post-traumatic stress disorder frequently develop it not because
of something they saw, but because of something they did. There are many demons, so
to speak, on the battlefield. Involvement in warfare is something that can open a gateway
to Hell. Now and then something climbs through and possesses some naive farm-boy
from Iowa, and he turns monstrous. He does something terrible. He rapes and kills the
women and massacres the infants of My Lai. And he watches himself do it. And some
dark part of him enjoys it—and that is the part that is most unforgettable. And, later, he
will not know how to reconcile himself with the reality about himself and the world that
was then revealed. And no wonder.

In the great and fundamental myths of ancient Egypt, the god Horus—often regarded as
a precursor to Christ, historically and conceptually speaking —experienced the same
thing, when he confronted his evil uncle Set, usurper of the throne of Osiris, Horus’s
father. Horus, the all-seeing Egyptian falcon god, the Egyptian eye of supreme, eternal
attention itself, has the courage to contend with Set’s true nature, meeting him in direct
combat. In the struggle with his dread uncle, however, his consciousness is damaged. He
loses an eye. This is despite his godly stature and his unparalleled capacity for vision.
What would a mere man lose, who attempted the same thing? But perhaps he might gain
in internal vision and understanding something proportional to what he loses in
perception of the outside world.

Satan embodies the refusal of sacrifice; he is arrogance, incarnate; spite, deceit, and
cruel, conscious malevolence. He is pure hatred of Man, God and Being. He will not
humble himself, even when he knows full well that he should. Furthermore, he knows
exactly what he is doing, obsessed with the desire for destruction, and does it
deliberately, thoughtfully and completely. It has to be him, therefore—the very archetype
of Evil—who confronts and tempts Christ, the archetype of Good. It must be him who
offers to the Savior of Mankind, under the most trying of conditions, what all men most
ardently desire.

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Satan first tempts the starving Christ to quell His hunger by transforming the desert
rocks into bread. Then he suggests that He throw Himself off a cliff calling on God and
the angels to break His fall. Christ responds to the first temptation by saying, “One does
not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” What
does this answer mean? It means that even under conditions of extreme privation, there
are more important things than food. To put it another way: Bread is of little use to the
man who has betrayed his soul, even if he is currently starving. Christ could clearly
use his near-infinite power, as Satan indicates, to gain bread, now—to break his fast—
even, in the broader sense, to gain wealth, in the world (which would theoretically solve
the problem of bread, more permanently). But at what cost? And to what gain? Gluttony,
in the midst of moral desolation? That’s the poorest and most miserable of feasts. Christ
aims, therefore, at something higher: at the description of a mode of Being that would
finally and forever solve the problem of hunger. If we all chose instead of expedience to
dine on the Word of God? That would require each and every person to live, and produce,
and sacrifice, and speak, and share in a manner that would permanently render the
privation of hunger a thing of the past. And that’s how the problem of hunger in the
privations of the desert is most truly and finally addressed.

There are other indications of this in the gospels, in dramatic, enacted form. Christ is
continually portrayed as the purveyor of endless sustenance. He miraculously multiplies
bread and fish. He turns water into wine. What does this mean? It’s a call to the pursuit
of higher meaning as the mode of living that is simultaneously most practical and of
highest quality. It’s a call portrayed in dramatic/literary form: live as the archetypal
Saviour lives, and you and those around you will hunger no more. The beneficence of the
world manifests itself to those who live properly. That’s better than bread. That’s better
than the money that will buy bread. Thus Christ, the symbolically perfect individual,
overcomes the first temptation. Two more follow.

“Throw yourself off that cliff,” Satan says, offering the next temptation. “If God exists,
He will surely save you. If you are in fact his Son, God will surely save you.” Why would
God not make Himself manifest, to rescue His only begotten Child from hunger and
isolation and the presence of great evil? But that establishes no pattern for life. It doesn’t
even work as literature. The deus ex machina —the emergence of a divine force that
magically rescues the hero from his predicament—is the cheapest trick in the hack
writer’s playbook. It makes a mockery of independence, and courage, and destiny, and
free will, and responsibility. Furthermore, God is in no wise a safety net for the blind.
He’s not someone to be commanded to perform magic tricks, or forced into Self¬
revelation—not even by His own Son.

“Do not put the Lord your God to the test” (Matthew 4:7)—this answer, though rather
brief, dispenses with the second temptation. Christ does not casually order or even dare
ask God to intervene on his behalf. He refuses to dispense with His responsibility for the
events of His own life. He refuses to demand that God prove His presence. He refuses, as
well, to solve the problems of mortal vulnerability in a merely personal manner)—by
compelling God to save Him—because that would not solve the problem for everyone else
and for all time. There is also the echo of the rejection of the comforts of insanity in this
forgone temptation. Easy but psychotic self-identification as the merely magical Messiah
might well have been a genuine temptation under the harsh conditions of Christ’s sojourn
in the desert. Instead He rejects the idea that salvation—or even survival, in the shorter
term—depends on narcissistic displays of superiority and the commanding of God, even
by His Son.

Finally comes the third temptation, the most compelling of all. Christ sees the
kingdoms of the world laid before Him for the taking. That’s the siren call of earthly
power: the opportunity to control and order everyone and everything. Christ is offered the

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pinnacle of the dominance hierarchy, the animalistic desire of every naked ape: the
obedience of all, the most wondrous of estates, the power to build and to increase, the
possibility of unlimited sensual gratification. That’s expedience, writ large. But that’s not
all. Such expansion of status also provides unlimited opportunity for the inner darkness
to reveal itself. The lust for blood, rape and destruction is very much part of power’s
attraction. It is not only that men desire power so that they will no longer suffer. It is not
only that they desire power so that they can overcome subjugation to want, disease and
death. Power also means the capacity to take vengeance, ensure submission, and crush
enemies. Grant Cain enough power and he will not only kill Abel. He will torture him,
first, imaginatively and endlessly. Then and only then will he kill him. Then he will come
after everyone else.

There’s something above even the pinnacle of the highest of dominance hierarchies,
access to which should not be sacrificed for mere proximal success. It’s a real place, too,
although not to be conceptualized in the standard geographical sense of place we typically
use to orient ourselves. I had a vision, once, of an immense landscape, spread for miles
out to the horizon before me. I was high in the air, granted a bird’s-eye view. Everywhere
I could see great stratified multi-storied pyramids of glass, some small, some large, some
overlapping, some separate—all akin to modern skyscrapers; all full of people striving to
reach each pyramid’s very pinnacle. But there was something above that pinnacle, a
domain outside each pyramid, in which all were nested. That was the privileged position
of the eye that could or perhaps chose to soar freely above the fray; that chose not to
dominate any specific group or cause but instead to somehow simultaneously transcend
all. That was attention, itself, pure and untrammeled: detached, alert, watchful attention,
waiting to act when the time was right and the place had been established. As the Tao te
Ching has it:

He who contrives, defeats his purpose;

and he who is grasping, loses.

The sage does not contrive to win,

and therefore is not defeated;

he is not grasping, so does not lose.}

There is a powerful call to proper Being in the story of the third temptation. To obtain the
greatest possible prize—the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth, the
resurrection of Paradise—the individual must conduct his or her life in a manner that
requires the rejection of immediate gratification, of natural and perverse desires alike, no
matter how powerfully and convincingly and realistically those are offered, and dispense,
as well with the temptations of evil. Evil amplifies the catastrophe of life, increasing
dramatically the motivation for expediency already there because of the essential tragedy
of Being. Sacrifice of the more prosaic sort can keep that tragedy at bay, more or less
successfully, but it takes a special kind of sacrifice to defeat evil. It is the description of
that special sacrifice that has preoccupied the Christian (and more than Christian)
imagination for centuries. Why has it not had the desired effect? Why do we remain
unconvinced that there is no better plan than lifting our heads skyward, aiming at the
Good, and sacrificing everything to that ambition? Have we merely failed to understand,
or have we fallen, wilfully or otherwise, off the path?

Christianity and its Problems

Carl Jung hypothesized that the European mind found itself motivated to develop the
cognitive technologies of science—to investigate the material world—after implicitly
concluding that Christianity, with its laser-like emphasis on spiritual salvation, had failed
to sufficiently address the problem of suffering in the here-and-now. This realization
became unbearably acute in the three or four centuries before the Renaissance. In

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consequence, a strange, profound, compensatory fantasy began to emerge, deep in the
collective Western psyche, manifesting itself first in the strange musings of alchemy, and
developing only after many centuries into the fully articulated form of science. - It was
the alchemists who first seriously began to examine the transformations of matter,
hoping to discover the secrets of health, wealth and longevity. These great dreamers
(Newton foremost among them ) intuited and then imagined that the material world,
damned by the Church, held secrets the revelation of which could free humanity from its
earthly pain and limitations. It was that vision, driven by doubt, that provided the
tremendous collective and individual motivational power necessary for the development
of science, with its extreme demands on individual thinkers for concentration and delay of
gratification.

This is not to say that Christianity, even in its incompletely realized form, was a failure.

12 RULES FOR LIFE JORDAN B. PETERSON

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