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 und

12 RULES FOR LIFE JORDAN B. PETERSON

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