Jordan peterson 12 rules for life summary

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3 Sentence Summary

In 12 Rules For Life, Jordan Peterson weaves together personal anecdotes, intellectual history, and religious imagery into a truly unique book that explores how to live a life full of meaning and purpose. This book broadly discusses individual responsibility, discipline, freedom and adventure in ways that range from the humorous and surprising, to the deeply philosophical and serious. Dr. Peterson’s unconventional style is full of encouragement and optimism that serves his message well; that a better world is possible if we aim to swallow our pride, take responsibility for our individual faults, listen to each other, and act with compassion and humility.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Stand up straight, speak boldly, and take individual responsibility for your life.
2. Life is suffering. But meaning is found in the choices you make to alleviate human anguish.
3. Be cautious when extending a helping hand that you don’t get pulled down. Falling down is much easier than rising up. Not everyone who is failing is a victim, and not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise.
4. Always tell the truth. Truth builds strength of character that allows you to prevail against adversity.
5. Don’t ever underestimate the destructive power of sins of omission. Living things die without attention.

Please Note

The following book summary is a collection of my notes and highlights taken straight from the book. Most of them are direct quotes. Some are paraphrases. Very few are my own words.

These notes are informal. I try to organize them by chapter. But I pick and choose ideas to include at my discretion.

Enjoy!

12 Rules

1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back
2. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
3. Make friends with people who want the best for you
4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
5. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
6. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
7. Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
8. Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie
9. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
10. Be precise in your speech
11. Do not bother children when they are skateboarding
12. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

Forward by Dr. Norman Doidge, MD

• Why should we be judged according to another’s rule? The story of the golden calf reminds us that without rules, we quickly become slaves to our passions—and there’s nothing freeing about that.
• The best rules do not ultimately restrict us but instead facilitate our goals and make for fuller, freer lives.
• 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.
• 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.

Rule #1. Stand Up Straight With Your Shoulders Back

Price’s Law

• 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.
• It’s a winner-take-all world in many domains—especially creative domains.
  • The richest 85 people have as much as the bottom 3.5 billion.
  • Four classical composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky) wrote almost all the music played by modern orchestras.
  • 1.5 million separately titled books are sold each year in the US, but only 500 of these titles sell more than 100,000 copies.

For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

Matthew 25:29

The Nature of Nature

• The environment—the nature that selects and initiates evolution—itself transforms.
• Nature selects fitness. Fitness is the probability that a given organism will leave offspring. The “fit” in “fitness” is, therefore, the matching of organismal attribute to environmental demand.
• 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 you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.

Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland

• But nature is not simply dynamic, either. Some things change quickly, but they are nested within other things that change less quickly. Leaves change more quickly than tress, and trees more quickly than forests. Weather changes faster than climate. It’s chaos, within order, within chaos, within higher order. The order that is most real is the order that is most unchanging.
• It is a mistake to conceptualize nature romantically. It can be beautiful, majestic and harmonious. But “the environment” is also elephantiasis and guinea worms, anopheles mosquitoes and malaria, starvation-level droughts, AIDS and the Black Plague.
• It is a mistake to believe that nature is something strictly segregated from the cultural constructs that have emerged within it.
• The order within 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.

Dominance Hierarchies

• The dominance hierarchy is not capitalism. It’s not communism, the military-industrial complex, or the patriarchy. It’s not even a human creation. 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.
• Lobsters have been around for more than 350 million years. The fact that they organize themselves into dominance hierarchies (status and society) is evidence that this social phenomenon has been an essentially permanent feature of the environment to which all complex life has adapted.
• 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.
• 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.

Routines Regulate

• Erratic habits of sleeping and eating can interfere with the control system’s function.
• Stable and reliable daily habits help us regulate our “master control system”.
• Anxiety and depression cannot be easily treated if the sufferer has unpredictable daily routines.

Positive Feedback Loops

• There are many systems of interaction between brain, body and social world that can get caught in positive feedback loops.
• Depressed people 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.

Rising Up

• Sometimes people are bullied because they can’t fight back. This can happen to people who are weaker, physically, than their opponents.
• 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. 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

What it Means to Stand Up Straight

• 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.
• 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.

Benefits of Standing Up Straight

• People around you will start to assume that you are competent and able (or at least they will not immediately conclude the reverse).
• You will feel less anxious.
• Your conversations will flow better, with fewer awkward pauses. This will make you more likely to meet people, interact with them, and impress them.
• The probability of good things happening to you will increase.
• 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.

Rule #2: Treat Yourself Like Someone You Are Responsible For Helping

Pets

• People are generally better at filling and properly administering prescription medication to their pets than to themselves.

Chaos and Order

• Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself. It’s unexplored territory.
• Chaos is all those things and situations we neither know nor understand.
• Chaos is freedom, dreadful freedom, too.
• Order is explored territory.
• Order is tribe, religion, hearth, home and country.
• 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.
• Chaos and order are fundamental elements because every 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.

Only Humans Are Capable of Evil

• The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity for evil. The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal.
• Predators are 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Human beings have a great capacity for wrongdoing. It’s an attribute that is unique in the world of life.

A Spark of the Divine

• Many people 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.
• 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 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.
• “Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “Loving your neighbor as yourself” Neither statement has anything to do with being nice. 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?
• 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…We are low-resolution 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.

Give Yourself Some Respect

• Some people degenerate into the hell of resentment and the hatred of Being, but most refuse to do so, despite their suffering and disappointment and losses and inadequacies and ugliness, and again that is a miracle for those with the eyes to see it.
• 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 obligated to take care of yourself.
• 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.”
• 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.
• Start with yourself. Take care of yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being.
• You could help direct the world, on its careening trajectory, a bit more toward Heaven and a bit more away from Hell…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.

Rule #3: Make Friends With People Who Want The Best For You

Bad Friends

• 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.
• Sometimes people choose bad friends because they want to rescue someone.

Not Everyone Who Is Failing Is A Victim

• But not everyone who is failing is a victim, and not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise.
• People 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.
• It is very difficult to distinguish between someone truly wanting and needing help and someone who is merely exploiting a willing helper.

Selfless Help Or Narcissistic Vanity

• The attempt to rescue someone isn’t just naïveté. It is often fuelled by vanity and narcissism.

Objection

Christ himself 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?

• Delinquency spreads a whole lot easier than stability. Down is a lot easier that up.
• Maybe you help someone because you’re a strong, generous person who wants to do the right thing. But it’s also likely—and, perhaps, more likely—that you just want to draw attention to your inexhaustible reserves of compassion and good-will.
• Assume first that you are doing the easiest thing, and not the most difficult.

Personal Responsibility

• 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.
• 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.

Vice is Easy

• It is far more likely that a given individual has just decided to reject the path upward becuase of its difficulty.
• Vice is easy. Failure is easy, too. It’s easier not to shoulder a burden. It’s easier not to think, and not to do, and not to care. It’s easier to put offf until tomorrow what needs to be done today, and drown the upcoming months and years in today’s cheap pleasures.

Choose People Who Want Things to Be Better

• Carl Rogers, the famous humanistic psychologist, beleived it was impossible to start a therapeutic relationship if the person seeking help did not want to improve. Rogers believed it was impossible to convince someone to change for the better. The desire to improve was, instead, the precondition for progress.
• You should choose pepole who want things to be better, not worse. It’s appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improve.
• Don’t think it is easier to surround yourslef with good healthy people than with bad unhealthy people. It’s not. A good, healthy person is an ideal. It requires strength and daring to stand up near such a person. Have some humility. Have some courage. Use your judgement, and protect yourself from too-uncritical compassion and pity.

Rule #4: Compare Yourself To Who You Were Yesterday, Not To Who Someone Else Is Today

The Internal Critic

• If the internal voice makes you doubt the value of your endeavours—or your life, or life itself—perhaps you should stop listening.
• There will always be people better than you—that’s a cliché of nihilism, like the phrase, In a million years, who’s going to know the difference? The proper response to that statement is not, Well, then, everything is meaningless. It’s, Any idiot can choose a frame of time whithin which nothing matters. Talking yourself into irrelevance is not a profound critique of Being. It’s a cheap trick of the rational mind.

Many Good Games to Play

• If something can be done at all, it can be done better or worse.
• There is not just one game at which to succeed or fail. There are many good games—games that match your talents, involve you productively with other people, and sustain and even improve themselves across time. Lawyer is a good game. So is plumber, physician, carpenter, or school-teacher.
• If changing games does not work, you can invent a new one.
• It’s also unlikely that you’re playing only one game. You have a career and friends and family members and personal projects and artistic endeavors and athletic pursuits.
• You might object: I should be winning at everything! But winning at everything might only mean that you’re not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning but you’re not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning.
• You might come to realize that the specifics of the many games you are playing are so unique to you, so individual, that comparison to others is simply inappropriate.
• Perhaps you are overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do have. There’s some real utility in gratitude. It’s also good protection against the dangers of victimhood and resentment.

Debilitating Comparisons

When the internal critic puts you down using such comparisons, here’s how it operates:

1. First, it selects a single, arbitrary domain of comparison (fame, maybe, or power).
2. Then it acts as if that domain is the only one that is relevant.
3. Then it contrasts you unfavourably with someone truly stellar, within that domain.

Find Meaning in the Journey

• Even when satisfied, temporarily, we remain curious. We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better.
• Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak.
• What you aim at determines what you see.
• Making your life better means adopting a lot of responsibility, and that takes more effort and care than living stupidly in pain and remaining arrogant, deceitful and resentful.
• You cannot aim yourself at anything if you are completely undisciplined and untutored. You will not know what to target, and you won’t fly straight, even if you somehow get your aim right.

Faith to Aim High

• Faith is not at all the will to believe things that you know perfectly well to be false. Faith is not the childish belief in magic. That is ignorance or even willful blindness. It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalitites of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being. It is simultaneously the will to dare set your sights at the unachievable, and to sacrifice everything, including (and most importantly) your life.
• Aim high. Set your sights on the betterment of Being. Align yourself, in your soul, with Truth and the Highest Good. There is habitable order to establish and beauty to bring into existence. There is evil to overcome, suffering to ameliorate, and yourself to better.

Rule #5: Do Not Let Your Children Do Anything That Makes You Dislike Them

When You Don’t Say “No”

• The desire of parents to let their child act without correction on every impulse preversely produced precisely the opposite effect: they deprived him instead of every opportunity to engage in independent action. Because they did not dare to teach him what “No” means, he had no conception of the reasonable limits enabling maximal toddler autonomy.

Individual Problems and Social Corruption

• Even more problematic is the insistence logically stemming from this presumption of social corruption that all individual problems, no matter how rare, must be resolved by cultural restructuring, no matter how radical. Our society faces the increasing call to deconstruct its stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people who do not or will not fit into the categories upon which even our perceptions are based. This is not a good thing. Each person’s private trouble cannot be solved by a social revolution, because revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous.
• Altering our ways of social being carelessly in the name of some ideological shibboleth (diversity springs to mind) is likely to produce far more trouble than good, given the suffering that even small revolutions generally produce.
• Horror and terror lurk behind the walls provided so wisely by our ancestors. We tear them down at our peril. We skate, unconsciously, on thin ice, with deep, cold waters below, where unimaginable monsters lurk.

Peaceful Societies

• Evidence strongly suggests that human beings have become more peaceful, rather than less so, as time has progressed and societies became larger and more organized.
• The !Kung bushmen of Africa, romanticized in the 1950s by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas as the “harmless people,” had a yearly murder rate of 40 per 100,000, which declined by more than 30% once they became subject to state authority. This is a very instructive example of complex social structures serving to reduce, not exacerbate, the violent tendencies of human beings.
• Because children, like other human beings, are not only good, they cannot simply be left to their own devices, untouched by society, and bloom into perfection. Even dogs must be socialized if they are to become acceptable members of the pack—and children are much more complex than dogs. This means that they are much more likely to go complexly astray if they are not trained, disciplined and properly encouraged.

Discipline Your Children

• Children can be damaged as much or more by a lack of incisive attention as they are by abuse, mental or physical. This is damage by omission, rather than commission, but it is no less severe and long-lasting.
• More often than not, modern parents are simply paralyzed by the fear that they will no longer be liked or even loved by their children if they chastise them for any reason. They want their children’s friendship above all, and are willing to sacrifice respect to get it. This is not good. A child will have many friends, but only two parents—if that—and parents are more, not less, than friends.
• It is an act of responsibility to discipline a child. It is not anger at misbehavior. It is not revenge for a misdeed. It is instead a careful combination of mercy and long-term judgment.
• Because of this combination of responsibility and difficulty, any suggestion that all constraints placed on children are damaging can be perversely welcome. Such a notion, once accepted, allows adults who should know better to abandon their duty to serve as agents of enculturation and pretend that doing so is good for children. It’s a deep and pernicious act of self-deception. It’s lazy, cruel and inexcusable.

Helpful Rules

• We assume that rules will irremediably inhibit what would otherwise be the boundless and intrinsic creativity of our children, even theough the scientific literature clearly indicates, first, that creativity beyond the trivial is shockingly rare and second, that strict limitations facilitate rather than inhibit creative achievement.
• Violence, after all, is no mystery. It’s peace that’s the mystery. Violence is the default. It’s easy. It’s peace that is difficult: learned, inculcated, earned.
• Scared parents think that a crying child is always sad or hurt. This is simply not true. Anger is one of the most common reasons for crying.
• Accepting an objection as formulated is halfway to accepting its validity, and that can be dangerous if the question is ill-posed.
• Bad laws drive out respect for good laws.
• First, limit the rules. Then, use the least force necessary to enforce those rules.

Rule for Beginners

1. Do not bite, kick or hit, except in self-defence.
2. Do not torture and bully other children, so you don’t end up in jail.
3. Eat in a civilized and thankful manner, so that people are happy to have you at their house, and pleased to feed you.
4. Learn to share, so other people will play with you.
5. Pay attention when spoken to by adults, so they don’t hate you and might therefore deign to teach you something.
6. Go to sleep properly, and peaceably, so that your parents can have a private life and not resent your existence.
7. Take care of your belongings, because you need to learn how and because you’re lucky to have them.
8. Be good company when something fun is happening, so that you’re invited for the fun.
9. Act so that other people are happy you’re around, so that people will want you around.

The Meaning of “No”

• To hold the no excuse for physical punishment theory is to assume that the word no can be effectively uttered to another person in the absence of the threat of punishment.
• What no means, in the final analysis, is always, “If you continue to do that, something you do no like will happen to you.” Otherwise it means nothing.
• The only time no ever means no in the absence of violence is when it is uttered by one civilized person to another.

Discipline for Children

• Time out can be an extremely effective form of punishment, particularly if the misbehaving child is welcome as soon as he controls his temper.
• For the child who is pushing the limits in a spectacular way, a swat across the backside can indicate requisite seriousness on the part of a responsible adult.
• There are some situtation in which even that will not suffice, partly because some children are very determined, exploratory, and tough, or because the offending behaviour is truly severe. And if you’re not thinking such things through, then you’re not acting responsibly as a parent. You’re leaving the dirty work to someone else, who will be much dirtier in doing it.

Parenting in Pairs

• Parents should come in pairs. Raising young children is demanding and exhausting.
• It’s easy for one parent to make a mistake. Insomnia, hunger, the aftermath of an argument, a hangover, a bad day at work—any of these things singly can make a person unreasonable, while in combination they can produce someone dangerous.
• Parents should come in pairs so the father of a newborn can watch the new mother so she won’t get worn out and do something desperate after hearing her colicky baby wail from eleven in the evening until five in the morning for thirty nights in a row. I am not saying we should be mean to single mothers, many of whom struglle impossibly and courageously—and a proportion of whom have had to escape, singly, from a brutal realtionship—but that doesn’t mean we should pretend that all family forms are equally viable. They’re not. Period.
• Parents should understand their own capacity to be harsh, vengeful, arrogant, resentful, angry, and deceitful. Very few people set out, consciously, to do a terrible job as father or mother, but bad parenting happens all the time. This is because people have a great capacity for evil, as well as good—and because they remain willfully blind to that fact.
• Parents have a duty to act as proxies for the real world. This obligation supersedes any responsibility to ensure happiness, foster createivity, or boost self-esteem. It is the primary duty of parents to make their children socially desirable. That will provide the child with opportunity, self-regard, and security.

Rule #6: Set Your House In Perfect Order Before You Criticize The World

Good from Evil

• Truly terrible things happen to people. It’s no wonder they’re out for revenge. Under such conditions, vengeance seems a moral necessity. How can it be distinguished from the demand for justice? After the experience of terrible atrocity, isn’t forgiveness just cowardice, or lack of willpower? Such quesitons torment me. But people emerge from terrible pasts to do good, and not evil. Although such an accomplishment can seem superhuman.
• People who experience evil may certainly desire to perpetuate it, to pay it forward. But it is also possible to learn good by experiencing evil.
• Many, perhaps even most, of the adults who abuse children were abused themselves as children. However, the majority of people who were abused as children do not abuse their own children.

Things Fall Apart

Hurricane Katrina

When the hurricane hit New Orleans, and the town sank under the waves, was that a natural disaster?

The Dutch prepare their dikes for the worst storm in ten thousand years. Had New Orleans followed that example, no tragedy would have occurred.

It’s not that no one knew. The Flood Control Act of 1965 mandated improvements in the levee system that held back Lake Pontchartrain. The system was to be completed in 1978. Forty years later, only 60% of the work had been done.

Willful blindness and corruption took the city down.

A hurricane is an act of God. But failure to prepare, when the necessity for preparation is known—that’s sin. That’s failure to hit the mark. And the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23).

Stop Doing What You Know to Be Wrong—Without Question

• Have you cleaned up your life? If the answer is no, here’s something to try: Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong.
• Inopportune questioning can confuse, without enlightening, as well as deflecting you from action. You can know that something is wrong or right without knowing why.
• Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?

Rule #7: Pursue What Is Meaningful (Not What is Expedient)

• Life is suffering. That’s clear. There is no more basic, irrefutable truth.

The Delay of Gratification

• When engaging in sacrifice, our forefathers began to act out what would be considered a proposition, if it were stated in words: that something better might be attained in the future by giving up something of value in the present.
• There is little difference between sacrifice and work. They are also both uniquely human. Long ago, in the dimmists of time, we began to realize that reality was structured as if it could be bargained with. We learned that behaving properly now, in the present—regulating our impulses, considering the plight of others—could bring rewards in the future, in a time and place that did not yet exist.
• The future is a judgemental father.
• Benjamin Franklin once suggested that a newcomer to a neighborhood ask a new neighbor to do him or her a favor, citing an old maxim: He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.
• It is better to have something than nothing. It’s better yet to share generously the something you have. It’s even better than that, however, to become widely known for generous sharing. That’s something that lasts.
• The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.
• What’s the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful? The successful sacrifice.

When Things Don’t Go Well

• Sometimes, when things are not going well, it’s not the world that’s the cause. The cause is instead that which is currently most valued, subjectively and personally. Why? Because the world is revlealed, to an indeterminate degree, through the template of your values.
• If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, it’s time to examine your values. It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It’s time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying who you are.

How to catch a monkey

First, you must find a large, narrow-necked jar, just barely wide enough in diameter at the top for a monkey to put its hand inside.

Then you must fill the jar part way with rocks, so it is too heavy for a monkey to carry.

Then you must scatter some treats, attractive to monkeys, near the jar, to attract one, and put some more inside the jar.

A monkey will come along, reach into the narrow opening, and grab while the grabbing’s good. But now he won’t be able to extract his fist, now full of treats, from the too-narrow opening of the jar.

Not without unclenching his hand. Not without relinquishing what he already has. And that’s just what he won’t do.

The monkey-catcher can just walk over to the jar and pick up the monkey.

The animal will not sacrifice the part to preserve the whole.

The Greatest Sacrifice

• Something valuable, given up, ensures prosperity. Something valuable, sacrificed, pleases the Lord.
• What is the most valuable, and best sacrificed? A choice cut of meat?…More than that?…Something intensely personal and painful to give up—circumcision…More than that? The ultimate sacrifice? It’s a close race between child and self.
• In Christ’s case, however—as He sacrifices Himself—God, His Father, is simultaneously sacrificing His son. It is for this reason that the Christian sacrificial drama of Son and Self is archetypal. It’s a story at the limit, where nothing more extreme—nothing greater—can be imagined. That’s the very definition of “archetypal.” That’s the core of what constitutes “religious”.

Pursue What is Meaningful

• If you cease to utter falsehoods and live according to the dictates of your conscience, you can maintain your nobility, even when facing the ultimate threat.
• If you abide, truthfully and courageously, by the highest of ideals, you will be provided with more security and strength than will be offered by any short-sighted concentration on your own safety.
• If you live properly, fully, you can discover meaning so profound that it protects you even from the fear of death.

Death, Toil and Evil

Knowledge of Good and Evil

Once you become consciously aware that you, yourself, are vulnerable, you understand the nature of human vulnerability, in general. You understand what it’s like to be fearful, and angry, and resentful, and bitter. You understand what pain means.

And once you truly understand such feelings in yourself, and how they’re produced, you understand how to produce them in others.

It is in this manner that the self-conscious beings that we become voluntarily and exquisitely capable of tormenting others. We see the consequences of this new knowledge manifest themselves when we meet Cain and Abel, the sons of Adam and Eve.

• Evil enters the world with self-consciousness.
• Earthquakes, floods, poverty, cancer—we’re tough enough to take on all of that. But human evil adds a whole new dimension of misery to the world. It is for this reason that the rise of self-consciousness and its attendant realization of mortality and knowledge of Good and Evil is presented in the early chapters of Genesis as a cataclysm of cosmic magnitude.
• The central problem of life—the dealing with its brute facts—is not merely what and how to sacrifice to diminish suffering, but what and how to sacrifice to diminish suffering and evil—the conscious and voluntary source of the worst suffering.

Jesus in the Desert

• In the desert, Christ encounters Satan. The psychological meaning of this story is that Christ is forever He who determines to take personal responsibility for the full depth of human depravity. It means that Christ is eternally He who is willing to confront and deeply consider and risk the temptations posed by the most malevolent elements of human nature.
• Satan embodies the refusal of sacrifice; he is arrogance, incarnate; spite, deceit, and cruel, conscious malevolence. He is pure hatred of Man, God and Being. He will not humble himself, even when he knows full well that he should.
• Satans tempts starving Jesus to quell his hunger by transforming the desert rocks into bread. Christ repsonds by saying “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” This means that under conditions of extreme privation, there are more important things than food. To put it another way: Bread is of little use to the man who has betrayed his soul, even if he is currently starving.
• What if we all chose, instead of expedience (e.g. turn rocks into bread), to dine on the Word of God? That would require each and every person to live, and produce, and sacrifice, and speak, and share in a manner that would permanently render the privation of hunger a thing of the past.
• Christ is continually portrayed as the purveyor of endless sustenance. He miraculously multiplies bread and fish. He turns water into wine. What does this mean? It’s a call to the pursuit of higher meaning as the mode of living that is simultaneously most practical and of highest quality. Live as the archetypal Saviour lives, and you and those around you will hunger no more. The beneficence of the world manifests itself to those who live properly.
• Satan tells Jesus to throw himself off a cliff so that God will save him. Jesus responds, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” Christ does not casually order or even dare ask God to intervene on his behalf. He refuses to dispense with His responsibility for the events of His own life. He refuses to demand that God prove His presence. He refuses, as well, to solve the problems of mortal vulnerability in a merely personal manner—by compelling God to save Him—because that would not solve the problem for everyone else and for all time.
• Finally, Satan tempts Jessus with the most compelling offer of all—to rule over all kindoms. The opportunity to control and order everyone and everyting…Such expansion of status also provides unlimited opportunity for the inner darkeness to reveal itself. Power means the capacity to take vengeance, ensure submission, and crush enemies.

Christianity and Individual Rights

• Christianity achieved the well-nigh impossible. The Christian doctrine elevated the individual soul, placing slave and master and commoner and nobleman alike on the same metaphysical footing, rendering them equal before God and the law.
• It is in fact nothing short of a miracle (and we should keep this fact firmly before our eyes) that the hierarchical slave-based societies of our ancestors reorganized themseleves, under the sway of an ethical/religious revelation, such that the ownership and absolute domination of another person came to be viewed as wrong.
• Christianity made explicit the surprising claim that even the lowliest person had rights, genuine rights—and that sovereign and state were morally charged, at a fundamental level, to recognize those rights.
• Christianity put forward explicitly, the even more incomprehensible idea that the act of human ownership degraded the slaver (previously viewed as admired nobility) as much or even more than the slave. We fail to understand how difficult such an idea is to grasp. We forget that the opposite was self-evident throughout most of human history. We think that it is the desire to enslave and dominate that requires explanation. We have it backwards.

Socialism

• Through the great George Orwell, we learn that much of the socialism ideals is motivated by hatred of the rich and successful, instead of true regard for the poor. Socialists are more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalist. They believe just as strongly in money. They just think that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish. This is simply untrue. There are many problems that money does not solve, and others that it makes worse.

Meaning as the Higher Good

• Make it your axiom: to the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering.
• To place the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering at the pinnacle of your hierarchy of value is to work to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth. That’s a state, and a state of mind, at the same time.
• Expedience—that’s hiding all the skeletons in the closet. That’s covering the blood you just spilled with a carpet. That’s avoiding responsibility. It’s cowardly, and shallow, and worng. It’s wrong because mere expedience, multiplied by many repetitions, produces the character of a demon.
• To have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want, because you may neither know what you want, nor what you truly need.

Rule #8: Tell The Truth—Or, At Least, Don’t Lie

• What should you do, when you don’t know what to do? Tell the truth.
• Taking the easy way out or telling the truth—those are not merely two different choices. They are different pathways through life. They are utterly different ways of existing.
• You can use words to manipulate the world into delivering what you want.

Beware of Simple Ideologies

• The faculty of rationality inclines dangerously to pride: all I know is all that needs to be known. Pride falls in love with its own creations, and tries to make them absolute.
• This kind of oversimplification and falsification is particularly typical of ideologues. They adopt a single axiom: government is bad, immigration is bad, captialism is bad, patriarchy is bad. Then they filter and screen their experiences and insist ever more narrowly that everything can be explained by that axiom. They beleive, narcissistically, underneath all that bad theory, that the world could be put right, if only they held the controls.

Lies Weaken Your Character

• If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character. If you have a weak character, then adversity will mow you down when it appears, as it will, inevitably. You will hide, but there will be no place left to hide. And then you will find yourself doing terrible things.

Rules At Work

Someone power-hungry makes a new rule at your workplace.

It’s unnecessary. It’s counterproductive. It’s an irritant. It removes some of the pleasure and meaning from your work.

But you tell yourself it’s all right. It’s not worth complaining about.

Then it happens again. You’ve already trained yourself to allow such things, by failing to react the first time.

You’re a little less courageous. Your opponent, unopposed, is a little bit stronger.

The institution is a little bit more corrupt. The process of bureaucratic stagnation and oppression is underway, and you’ve contributed, by pretending it was OK.

• Deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism.
• Untruth corrupts the soul and the state alike, and one form of corruption feeds the other.

What Saves

• Rationality is subject to the single worst temptation—to raise what it knows now to the status of an absolute.
• What is going to save you? The totalitarian says, in essence, “You must rely on faith in what you already know.” But this is not what saves. What saves is the willingness to learn from what you do not know. That is faith in the possibility of human transformation. That is faith in the sacrifice of the current self for the self that could be.
• Communism, in particular, was attractive not so much to opporessed workers, its hypothetical beneficiaries, but to intellectuals—to those whose arrogant pride in intellect assured them they were always right. But the promised utopia never emerged. Instead humanity expereienced the inferno of Stalinist Russia and Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the citizens of those states were required to betray their own experience, turn against their fellow citizens, and die in the tens of millions.

Deceit Kills

• It is deceit that makes people miserable beyond what they can bear. It is deceit that fills human souls with resentment and vengefulness. It is deceit that produces the terrible suffering of mankind: the death camps of the Nazis; the torture chambers and genocides of Stalin and that even greater monster, Mao. It was deceit that killed hundreds of millions of people in the twentieth century. It was deceit that almost doomed civilization itself. It is deceit that still threatens us, most profoundly, today.

The Truth, Instead

• Set your ambitions, even if you are uncertain about what they should be. The better ambitions have to do with development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity.
• All people serve their ambition. In that matter, there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don’t know, what God they serve.
• Things fall apart: this is one of the great discoveries of humanity. And we speed the natural deterioration of great things through blindness, inaction and deceit. Without attention, culture degenerates and dies, and evil prevails.
• Truth builds edificies that can stand a thousand years. Truth feeds and clothes the poor, and makes nations wealthy and safe. Truth reduces the terrible complexity of a man to the simplicity of his word, so that he can become a partner, rather than an enemy. Truth makes the past truly past, and makes the best use of the future’s possibilities. Truth is the ultimate, inexhaustible natural resource. It’s the light in the darkness.
• See the truth. Tell the truth.
• If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth.
• In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise.

Rule #9: Assume That The Person You Are Listening To Might Know Something You Don’t

• Memory is not a description of the objective past. Memory is a tool. Memory is the past’s guide to the future. If you remember that something bad happened, and you can figure out why, then you can try to avoid that bad thing happening again. That’s the purpose of memory. It’s not “to remember the past.” It’s to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over.

Figure It Out for Yourself

• True thinking is rare—just like true listening. Thinking is listening to yourself. It’s difficult. To think, you have to be at least two people at the same time. Then you have to let those people disagree. Thinking is an internal dialogue between two or more different views of the world.
• True thinking is complex and demanding. It requires you to be an articulate speaker and careful, judicious listener, at the same time. It involves conflict.
• Something new and radical is still almost always wrong. You need good, even great, reasons to ignore or defy general, public opinion. That’s your culture. It’s a mighty oak.
• If you’re in a rut, at least yo uknow that other people have travelled that path. Out of the rut is too often off the road. And in the desert that awaits off the road there are highwaymen and mosters.

A Listening Person

The great majority of us cannot listen; we find ourselves compelled to evaluate, because listening is too dangerous. The first requirement is courage, and we do not always have it.

Carl Rogers

• In discussions, institute this rule: Each person can speak up for himslef only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker’s satisfaction.
• Summarize what people say to you and ask them if you have understood properly.
• This helps you really understand what someone is trying to tell you.
• The scond advantage to the act of summary is that it aids the person in consolidation and utility of memory.
• “This is what happened. This is why. This is what I have to do to avoid such things from now on.” That’s a successful memory. You remember the past not so that it is “accurately recoreded,” but so that you are prepared for the future.
• The third advantage is the difficulty it poses to the careless construction of straw-man arguments. When someone opposes you, it is very tempting to oversimplify, parody, or distor his or her position. This is a counter-productive game, designed both to harm the dissenter and to unjustly raise your personal status.
• If you first give the devil his due, looking at his arguments from his perspective, you can (1) find the value in them, and learn something in the process, or (2) hone your positions against them (if you still believe they are wrong) and strengthen your arguments further against challenge.
• If you listen without premature judgment, people will generally tell you everything they are thinking—and with very little deceit. People will tell you the most amazing, absurd, interesting things. Very few of your conversations will be boring.

Misunderstood

• In conversations between men and women, there is often misunderstanding when the man is accused of trying to “fix things” too quickly, while the woman is often intent on formulating the problem precisely. Women need to be listened to—even questioned—to help ensure clarity in the formulation. Then, whatever problem is left, if any, can be helpfully solved.

Lecturing

• A good lecturer is not only delivering facts (which is perhaps the least important part of a lecture), but also telling stories about those facts, pitching them precisely to the level of the audience’s comprehension, gauging that by the interest they are showing. The story he or she is telling conveys to the members of the audience not only what the facts are, but why they are relevant.
• A good lecturer is thus talking with and not at or even to his or her listeners. To manage this, the lecturer needs to be closely attending to the audience’s every move, gesture and sound. Perversley, this cannot be done by watching the audience, as such. A good lecturer speaks directly to and watches the response of a single, identifiable person, instead of doing something cliched, such as “presenting a talk” to an audience.
• There is no “audience”. There are only individuals who need to be included in the conversation.
• The strategy of speaking to individuals is not only vital to the delivery of any message, it’s a useful antidote to fear of public speaking. No one wants to be stared at by hundreds of unfriendly, judgmental eyes. However, almost everybody can talk to just one attentive person. So, if you have to deliver a speech then do that. Talk to the individuals in the audience—and don’t hide: not behind the podium, not with downcast eyes, not by speaking too quietly or mumbling, not by apologizing for your lack of brilliance or preparedness, not behind ideas that are not yours, and not behind cliches.

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

• Truth and humor are often close allies.
• You already know what you know–and, unless your life is perfect, what you know is not enough.

Rule #10: Be Precise In Your Speech

• The world reveals itself to us as something to utilize and something to navigate through—not as something that merely is.
• Objects we see are not simply there, in the world, for our simple, direct perceiving. They exist in complex, multi-dimensional relationship to one another, not as self-evidently separate, bounded, independent objects. We perceive not them, but their functional utility and, in doing so, we make them sufficiently simple for sufficient understanding. It is for this reason that we must be precise in our aim. Absent that, we drown in the complexity of the world.

There’s No Such Thing as a Dragon

There’s No Such Thing as a Dragon is a story for children by Jack Kent.

It’s about a small boy, Billy Bixbee, who spies a dragon sitting on his bed one morning. It’s about the size of a house cat, and friendly. He tells his mother about it, but she tells him that there’s no such thing as a dragon.

So, it starts to grow.

It eats all of Billy’s pancakes. Soon it fills the whole house. Mom tries to vacuum, but she has to go in and out of the house through the windows because of the dragon everywhere. It takes her forever.

Then, the dragon runs off with the house.

Billy’s dad comes home—and there’s just an empty space, where he used to live. The mailman tells him where the house went. He chases after it, climbs up the dragon’s head and neck (now sprawling out into the street) and rejoins his wife and son.

Mom still insists that the dragon does not exist, but Billy, who’s pretty much had it by now, insists, “There’s a dragon, Mom.”

Instantly, it starts to shrink. Soon, it’s cat-sized again.

Everyone agrees that dragons of that size (1) exist and (2) are much preferable to their gigantic counterparts.

Mom, eyes reluctantly opened by this point, asks somewhat plaintively why it had to get so big.

Billy quietly suggests: “maybe it wanted to be noticed.”

• Communication would require admission of terrible emotions: resentment, terror, loneliness, despair, jealousy, frustration, hatred, boredom. Moment by moment, it’s easier to keep the peace. But in the background, in Billy Bixbee’s house, and in all that are like it, the dragon grows. One day it bursts forth, in a form that no one can ignore. it lifts the very household from its foundations.
• Don’t ever underestimate the destructive power of sins of omission.

Marriage

• In many households, in recent decades, the traditional household division of labor has been demolished, not least in the name of liberation and freedom. That demolition, however, has not left so much glorious lack of restriction in its wake as chaos, conflict and indeterminacy. The escape from tyranny is often followed not by Paradise, but by a sojourn in the desert, aimless, confused and deprived.
• There is little, in a marriage, that is so little that it is not worth fighting about. You’re stuck in a marriage like the two proverbial cats in a barrel, bound by the oath that lasts in theory until one or both of you die. That oath is there to make you take the damn situation seriously. Do you really want the same petty annoyance tormenting you every single day of your marriage, for the decades of its existence?
• Living things die without attention.
• No one finds a match so perfect that the need for continued attention adn work vanishes (and, besided, if you found the perfect person, he or she would run away from ever-so-imperfect you in justifiable horror). In truth, what you need is someone exactly as imperfect as you.
• Everything clarified and articulated becomes visible.
• Every single voluntarily unprocessed and uncomprehended and ignored reason for marital failure will compound and conspire and will then plague that betrayed and self-betrayed woman for the rest of her life. The same goes for her husband. All she—he—they—or we— must do to ensure such an outcome is nothing: don’t notice, don’t react, don’t attend, don’t discuss, don’t consider, don’t work for peace, don’t take responsibility. Don’t confront the chaos and turn it into order—just wait, anything but naive and innocent, for the chaos to rise up and engulf you instead.

Vague is Easy

• Why remain vague, when it renders life stagnant and murky? Well, if you don’t know who you are, you can hide in doubt.
• Why refuse to specify, when specifying the problem would enable its solution? Because to specify the problem is to admit that it exists. Because to specify the problem is to allow yourself to know what you want, say, from friend or lover—and then you will know, precisely and cleanly, when you don’t get it, and that will hurt, sharply and specifically.
• When things fall apart, and chaos re-emerges, we can give structure to it, and re-establish order, through our speech. If we speak carefully and precisely, we can sort things out, and put them in their proper place, and set a new goal, and navigate to it—often communally, if we negotiate; if we reach consensus.
• If we speak carelessly and imprecisely, however, things remain vague. The destination remains unproclaimed. The fog of uncertainty does not lift, and there is no negotiating through the world.

Define the Problem

• You have to consciously define the topic of conversation, particularly when it is difficult—or it becomes a conversation about everything, and everything is too much. This is so frequently why couples cease communicating. Every argument degenerates into every problem that ever emerged in the past, every problem that exists now, and every terrible thing that is likely to happen in the future. No one can have a discussion about “everthing”. Instead, you can say, “this exact, precise thing—that is what is making me unhappy.”
• But to do that, you have to think: What is wrong, exactly? What do I want, exactly? You must speak forthrightly and call forth the habitable world from chaos. you must use honest precise speech to do that.
• You must determine where you are going in your life, because you cannot get there unless you move in that direction. Random wandering will not move you forward. It will instead disappoint and frustrate you and make you anxious and unahppy and hard to get along with (and then resentful, and then vengeful, and then worse).
• Say what you mean, so that you can find out what you mean. Act out what you say, so you can find out what happens. Then pay attention. Note your errors. Articulate them. Strive to correct them. That is how you discover the meaning of your life. That will protect you from the tragedy of your life. How could it be otherwise?

Rule #11: Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding

• Becoming compentent is better than remaining safe. Compentence is what makes people as safe as they can truly be.
• People, including children, don’t seek to minimize risk. They seek to optimize it. They drive and walk and love and play so that they achieve what they desire, but they push themselves a bit at the same time, too, so they continue to develop. Thus, if things are made too safe, people start to figure out ways to make them dangerous again.

For that man be delivered form revenge—that is for me the bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms. The tarantulas, of course, would have it otherwise. “What justice means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge”—thus they speak to each other. “We shall wreak vengeane and abuse on all whose equals we are not”—thus do the tarantula-hearts vow. “And ‘will to equality’ shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!” You preachers of equality, the tyrant-mania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue.

Nitzche

• In the second half of George Orwell’s book, The Road to Wigan Pier, he concluded that the tweed-wearing, armchair-philosophizing, victim-identifying, pity-and-contempt-dispensing social-reformer types frequently did not like the poor, as they claimed. Instead, they just hated the rich. They disguised their resentment and jealousy with piety, sanctimony and self-righteousness.
• When someone claims to be acting from the highest principles, for the good of others, there is no reason to assume that the person’s motives are genuine. People motivated to make things better usually aren’t concerned with changing other people—or, if they are, they take responsibility for making the same changes to themselves (and first).

Self-Appointed Judges of the Human Race

• We do what we can to make the best of things, in our vulnerability and fragility, and the planet is harder on us than we are on it. We could cut ourselves some slack.
• No one in the modern world may without objection express the opinion that existence would be bettered by the absence of Jews, blacks, Muslims, or Englishmen. Why, then, is it virtuous to propose that the planet might be better off, if there were fewer people on it?
• And why does it so often seem to be the very people standing so visibly against prejudice who so often appear to feel obligated to denounce humanity itself?

Boys

• Boys are suffering, in the modern world. They are more disobedient—negatively—or more independent—positively—than girls, and they suffer for this, throughout their pre-university educational career. They are less agreeable and less susceptible to anxiety and depression, at least after both sexes hit puberty. Boys’ interests tilt toward things; girls’ interests tilt towards people. Strikingly, these differences, strongly influenced by biological factors, are most pronounced in the Scandinavian societies where gender-equality has been pushed hardest: this is the opposite of what would be expected by those who insist, ever more loudly, that gender is a social construct. It isn’t. This isn’t a debate. The data are in.

What Girls Want

• Girls aren’t attracted to boys who are their friends, even though they might like them, whatever that means. They are attracted to boys who win status contests with other boys.
• Why do women want an employed partner and, preferably, one of higher status? In no small part, it’s because women become more vulnerable when they have children. They need someone competent to support mother and child when that becomes necessary. It’s a perfectly rational compensatory act, although it may also have a biological basis. Why would a woman who decides to take responsibility for one or more infants want an adult to look after as well?

Fatherhood

• Children in father-absent homes are four times as likely to be poor.
• Fatherless children are at much greater risk for drug and alcohol abuse.
• Children living with married biological parents are less anxious, depressed and delinquent than children living with one or more non-biological parents.
• Children in single-parent families are also twice as likely to commit suicide.

Culture

• The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West, is a gift from our ancestors: the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury, and the opportunity. Culture takes with one hand, but in some fortunate places it gives more with the other.
• To think about culture only as oppressive is ignorant and ungrateful, as well as dangerous. This is not to say that culutre should not be subject to criticism.
• Any hierarchy creates winners and losers.
• We experience almost all the emotions that make life deep and engaging as a consequence of moving successfully towards something deeply desired and valued. The price we pay for that involvement is the inevitable creation of hierarchies of success, while the inevitable consequence is difference in outcome. Absolute equality would therefore require the sacrifice of value itself—and then there would be nothing worth living for.

Postmodernism and the Long Arm of Marx

• When Marxism was put into practice in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and elsewhere, economic resources were brutally redistributed. Private property was eliminated, and rural people forcibly collectivized. The result? Tens of millions of people died. Hundreds of millions more were subject to oppression rivalling that still operative in North Korea, the last classic communist holdout.

The Khmer Rouge

Marxist ideas were very attractive to intellectual utopians. One of the primary architects of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, Khieu Samphan, received a doctorate at the Sorbonne before he became the nominal head of Cambodia in the mid-1970s.

In his doctoral thesis, written in 1959, he argued that the work done by non-farmers in Cambodia’s cities was unproductive: bankers, bureaucrats and businessmen added nothing to society. Instead, they parasitized the genuine value produced through agriculture, small industry and craft.

Samphan’s ideas were favorably looked upon by the French intellectuals who granted him his Ph.D. Back in Cambodia, he was provided with the opportunity to put his theories into practice.

The Khmer Rouge evacuated Cambodia’s cities, drove all the inhabitants into the countryside, closed the banks, banned the use of currency, and destroyed all the markets.

A quarter of the Cambodian population were worked to death in the countryside, in the killing fields.

The Soviet Kulaks

In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the Stalinist Soviets sent two million kulaks, the richest peasants, to Siberia (those with a small number of cows, a couple of hired hands, or a few acres more than was typical).

From the communist viewpoint, these kulaks had gathered their wealth by plundering those around them and deserved their fate. Wealth signified oppression, and private property was theft. It was time for some equity.

More than thirty thousand kulaks were shot on the spot. Many more met their fate at the hands of their most jealous, resentful and unproductive neighbors, who used the high ideals of communist collectivization to mask their murderous intent…

…The “parasitical” kulaks were, in general, the most skillful and hardworking famers. A small minority of people are responsible for most of the production in any field, and farming proved no different.

Agricultural output crashed. What little remained was taken by force out of the countryside and into the cities.

Rural people who went out into the fields after the harvest to glean single grains of wheat for their hungry families risked execution. Six million people died of starvation in Ukraine, the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, in the 1930s.

Power

• Power is a fundamental motivational force (“a,” not “the”). People compete to rise to the top, and they care where they are in dominance hierarchies. But (and this is here you separate the metaphorical boys from the men, philosophically) the fact that power plays a role in human motivation does not mean that it plays the only role, or even the primary role.
• Beware of single cause interpretations—and beware the people who purvey them.
• In socieities that are well-functioning—not in comparison to a hypothetical utopia, but contrasted with other exisitng or historical cultures—competence, not power, is a prime determiner of status. Competence. Ability. Skill. Not power.
• Why do people insist that everything is only about power? Maybe because if power exists, then the use of power becomes fully justifiable.
• Here’s the fundamental problem: group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual. Every person is unique—and not just in a trivial manner: importantly, significantly, meaningfully unique. Group membership cannot capture that variability. Period.

The Strong Man Ethic

• Men enforce a code of behavior on each other, when working together. Do your work. Pull your weight. Stay awake and pay attention. Don’t whine or be touchy. Stand up for your friends. Don’t suck up and don’t snitch. Don’t be a slave to stupid rules. Don’t, in the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, be a girlie man. Don’t be dependent. At all. Ever. Period.
• It is to woman’s clear advantage that men do not happily put up with dependency among themselves. Part of the reason so many a working-class woman does not marry, now, as we have alluded to, is because she does not want to look after a man, struggling for employment, as well as her children.
• When softeness and harmlessness become the only consciously acceptable virtues, then hardness and dominance will start to exert an unconscious fascination. Partly what this means for the future is that if men are pushed too hard to feminaize, they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology.
• If they’re healthy, women don’t want boys. They want men. They want someone to contend with; someone to grapple with. If they’re tough, they want someone tougher. If they’re smart, they want someone smarter. They desire someone who brings to the table something they can’t already provide. This often makes it hard for tough, smart, attractive women to find mates: there just aren’t that many men around who can outclass them enough to be considered desirable.
• If you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.

Rule #12: Pet A Cat When You Encounter One On The Street

• I had realized something relevant to this, years before, about three-year-old Julian. I thought, “I love my son. He’s three, and cute and little and comical. But I am also afraid for him, because he could be hurt. If I had the power to change that, what might I do?” I thought, “He could be twenty fee tall instead of forty inches. Nobody would push him over then. He could be made of titanium, instead of flesh and bone. Then, if some brat bounced a toy truck off his noggin, he wouldn’t care. He could have a computer-enhanced brain. And even if he was damaged, somehow, his parts could be immediately replaced. Problem solved!” But no—not problem solved—and not just because such things are currently impossible. Artificially fortifying Julian would have been the same as destroying him. Instead of his little three-year-old self, he would be a cold, steel-hard robot. That wouldn’t be Julian. It would be a monster. I cam to realize through such thoughts that what can be truly loved about a person is inseparable from their limitations.

Imagine a Being who is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. What does such a Being lack?

The answer? Limitation.

If you are already everything, everywhere, always, there is nowhere to go and nothing to be. Everything that could be already is, and everything that could happen already has.

And it is for this reason, so the story goes, that God created man. No limitation, no story. No story, no Being.

• A superhero who can do anything turns out to be no hero at all. He’s nothing specific, so he’s nothing. He has nothing to strive against, so he can’t be admirable. Being of any reasonable sort appears to require limitation. Perhaps this is because Being requires Becoming, as well as mere static existence—and to become is to become something more, or at least something different. That is ony possible for something limited.
• Hating life, despising life—even for the genuine pain that life inflicts—merely serves to make life itself worse, unbearably worse. There is no genuine protest in that. There is no goodness in that, only the desire to produce suffering, for the sake of suffering. That is the very essence of evil.
• When you love someone, it’s not despite thier limitations. It’s because of their limitations. Of course, it’s complicated. you don’t have to be in love with every shortcoming, and merely accept. You shouldn’t stop trying to make life better, or let suffering just be. But there appear to be limits on the path to improvement beyond which we might not want to go, lest we sacrifice our humanity itself.

Enduring Trials

• Set aside some time to talk and to think about the illness or other crisis and how it should be managed every day. Do not talk or think about it otherwise. If you do not limit its effect, you will become exhausted, and everything will spiral into the gorund. This is not helpful. Conserve your strength. You’re in a war, not a battle, and a war is composed of many battles. You must stay functional through all of them.

Coda

Ask, and it shall be given to you; Seek, and ye shall find; Knock, and it shall be open unto you: For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened unto you.

Matthew 7:7-8

• At first glance, this seems like nothing but a testament to the magic of prayer, in the sense of entreating God to grant favors. But God, whatever or whoever He may be, is no simple granter of wishes. When tempted by the Devil himself, in the desert, even Christ Himself was not willing to call upon his Father for a favor; furthermore, every day, the praryers of desperate people go unanswered. But maybe this is because the questions they contain are not phrased in the proper manner. Perhaps it’s not reasonable to ask God to break the rules of physics every time we fall by the wayside or make a serious error.
• Perhaps you could ask, instead, what you might have to do right now to increase your resolve, buttress your character, and find the strength to go on. Perhaps you could instead ask to see the truth.
• You don’t get peace by being right. You just get to be right, while your partner gets to be wrong–defeated and wrong. Do that ten thousand times and your marriage will be over (or you will wish it was).
• To choose the alternative—to seek peace—you have to decide that you want the answer, more than you want to be right. That’s the way out of the prison of your stubborn preconceptions. That’s the prerequisite for negotiation. That’s to truly abide by the principle of Rule #2.
• Perhaps that is true prayer: the question, “What have I done wrong, and what can I do now to set things at least a little bit more right?” But your heart must be open to the terrible truth. You must be receptive to that which you do not want to hear. When you decide to learn about your faults, so that they can be rectified, you open a line of communication with the source of all revelatory thought. Maybe that’s the same thing as consulting your conscience. Maybe that’s the same thing, in some manner, as a discussion with God.

What shall i do with my life?

• Aim for Paradise, and concentrate on today.

And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin.Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Matthew 6:28-34

• What does all that mean? Orient yourself properly. Then—and only then—concentrate on the day. Set your sights at the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, and then focus pointedly and carefully on the concerns of each moment. Aim continually at Heaven while you work diligently on Earth.

What shall I do with my wife?

• Treat her as if she is the Holy Mother of God, so that she may give birth to the world-redeeming hero.

What Shall I do with my daughter?

• Stand behind her, listen to her, guard her, train her mind, and let her know it’s OK if she wants to be a mother.

What Shall I do with my parents?

• Act such that your actions justify the suffering they endured.

What shall I do with my son?

• Encourage him to be a true Son of God.

What Shall I do with the stranger?

• Invite him into my house, and treat him like a brother, so that he may become one.

What shall I do with a fallen soul?

• Offer a genuine and cautious hand, but do not join it in the mire.

What shall I do with the World?

• Conduct myself as if Being is more valuable than Non-Being. Confront the uncertainty of the world voluntarily, and with faith and courage.

How shall I educate my people?

• Share with them those things I regard as truly important.

What shall I do with a torn nation?

• Stitch it back together with careful words of truth.

What shall I do with God my Father?

• Sacrifice everything I hold dear to yet greater perfection. Let the deadwood burn off, so that new growth can prevail.

What Shall I do with a lying man?

• Let him speak so that he may reveal himself.

How shall I deal with the enlightened one?

• Replace him with the true seeker of enlightenment. There is no enlightened one. There is only the one who is seeking futher enlightenment.

What shall I do when I despise what I have?

• Remember those who have nothing and strive to be grateful. Consider, as well, that you may be blocked in your progress not because you lack opportunity, but because you have been too arrogant to make full use of what already lies in front of you.

What shall I do when greed consumes me?

• Remember that it is truly better to give than to receive.

What shall I do when I ruin my rivers?

• Seek for the living water and let it cleanse the Earth. Maybe the environmental probelm is ultimately spiritual. If we put ourselves in order, perhaps we will do the same for the world.

What shall I do when my enemy succeeds?

• Aim a little higher and be grateful for the lesson.

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor i and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.

Matthew 5:43-45

• What does this mean? Learn, from the success of your enemies; listen to their critique, so that you can glean from their opposition whatever fragments of wisdom you might incorporate, to your betterment; adopt as your ambition the creation of a world in which those who work against you see the light and wake up and succeed, so that the better at which you are aiming can encompass them too.

What shall I do when I’m tired and Impatient?

• Gratefully accept an outstretched helping hand.

What shall I do with the fact of aging?

• Replace the potential of my youth with the accomplishments of my maturity.
• A life lived thoroughly justifies its own limitations. The young man with nothing has possibilities to set against the accomplishments of his elders.

What shall I do with my infant’s death?

• Hold my other loved ones and heal their pain. It is necessary to be strong in the face of death, because death is intrinsic to life.
• It is for this reason that I tell my students: aim to be the person at your father’s funeral that everyone, in their grief and misery, can rely on. There’s a worthy and noble ambition: strength in the face of adversity. That is very different from the wish for a life free of trouble.

What shall I do in the next dire moment?

• Focus my attention on the next right move.

What shall i say to a faithless brother?

• The King of the Damned is a poor judge of Being. It is my firm belief that the best way to fix the world is to fix yourself. Anything else is presumptuous. Anything else risks harm, stemming from your ignorance and lack of skill. But that’s OK. There’s plenty to do, right where you are. After all, your specific personal faults detrimentally affect the world. Your conscious, voluntary sins make things worse than they have to be. Your inaction, inertia and cynicism removes from the world that part of you that could learn to quell suffering and make peace.

What shall I do to strengthen my spirit?

• Do not tell lies, or do what you despise.

What shall I do to ennoble my body?

• Use it only in the service of my soul.

What shall I do with the most difficult of questions?

• Consider them the gateway to the path of life.

What shall I do with the poor man’s plight?

• Strive through right example to lift his broken heart.

What shall I do when the Great crowd beckons?

• Stand tall and utter my broken truths.

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