Book notes: 12 rules for life
The story of the golden calf reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions, and that there's nothing freeing about that. Unchaperoned and left to our own untutored judgment we are quick to aim low and worship qualities beneath us.
Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues in power are always dangerous, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.
The study of virtue is not quite the same as the study of morals (right and wrong, good and evil). Aristotle's virtues simply are the ways of behaving most conducive to the happiness in life.
Cultivating judgment about the difference between vice and virtue is the beginning of wisdom, something that can never be out of date.
Telling people you're virtuous isn't virtue, it is self-promotion. Virtue signalling isn't virtue, it is quite possibly our commonest vice.
The foremost rule is that you must take responsibility for your own life.
Stretching yourself beyond the boundaries of your current self requires carefully choosing and then pursuing ideals: ideals that are up there, above you - and that you can't always be sure you'll reach.
People who live by the same code are rendered mutually predictable to one another, acting in keeping with each other's expectations and desires.
We experience much of our positive emotion in relation to goals.
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. Longer than trees have been around.
The physical demands of emergency preparedness will wear you down in every way.
Waking up at a consistent hour is a necessity. The systems that mediate negative emotion are tightly tied to the properly cyclical circadian rhythms. Many clients have reduced their anxiety to subclinical levels merely because they started to sleep on a predictable schedule and eat breakfast.
Our anxiety systems are very practical, assuming anything you ran away from was dangerous. The proof, that you ran away. Anxiety induced retreat makes the self smaller and the ever-more-dangerous world bigger.
People who refuse to muster self-protective territorial responses are laid open to exploitation as much as those who genuinely can’t stand up for their own rights.
Standing up physically also implies and invokes and demands standing up metaphysically. Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of Being.
People are better at filling in and properly administering prescription medicine to their pets than to themselves.
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 all those things and situations we neither know nor understand.
Order is the place where the behaviour of the world matches our expectations, when things turn out the way we want them to. But it is sometimes tyranny and stultification.
We evolved over millenia within intensely social circumstances. This means that the most significant elements of our environment were personalities, not things, objects or situations.
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.
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.
Order is not enough. Therein lies stagnation. But chaos can be too much, one can't tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond one's capacity to learn.
The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal. No wall, however tall, will keep that out.
It is far better to render Beings within your care competent than to protect them. If not, another danger would emerge: that of permanent human infantilism and absolute uselessness.
Do you want to make your children safe, or strong?
Old stories contain nothing superfluous. Anything accidental - anything that does not serve the plot - has long been forgotten in the telling.
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.
Only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the best definition of evil I can formulate.
Many people have the opposite problem: they shoulder intolerable burdens of self-disgust, self-contempt, shame and self-consciousness.
These people often don’t really believe that they deserve the best care.
Instead of narcissistically inflating their own importance, they don’t value themselves.
It is not virtuous to be victimized by a bully, even if that bully is oneself. To stand up to the bully that is yourself is to embrace and love the sinner who is yourself, as much as forgiving and aiding someone else who is stumbling and imperfect.
You are important to other people, as much as to yourself. You are therefore morally obliged to take care of yourself.
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.
Intelligence is in large part the ability to learn and transform.
People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results.
Not everyone who is failing is a victim.
Not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise.
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.
A villain who despairs of his villany has not become a hero. A hero is something positive, not just the absence of evil.
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 it's easier to look virtuous when standing alongside someone utterly irresponsible.
Assume first you are doing the easiest thing, not the most difficult.
Are you enabling a delusion?
Is it possible that your contempt would be more helpful than your pity?
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 not the existence of vice, or indulgence in it, that requires explanation. Vice is easy.
Peace is not.
The desire to improve is the precondition for progress.
Loyalty must be negotiated, fairly and honestly. Friendship is a reciprocal arrangement.
When you dare aspire upward, you reveal the inadequacy of the present and the promise of the future. Then you disturb others, in the depths of their souls, where they understand that their cynicism and immobility are unjustifiable.
Failure is the price we pay for standards and, because mediocrity has consequences both real and harsh, standards are necessary.
If the cards are always stacked against you, perhaps the game you are playing is somehow rigged - perhaps by you.
The idea of a value-free choice is a contradiction in terms. Value judgments are a precondition for action.
Furthermore, every activity, once chosen, comes with its own internal standards of accomplishment.
If something can be done at all, it can be done better or worse.
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.
Dare to be truthful.
Dare to articulate yourself, and express what would really justify your life.
Consult your resentment. It’s a revelatory emotion, for all its pathology.
Resentment always means one of two things.
Either the resentful person is immature, in which case he or she should shut up, quit whining, and get on with it.
Or is being taken advantage of (or allowing yourself to be taken advantage of).
We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better.
If we did not see things this way, we would not act at all.
The downside to all this foresight and creativity is chronic unease and discomfort.
Much of happiness is hope, no matter how deep in the underworld this hope was conceived.
You must be cautious, because making your life better means adopting a lot of responsibility, and that takes more effort and care than living stupidly in pain and remaining arrogant, deceitful and resentful.
Obedience is not sufficient. But a person capable of obedience, of discipline, is at least a well-forged tool. Of course, there must be vision, beyond discipline and dogma. A tool still needs a purpose.
It is that declaration of existential faith and keep hatred of Being at bay. Such faith is not at all the will to believe things that you know perfectly well to be false. It is instead the realisation that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being. It is simultaneously the will to dare set your sights at the unachievable, and to sacrifice everything, including your life.
“What is it that is bothering me?”
“Is that something I could fix?”
“Would I actually be willing to fix it?”
If you find that the answer is “no,” to any or all of the questions, then look elsewhere. Aim lower.
Search until you find something that bothers you, that you could fix, that you would fix, and then fix it. That might be enough for the day.
The people from whom thanks you want might not be very proficient in offering it, to begin with, but that shouldn't stop you. People can learn, even if they are very unskilled at the beginning.
There is evil to overcome, suffering to ameliorate, and yourself to better.
I cite wikipedia because it is collectively written and edited and therefore the perfect place to find accepted wisdom.
The appearance of triviality is deceptive: it is the things that occur every single day that truly make up our lives, and time spent the same way over and over again adds up at an alarming rate.
It’s not for the best that all human corruption is uncritically laid at society’s feet. That conclusion merely displaces the problem, back in time. It explains nothing, and solves no problems.
If society is corrupt, but not the individuals within it, then where did the corruption originate? How is it propagated? It’s a one-sided, deeply ideological theory.
Chimpanzees conduct inter-tribal warfare, with almost unimaginable brutality.
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.
Children can be damaged as much or more by a lack of incisive attention as they are by abuse. This is damage by omission rather than commission, but is no less severe and long-lasting.
A child will have many friends, but only two parents. Friends have very limited authority to correct.
Parents are the arbiters of society. They teach children how to behave so that other people will be able to interact meaningfully and productively with them.
It is an act of responsibility to discipline a child.
Violence is no mystery, it is the default. Peace is the mystery.
Scared parents often think that a crying child is always sad or hurt. That's simply not true. Anger is one of the most common reasons for crying.
You can discipline your children, or you can turn that responsibility over to the harsh, uncaring, judgmental world - and the motivation for the latter decision should never be confused for love.
Much more of our sanity than we commonly realize is a consequence of our fortunate immersion in a social community.
Some children are agreeable. They deeply want to please, but pay for that with a tendency to be conflict-averse and dependent.
Bad laws drive out respect for good laws.
So, don’t encumber children with too many rules. The ethical equivalent of Occam's Razor.
Be good company when something fun is happening, so that you’re invited for the fun.
Act so that other people are happy you’re around, so that people will want you around.
A child who knows these rules will be welcome everywhere.
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 a parent, but bad parenting happens all the time.
The primary duty of parents is to make their children socially desirable. That will provide the child with opportunity, self-regard, and security.
It is possible to learn good by experiencing evil. Abuse disappears across generations. That's a testament to the genuine dominance of good over evil in the human heart.
A hurricane is an act of God. But failure to prepare, when the necessity for preparation is well known - that’s sin.
Stop saying those things that make you weak and ashamed. Say only those things that make you strong. Do only those things that you could speak of with honour.
Life is short and you don't have time to figure out everything on your own. The wisdom of the past was hard-earned, and your dead ancestors may have something useful to tell you.
The discovery of the causal relationship between our efforts today and the quality of tomorrow motivated the social contract.
The act of making a ritual sacrifice to God was an early and sophisticated enactment of the idea of the usefulness of delay.
The realisation that pleasure could be forestalled dawned on us with great difficulty. It runs absolutely contrary to ancient, fundamental animal instincts.
To share does not mean to give away something you value, and get nothing back. That is only what every child who refuses to share fears it means. To share means, properly, to initiate the process of trade. Those who can't share can't have friends, because having friends is a form of trade.
No tree can grow to heaven, unless its roots reach down to Hell - Jung. For this reason, enlightenment is rare.
Christ's portrayal as the purveyor of endless sustenance says: live as the archetypal Saviour lives, and you and those around you will hunger no more.
Problems that are solved disappear from view. The fact that automobiles pollute only becomes a problem of sufficient magnitude to attract public attention when the far worse problems that the internal combustion engine solves has vanished from view.
People stricken with poverty don’t care about carbon dioxide.
For Nietzsche and Dostoevsky alike, freedom - and even the ability to act - requires constraint. For this reason, they both realised the vital necessity of the dogma of the Church.
Jung's great discovery - we cannot invent our own values, because we cannot merely impose what we believe on our souls. We must discover our unique nature, and contend with it, before making peace with ourselves.
Expedience: That’s avoiding responsibility. It’s cowardly, and shallow, and wrong.
There is no faith and no courage and no sacrifice in doing what is expedient.
What can I not doubt? The reality of suffering. It brooks no arguments.
Untruth, however well meant, can produce unintended consequences.
Someone living a life-lie is attempting to manipulate reality with perception, thought and action, so that only some narrowly-defined outcome is allowed to exist. It is based on two premises, that current knowledge is sufficient to define what is good, far into the future. the second is that reality would be unbearable if left to its own devices.
She's afraid of opening Pandora's box, where all the troubles of the world reside. But hope is in there, too.
Someone hiding is someone not vital. Vitality requires original contribution.
If you betray yourself, you weaken your character. If you have a weak character, then adversity will mow you down when it appears, as it will, inevitably.
A vision of the future, the desirable future, is necessary. Such a vision links action taken now with important, long-term, foundational values. It lends actions in the present significance.
Willful blindness is the refusal to know something that could be known. It avails itself of easy rationalisations.
Error necessitates sacrifice to correct it, and serious error necessitates serious sacrifice. To accept the truth means to sacrifice, and if you've rejected the truth for a long time, that's a big debt you've built up.
Lies warp the structure of Being.
Rationality is subject to the single worst temptation - to raise what it knows now to the status of an absolute. That means denial of the necessity for courageous individual confrontation with Being. What is going to save you? The totalitarian says: "You must rely on faith in what you already know." But that is not what saves. What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don't know. That is faith in the possibility of human transformation.
Milton believed that stubborn refusal to change in the face of error not only meant ejection from heaven, and subsequent degeneration into hell, but the rejection of redemption itself.
Everyone needs a concrete, specific goal - an ambition, and a purpose.
An aim provides a destination. An aim defines progress and makes such progress exciting.
An aim reduces anxiety because if you have no aim everything can mean anything or nothing.
We must be precise in our aim. Absent that, we drown in the complexity of the world.
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.
The better ambitions have to do with the 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 such concrete goals can and should be subordinated to a meta-goal, which is a way of approaching and formulating goals themselves. The meta-goal could be "live in truth".
In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. that is what makes it Paradise.
Alcohol can cause ambiguity. That's partly why people drink. Alcohol temporarily lifts the terrible burden of self-consciousness from people. Drunk people know about the future, but they don't care about it. That's exciting. that's exhilarating.
People are often willing to produce a lot of collateral damage if they can retain their theory.
It is our responsibility to see what is before our eyes, courageously, and to learn from it, even if it seems horrible. The act of seeing is particularly important when it challenges what we know and rely on, upsetting and destabilising us.
The Word that produces order from Chaos sacrifices everything ,even itself, to God. That single sentence, wise beyond comprehension, sums up Christianity. Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better.
Advice is what you get when the person you’re talking with about something horrible and complicated wishes you would just shut up and go away.
Advice is what you get when the person you are talking to wants to revel in the superiority of his or her own intelligence.
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.
I have learned not to steal my clients' problems from them. I don't want to be the redeeming hero or the deus ex machina - not in someone else's story. I don't want their lives.
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. So, you have to tolerate conflict. Conflict involves negotiation and compromise. So, you have to learn to give and take and to modify your premises and adjust your thoughts.
You can be pretty smart if you can just shut up.
If you really understand a person in this way, if you are willing to enter their private world and see the way life appears to them, you run the risk of being changed yourself. You might see it their way, you might find yourself influenced in your attitudes or personality. This risk of being changed is one of the most frightening prospects most of us can face.
To discuss an event, particularly something emotional, like a death or serious illness, is to slowly choose what to leave behind.
We use the reactions of others to keep our complex selves functional. We outsource the problem of our sanity.
Before a problem can be solved it must be formulated precisely.
Too-early problem-solving may indicate a desire to escape from the effort of the problem-formulating conversation.
His joke was daring, anarchic to the point of recklessness, which is exactly the point where serious funny occurs.
At the boundary of order and chaos, one is stable enough to be secure, but flexible enough to transform.
Chaos emerges in a household, bit by bit, if left unnoticed. Don't ever underestimate the power of sins of omission.
Every single voluntarily unprocessed and uncomprehended reason for marital failure will compound and conspire and will then plague that betrayed and self-betrayed woman for the rest of her life.
Not thinking about something you don't want to know about doesn't make it go away. You are merely trading specific, particular, pointed knowledge of the likely finite list of your real faults and flaws for a much longer list of undefined potential inadequacies and insufficiencies.
Why refuse to specify, when specifying the problem would enable its solution? Because to specify the problem is to admit it exists. To do so is to allow yourself to know what you want, and then you will know, precisely when you don't get it, and that will hurt
Why refuse to specify? Because while you are failing to define success (and thus rendering it impossible), you are also refusing to define failure.
What if one had continually and honestly risked conflict in the present, in the service of longer-term truth and peace?
Dragons also hoard gold. In that collapse into the terrible mess of uncomprehended Being lurks the possibility of new and benevolent order. Clarity of thought is necessary to call it forth.
The escape from tyranny is often followed not by Paradise, but by a sojourn in the desert, aimless, confused, and deprived.
There is so little in a marriage that is not worth fighting about. Under some circumstances, there is nothing but a fight - with peace as the goal, that will reveal the truth.
No one can have a discussion about "everything". Instead you can say "This exact, precise thing - that is what is making me unhappy."
Living things die, after all, without attention. Life is indistinguishable from effortful maintenance. And relationships are alive.
It’s competence that makes people as safe as they can truly be.
If things are made too safe, people (including children) start to figure out ways to make them dangerous again.
Well-functioning societies use competence as a prime determiner of status.
When someone says, too loudly, “I stand for this!”, always wonder, “What, then, do you stand against?”
A woman should not look after a man, because she must look after children, and a man should not be a child.
Women don’t want boys.
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 holds true cross-culturally.
Absolute equality would therefore require the sacrifice of value itself - and then there would be nothing worth living for.
There are only two major reasons for resentment: being taken advantage of (or allowing oneself to be taken advantage of), or whiny refusal to adopt responsibility and grow up.
Assume ignorance before malevolence. No one has a direct pipeline to your wants and needs - not even you.
He was not fun to be around, and he couldn't take a joke. That's fatal, on a work crew.
If you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.
Cooperation is for safety, security and companionship.
Competition is for personal growth and status.
I came to realise that what can truly be loved about a person is inseparable from their limitations.
Imagine a Being who is omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. What does such a Being lack? Limitation. And for this reason, so the story goes, God created man. No limitation, no story. No story, no Being.
The parts of your brain that generate anxiety are more interested in the fact there is a plan than in the details of the plan.
Don't ruminate before you go to sleep. Then you may not be able to sleep, and if you can't sleep, everything will go rapidly downhill.
It is necessary to be strong in the face of death, because death is intrinsic to life. It is for this reason that Peterson tells his students: aim to be the person at your father's funeral that everyone, in their grief and misery, can rely on. Strength in the face of adversity. That is very different from the wish for a life free of trouble.