The True Meaning Of 'Beyond Order' | EP 258

As you pointed out, I'm going to hold up these books. So, this is the new book, "Beyond Order," and it does concentrate on pathologies of structure, and the previous book, which is "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos." The underlying presupposition there is that in our phenomenological landscape—so that's the world as we experience it, complete with emotions and motivations and dreams, and so the full range of human experience, including the subjective and the objective, let's say—can broadly be broken into two domains.

One is the domain of things that are beyond our grasp and reach, and that's the unknown. The unknown emerges when the unknown emerges. You tend to experience anxiety. And then there's the known. I define the known very specifically and very carefully. The known is the place you are when what you're doing produces the results you want. And I say "want" because that brings motivation and emotion into the game. So, you're motivated to pursue something, you pursue it, and what you want happens. Not only do you get what you want, but you get validation for the structure that governs your perceptions and your actions.

Now, if you imagine that you're, you know, you're lonely and you approach a young woman in a social situation attempting to make some contact with her, you want to alleviate your loneliness. And so you hope you make a good impression, and you tell a joke, let's say, in a relatively awkward manner, and you get rebuffed. Then you feel you're no longer where you control; you're no longer where you exercise control, and that brings up all sorts of specters.

Immediately, it's like, well, why were you rebuffed? Well, maybe all women are to be despised—that's one theory. Maybe there's something deeply wrong with you. Maybe you're having an off day. Maybe it wasn't a very good joke. And so when you don't get what you want, then a landscape of questions emerges, and those questions can resonate through different levels of your identity, from the trivial, "Oh, I told the joke wrong," to the profound, "There's nothing desirable about me, and I'll be alone for the rest of my life."

Now, you asked about identity, and I used the example of a child's game, but I could go through identity—and so I do this particularly in "Maps of Meaning." For example, let's say I'm sitting typing. Okay, we could decompose my identity. At the highest level of resolution, I'm moving my fingers. That could be my identity; I'm the thing that moves its fingers. Then, slightly at a broader level than that, I'm typing words. At a broader level, I'm typing phrases and thinking them up, and then sentences, then paragraphs, and then chapters, and then, let's say, full papers or books. That's a productive unit; I'm the author of a book or the author of a paper—that's an identity.

But then that's nested inside—for me, it would be nested inside being a clinical psychologist, being a professor, being a good citizen. And then that's nested inside something that's even broader than that, and I would say that that's nested inside a cultural heroism. I don't mean that specific to me; I mean that for everyone. That's the outermost level; whether you're playing out the role of hero or adversary, say, that's the highest possible level of identity. That's the level at which fundamental morality is adjudicated.

There isn't really anything beyond that; it's beyond us. It's the transcendent itself, and you're all of those at any one time. You're all of those levels of identity, but those are all practical, right? So those are the roles that you're playing in the world. All of those are a consequence of who you are, but in interplay, like in this situation with the child, all of that’s negotiated with other people.

If you have a functional identity, you see, if you have a functional identity, when you act it out in the world, then you get what you want and need. If an identity doesn't do that, well, then you should either retool your identity or you retool the world, your conception of the world. Well, if you're retooling your conception of the world, then you're retooling yourself.

Now, you can actually, I mean, what a revolutionary does is try to bring the world into alignment with—literally, yes, literally! Well, and we all do that to some degree because we are practical engineers. You know, I mean, not only do we perceive the world, but we also interact with it so that it does manifest itself in accordance with our desires. There are limits, obviously, to how far you can go or how far you should go with that, you know?

And what are the limits? Well, there's practical limits. Nature won't do what you want it to unless you're very sophisticated in your application of your knowledge. And other people will object. So now, you might say, well, you should forge forward regardless of their objection. And you know, there are circumstances under which that’s true. But generally speaking, that's not a very good idea. It certainly doesn't make you popular as a child.

So that brings up one other issue. I would also say, and this—I developed this idea quite a bit in the new book—you go from egocentrism. As a child, you have to go through this period where you're socialized as a child and adolescent. And that really means that you allow your identity to be molded and shaped by the group.

You know, you think about how important peers, friends, and peers are to children and adolescents. You know, your mother will say when you're a teenager, "Well, if Johnny jumped off the bridge, would you too?" And you say, "Well, no." But the real answer is, "Well, probably. If all your friends are there taunting you, you would, in fact, jump off the bridge."

Not only that, generally speaking, you should because it's your duty. It's your developmental duty as a child and a teenager to take your isolated self and turn it into a functioning social unit. Now you could say, "Well, does Peterson want everybody to be a functional social unit? A robot? You know, a cog in the wheel?" And I would say, well, that isn't where development stops. It has to go through that period before you can emerge as a genuine individual, which means you have to know the rules of the game before you can break them.

But not being able to abide by the rules is not anything like being a genuine creative individual. Those are not the same thing. And there are plenty of attempts to confuse the two things because it's much better if you can't follow the rules to view yourself as an avant-garde revolutionary than as a failure.

And it's not like—I don't know that that social molding crushes. Obviously, it crushes, and everyone feels that. These are existential problems; everyone deals with the tyranny of culture and the fact that it does want you to be a certain way and not other ways, and those ways might not be in keeping with the deepest elements of your nature.

Well, tough luck for you! Because you’re also the beneficiary of culture, and so you have to offer it your pound of flesh. Now, you shouldn't do that at the expense of your soul, but you shouldn't stay an immature child either. And so this notion of identity that we're being fed is very, very thin.

What are we being fed? Be very specific. Well, there is the idea, for example, that your identity is whatever you say it is and that everyone else has to go along with that. No, that isn't how it works, partly because no one even knows how to go along with it.

Like, let's say, just for example, that you're gender non-binary. Okay, what am I supposed to do about that? Man, I don't know; I hardly know what to do if the rules are already there. So let's say I grow up wanting to be a heterosexual male. I want to find a woman, fall in love with her, raise a family, have children, have grandchildren. That's a game I know the rules to.

Not well, because everyone's a failure at that; you know, it's very difficult. But at least you kind of know what the goal is and so does the person you're with. Well, you leap out of that, which is already terribly difficult. You leap out of that into completely unknown territory, saying, "I'm presenting myself as something other than those categories," leaves everyone around you and you completely bereft of direction.

Let me put it in any words that I get from your material. So, what I heard you just say—tell me if I'm wrong—is that part of the negotiation that we do from the time we are little kids, figuring out that play, we're up on the bridge, we jump, maybe because we want to fit in with our peer group, there is a sense of order to that.

Now, you've been very careful, and it would drive me crazy if people respond to this interview as if you have not already illustrated that it is the balance between two opposing forces. But we need enough order so that somebody can find their way through the world.

And many, I think a big part of the reason that your work has resonated so profoundly with people is they are left in a world where they don’t know how to move forward in a way that serves them spiritually, practically as well, for sure. And so, hey, everybody, both of those practically shades into spiritually as you move up into the broader reaches of identity, you know.

Look, this—see, one of the things I really laid this out in "Maps of Meaning." It took me a long time to understand that belief regulated emotion. So what happens is that if you act out your identity, if you act out your beliefs in the world, and what you want doesn't happen, what happens is that your body defaults into emergency preparation for action.

The reason for that is you've wandered too far away from the campfire, and now you're in the forest, and maybe you're naked. So what do you do then? And the answer is, well, you don't know what to do. So what do you do when you don't know what to do?

And the answer is, you prepare to do everything. And the problem with that is that it's unbelievably draining, psychophysiologically; like, it hurts you. And there's an immense physiological literature detailing the cost of exactly that kind of response, and so people need people.

And animals—they, people stay where what they do has the results they want. That's partly why you want to be around people who share your cultural presuppositions. It's because you know that, for example, even in small ways, let's say you're a country music aficionado and you're hanging around with your cowboy-hatted buddies, and you throw on a tape, and everyone says, "Great tunes, man!" and you know you're happy about that.

But you know you throw on a piece by Tchaikovsky, and you're in a different subculture, and who the hell are you? People in your group will say, "Man, who listens to music like that?" And that's a trivial example in some sense, but I believe it's one that everyone can resonate to.

It's very hard on us not to be where we know that what we want is going to happen. We hate that. We hate that! And no wonder, so—there are varying degrees of that, obviously. You can really be where you don't know what's going to happen, or you can only be there to some degree. But by and large, by and large, we're conservative creatures. Even if we're liberal in temperament, we can't tolerate that much uncertainty.

And you might ask, well, why? And the answer is, well, because you can be hurt, pain, you can be damaged, you can become intolerably anxious, and you can die. So it's no wonder you're sensitive; we're very sensitive to negative emotion.

And so our identities—rate functional identity regulates your emotion. Why "Beyond Order"? What is the genesis of that title? How did you arrive at that title?

As far as I can tell, in the world of value—so let's think about value for a minute—if you move towards something you value, otherwise you would move towards it. There's an old joke about the chicken: Why did the chicken cross the road? And the answer to that is, well, he thought the other side was better.

Well, that’s the case! You know, in order, we need a gradient of value to organize our action. And what you have to prioritize—because you can't do everything at once—and so you do the thing that's most important right now. Now, that means you're in a world of importance, and that's a value world.

And the value world, as far as I can tell, has two broad components. The Taoists talked about it as yin and yang, and broadly speaking, it's order and chaos. Order tends to be represented with masculine symbols, and chaos tends to be represented with feminine symbols. That doesn't mean order is male and chaos is female.

You know, I've been pilloried for this, even though it's hardly my proposition! But the idea of the patriarchy is a symbolic—it's its use of masculine symbolism to represent order.

So, anyways, order is where what happens. Order is—you're in order when what you want to happen happens. When you act—and so that's reassuring because not only do you get what you want, but the fact that you get what you want indicates that your theory about how to get what you want is true.

Every time you fail, you don't get what you want, but you also undermine the validity of the theory that you're using to organize your perceptions and your actions. That's partly why people don't like to fail because you don't know how far back that can echo, how far down your hierarchy of presuppositions that can echo.

If you're clinically depressed, every minor failure means you're a worthless human being, and you never know when a failure is going to demonstrate that.

You know, in any case, there's chaos and order; there are the two great domains, and you have to contend with chaos because too much of it overwhelms you. You drown in it—it's the flood—and that happens when your life gets beyond you, and you're somewhere where no matter what you do, nothing you want happens.

It's a domain of terror and pain. Now, it's also a domain of unlimited possibility because outside of what you know is everything you don't know. And there's untold riches to be gathered from the domain of everything you don't know.

But that doesn't mean—it still needs to be managed; it's dangerous! Now, the domain of order is the same way; if order becomes too extreme, then everything becomes cramped. It becomes totalitarian, and then that starts to pathologize.

That's the dying king—the king who's dying for lack of the water of life is the old tyrant who can no longer see beyond his own presuppositions. My first book concentrated more on pathologies of chaos, and the second book more on pathologies of order, and they're a matched set in that regard, so far as I was successful at doing that.

You know, the liberal types, they're very sensitive to pathologies of order, and the conservative types are very sensitive to pathologies of chaos, but they're both right. It's just there's no final solution to that problem; you're stuck with it. It's an eternal existential concern. That's why mythological language is standard across people.

No matter who you are, no matter when you live, you always have to deal with the fact that some things escape your competence, and no matter where you are, no matter who you are, you have to adapt to the fact of the existence of a value structure that's shared across a social group.

It's the fundamentals; those are fundamental constituent elements of human experience, and we have symbols for them, and we all understand the symbols. So, for example, in Pinocchio—this, I'm not going to go into this because it's too complicated—but no one balks at a puppet going to the bottom of the ocean and being swallowed by a whale.

Why? It makes no sense. There's nothing about that that makes sense, right? It's not an empirical description of the objective world. But it's so clearly real that a four-year-old can follow it. It's a mystery! You know, the whale breathes fire in Pinocchio; it's a dragon.

And why? Why is that? Well, we face dragons forever. That's what a human being is. It's a creature that faces the dragon. The dragon can burn you to a crisp, but it has what you need. That's the world; it'll burn you up, but it has what you need!

And so then the question is, how do you stop from getting burned up and get what you need? And the answer to that is that you mold yourself into the hero, and that's a religious story. You say, well, is it true? And the answer to that is, it depends on what you mean by true.

And you know, that's a weasel answer in some ways, but it's not because it's such a deep question that it can't be put forth without discussing the definition of true. So it's as deep a question as what is true.

Now, you know, it could be that the—I would say part of the cultural war is a criticism of the motif of the hero. That's, dare I say, fellow-gocentric Western culture is fellow-gocentric. I would say human culture is fellow-gocentric.

I think Derek was wrong about that; it's human culture. It's man, so to speak, against nature. Although sometimes it's man against culture, and sometimes it's man against man. It's man against nature, and we triumph as the hero.

Maybe that story isn't true or isn't correct, but that's us. And if it isn't correct, well then, we're an evolutionary abortion because that's who we are. And I would say, well, before you throw it aside, maybe you should try it. You don't have a better option anyway.

And there, what does it mean to try it? Mostly, I would say it means two things: it means to practice love, and that means assume that things are valuable and act according to that assumption. It requires truth, which is: don't say what you know to be untrue.

And you know when I tried to unpack the first sentence of Genesis in the context of the broader biblical narrative, what appears to be happening is that there's a proposition that God is guided by love and uses truth to create. It's something like that, and maybe love is something like the wish that all being would flourish.

There isn't a better story than that. What effect do you hope your new book to have? Now, that might seem like a lazy question, but I'm going to keep it broad. I'd just be interested to hear your thoughts. What would be a successful effect for this book looking back 12 months from now, 24 months from now?

Well, I would like it—it would be lovely if it had the same effect on people as the last book appeared to have. I mean, it's comforting to me to read through my YouTube comments, oddly enough, because that isn't generally a place people would go for comfort. You know, untold numbers of people have said to me in person but publicly—in that way that they put their lives together, at least in some ways.

And you talked about Viktor Frankl. You know, when I wrote "Maps of Meaning," I said, well, I was interested in malevolence. I was deeply affected by the accounts I'd read of what happened in the Second World War in Germany and what happened in the Soviet Union and in China—these horror shows that characterized the twentieth century constrain malevolence.

And so if you study malevolence, you start to understand what the opposite of that is. The opposite of malevolence is something like the hero's journey. You know, and it's easy to be cynical about that, but well, it's not that easy because if you're cynical about that, then you undermine your own life.

And everyone knows this. This is the other thing that's so interesting: everyone knows this! You never teach someone you love to lie. You're always appalled if you have a son or daughter; you're always appalled if they don't tell the truth. You know, in the deepest part of your heart, that if you don't tell the truth, the world falls apart. And that's actually true.

Let's dive into the book because, actually, so many of the things that we're talking about now are sort of part and parcel to all of the chapters here. So, chapter one, and what I really liked about this also is the way you organized it—the new topics.

Because one of the questions we would get often in the Q&A that you would get is, oh, was there a 13th rule that you couldn't get in the book? And you actually mentioned this in the book, that you had what, about 46 other—was it 46?

42. You had 40—yeah, the same as Douglas Adams' answer to the universe, life, the universe, and everything—42 rules—which was actually a coincidence. But I thought it was comical in the aftermath; there's 42 rules.

So now, I've written about 20; I've written essays about 24 of them. How did when you got to 42, how long did you give it before you said, "Okay, 42 is enough?" Because I know you, you're pretty methodical.

I just did it in an afternoon. The original list of rules—I was playing on Quora. I wrote about 40 answers for Quora, something like that, and I really haven't partaken in that forum for a long time now. I was investigating it, and some kid had asked, "What do you need to know in order to lead a good life, or what's most important to know, something like that?"

And I thought, well, I’ll take a crack at answering this, and I made this list of 42 rules, and it got very popular on Quora. Much more popular—typical Pareto distribution like that—one answer got more views than all of my other answers put together. So I thought that was kind of interesting; you know, I touched something for some reason.

Out of that, when I was asked by an agent who contacted me—Sally Harding of Cook Agency—she asked me if I was interested in writing something more popular, and I knew that those rules had found an audience, so that seemed to me to be a place to dive in.

So anyways, I've only written about 24 of them, you know, in the two books. There have them both here; you can see how they're structured. One's white, and the other's black. They make a matched set; you can read each of them independently.

One concentrates—the first one, "An Antidote to Chaos," does concentrate on the consequences of excess uncertainty, and the second book concentrates more on an excess of order. Both of those are fundamental existential dangers, as far as I'm concerned.

And in this universe of value, in the world of value, there are two major domains. One domain is the domain of order, and you can technically define it. The domain of order is where you find yourself when what you're doing produces the results you want. That's a really tight formulation because it gives you a particular idea of what a place and time is.

The place and time you occupy at any given moment is the place and time that's defined by your current goal, and you have a map of value that guides you through the actions that are necessary in that domain. If the result is what you want—which brings motivation and emotion into the picture—then you get what you need or want, but you also validate your theory of existence because it's good enough to produce the results that you desire.

Given that you're fallible and that you don't know everything, you have to use proximal truths. It's a pragmatic—it’s a form of philosophical pragmatism. If you make a bridge and it stands up, then you know how to make a bridge. Why? Because the bridge stood up!

Now, maybe you overbuilt it; you could have built it more elegantly, but it's sufficiently true so that the bridge functions. And we're like that. We're like engineers; we're cobbling together solutions all the time. And as long as those solutions work, we assume that we're right.

Well, that's the domain of order. The domain of chaos emerges when you lay out a plan and take it into action, and something other than what you wanted emerges. Sometimes that can be a catastrophe, an absolute catastrophe, and your brain—our psychophysiological—our psychophysiology is actually adapted to those two domains.

When something unexpected happens, all sorts of emotions and motivations break loose—fight and flight among them, anger among them gets disinhibited. Because when you don't know what's happening, you have to prepare for everything, so you get anxious, and then you hyper-prepare, which is extremely stressful.

And so the domain of chaos is extremely stressful in small doses; it's exhilarating. And that's because, well, where you don't know what's happening, you have the opportunity to learn and to expand your map. And so there's always an interplay between the domain of chaos and the domain of order, but they can each pathologize.

The pathologies of uncertainty are more associated with anxiety and nihilism and depression, whereas the pathologies of order are more totalitarian. And then I would say as well, the liberals, liberal types, the more left-leaning types, are quite sensitive to pathologies of order. They don't like them—that's the patriarchy.

The patriarchy is the pathology of order, and it's symbolically masculine—something I've been taken to task for claiming. But the patriarchy itself, the idea of the patriarchy itself, is a symbol. The patriarch is a symbol. That's why it has such power, and it's a symbol that refers to the domain of order.

Now, the domain of order is protective as well as oppressive, but when it degenerates, it becomes oppressive. And I would say it degenerates when it's based on power rather than competence. But it can be based on competence. You know, the Marxist critics and the politically correct types—they insist that every element of the patriarchy is only a consequence of the imposition of order, a forceful imposition of order—it's all power.

Well, no, no, it's not! When it degenerates, that's true, because—and you can tell that because the thing is, the domain of order will be upheld by those who inhabit it if it's functional. If you have to use force, that's already an indication that it's become pathological because people aren't playing voluntarily.

So would you say we're in a degenerative cycle right now? That the cycle seems more degenerative than, say, a building cycle, or do you think that that's just the play that's always going on, and you have to figure out your role in it?

Well, I think the play is always going on. And I don't think—the antidote to chaos isn't order, and the antidote to order isn't chaos. The antidote to both is the balancing, right? The active balancing of them—often!

You used to do this a lot; you would say the balance and the struggle between liberals and conservatives. So people see me doing this all the time; I was credible, Jordan was talking about this, but so you think that's it?

Well, it's really important; it's really important to understand that the antidote to chaos, in the final analysis, can't just be order because order itself can degenerate. So I believe that the antidote is active engagement with the world—honest active engagement with the world—truth.

And I think it's also truth motivated by love, which is a motif that runs through this second book in particular. And love is the desire for all things to flourish. You know, in Christ, He says that you should love your enemies. And that's—in what does that mean?

And it's really worth thinking about. You shouldn't wish your enemies harm. By that, what I mean is that it would be better for everyone if they would conduct themselves so that they would flourish. You know, and that doesn't mean you shouldn't defend yourself. It doesn't mean that soldiers aren't necessary or the police; it doesn't mean any of that.

It's not a weak-kneed statement. It means that if you have yourself pointed in the right direction, you don't wish an excess of harm on the world; you want it to flourish. That's love!

So you aren't yourself that way, and I do believe that that requires a certain courage because the world is so flawed and so painful. There's so much suffering in it; it’s very difficult to fall in love with it. You keep getting bounced off. You think this is so terrible that maybe it shouldn't even be, but that takes you down a very bad road.

So it's love first, and then truth serves that, and I do think that's the motif that runs through the Old and New Testaments—that the combination of those two things, love is the desire that being flourish. And I do believe that truth serves that.

Well, that's it.

No, please finish your thought.

Well, I also think that people find meaning in that. And you can—everyone can answer this for themselves. It's like, you have to watch, and you have to see where it is that you find the meaning that sustains your life. And I would say it's certainly not been my experience that people find that in deceit or hatred.

I mean, they may be tempted by that; they may have their reasons for it. But everyone is ashamed of that and wishes it could be otherwise, even if they don't know what to do about that.