Out Now! Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life | Jordan Peterson

Hi everyone, I'm pleased to announce the release of my new book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. I've been thinking for quite a while about what I would do to announce this book, and what popped into my mind constantly was that I should start the announcement with a thank you to all my viewers, listeners, and readers for the tremendous support that you've shown to my work in all of its forms, and for the multitude of kind, thoughtful, and often erudite and moving letters that you've sent to me and to my family, and comments that you've left on YouTube and other forms of social media.

I've been constantly amazed, and I mean constantly, and I mean amazed, by the volume of correspondence that has come my way and by the continual support I've received from so many people. So, um, I'm pleased to have been of use. I'm pleased that people found my last book, 12 Rules for Life, helpful and engaging, and I hope very much that the same thing will prove true of this new book.

I'm going to read the 12 rules from this book, and then I'm going to read some excerpts from it so that you can get a sense of the book. These 12 rules, like the 12 rules in the previous book, were drawn from a longer list of 42 that I published on Quora.

Rule 1: Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.

Rule 2: Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that.

Rule 3: Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.

Rule 4: Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.

Rule 5: Do not do what you hate.

Rule 6: Abandon ideology.

Rule 7: Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing, and see what happens.

Rule 8: Perhaps my favorite: try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible.

Rule 9: If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely.

Rule 10: Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship.

Rule 11: Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant.

Rule 12: Be grateful in spite of your suffering.

Each of these rules is accompanied by an illustration, as in the case of my previous book. This time the illustrator is Yulia Fogra, and she's done, I think, a lovely job. We held a competition for the illustrations, and her work was at least, in my opinion, the best of the bunch. She's produced these lovely artworks that have a classical fairy tale appeal, and so I think they add a bit of beauty to the book.

So, I'm going to read a couple of sections now. The first reading is from Rule 3, and to remind you, Rule 3 is "Do not hide unwanted things in the fog," and this is from a subsection entitled "What is the fog?"

Imagine that you are afraid. You have reason to be. You're afraid of yourself, you're afraid of other people, you're afraid of the world. You're nostalgic for the innocence of the past, for the time before you learned the terrible things that shattered the trust characterizing your childhood. The knowledge you have gained of yourself, other people, and the world has embittered more than enlightened. You've been betrayed, hurt, and disappointed. You've become distrustful even of hope itself, as your hope has been repeatedly shattered, and that is the very definition of hopelessness.

The last thing you want to know is more. Better to leave what is enshrouded in mystery. Better as well to avoid thinking too much or at all about what could be. When ignorance is bliss, after all, 'tis folly to be wise. Imagine more precisely that you are so afraid that you will not allow yourself even to know what you want. Knowing would simultaneously mean hoping, and your hopes have been dashed. You have your reasons for maintaining your ignorance.

You're afraid, perhaps, that there is nothing worth wanting. You're afraid that if you specify what you want precisely, you will simultaneously discover—and all too clearly—what constitutes failure. You are afraid that failure is the most likely outcome, and finally, you are afraid that if you define failure, and then fail, you will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was you that failed, and that it was your fault.

So, you do not allow yourself to know what you want. You manage this by refusing to think it through. You are happy, satisfied, and engaged sometimes, and unhappy, frustrated, and nihilistic other times, but you will not inquire deeply into why because then you would know, and then you would encounter yet again shattered hope and confirmed disappointment.

You are also afraid, but for different reasons, to allow others to know what you want. First, if they were to find out just what you wanted, then they might tell you, and then you would know, even if you were fighting against gathering that very knowledge. Second, if they knew, they could then deny you what you truly wanted, even needed, and hurt you much more efficiently than they might if your deepest desires, and therefore your vulnerabilities, remain secret.

The fog that hides is the refusal to notice, to attend to emotions and motivational states as they arise and the refusal to communicate them both to yourself and to the people who are close to you. A bad mood signifies something. A state of anxiety or sadness signifies something, and not likely something that will please you to discover. The most probable outcome of successfully articulating an emotion that has accrued without expression over time is tears and admission of vulnerability and pain, which are also feelings that people do not like to allow, particularly when they are feeling distrustful and angry.

Who wants to dig down into the depths of pain, grief, and guilt until the tears emerge? A voluntary refusal to take notice of our emotional states is not the only impediment to dealing with them. If your wife or husband, or whomever else you are tangled up with unhappily at the moment, says something that comes too close to the painful truth, for example, then a sharp and insulting remark will often shut them up and is, therefore, very likely to be offered.

This is partly a test: does the person being insulted care enough about you and your suffering to dig past a few obstacles and unearth the bitter truth? It is also partly—and more obviously—defensive. If you can chase someone away from something you yourself do not want to discover, that makes your life easier in the present. Sadly, it is also very disappointing if that defense succeeds and is typically accompanied by a sense of abandonment, loneliness, and self-betrayal.

You must nonetheless still live among other people, and they with you. You have desires, wants, needs, and however unstated and unclear, and you are still motivated to pursue them, not least because it is impossible to live without desire, want, and need. Your strategy under such conditions: show your disappointment when someone close to you makes you unhappy. Allow yourself the luxury and pleasure of resentment when something does not go your way.

Ensure that the person who has transgressed against you is frozen out by your disapproval. Force them to discover, with as much difficulty as possible, exactly what they have done to disappoint you. And finally, let them grope around blindly in the fog that you have generated around yourself until they stumble into and injure themselves on the sharp hidden edges of your unrevealed preferences and dreams.

And maybe these responses are tests too, tests deeply associated with the lack of courage to trust. If you really loved me, you would brave the terrible landscape that I have arrayed around myself to discover the real me. And perhaps there is even something to such claims, implicit though they may be. A certain testing of commitment might have its utility. Everything does not have to be given away for free, but even a little unnecessary mystery goes a long way.

And you must still live with yourself. In the short term, perhaps you are protected from the revelation of your insufficiency by your refusal to make yourself clear. Every ideal is a judge, after all—the judge who says you are not manifesting your true potential. No ideals, no judge, but the price paid for that is purposelessness. This is a high price. No purpose, then no positive emotion, as most of what drives us forward with hope intact is the experience of approaching something we deeply need and want.

And worse, when we are without purpose: chronic overwhelming anxiety, as focused purpose constrains what is otherwise likely to be the intolerable chaos of unexploited possibility and too much choice. If you make what you want clear and commit yourself to its pursuit, you may fail. But if you do not make what you want clear, then you will certainly fail. You cannot hit a target that you refuse to see. You cannot hit a target if you do not take aim.

And equally dangerously, in both cases, you will not accrue the advantage of aiming but missing. You will not benefit from the learning that inevitably takes place when things do not go your way. Success at a given endeavor often means trying, falling short, recalibrating with the new knowledge generated painfully by the failure, and then trying again, and falling short—often repeated ad nauseam. Sometimes, all that learning, impossible without the failure, leads you to see that aiming your ambition in a different direction would be better. Not because it is easier, not because you have given up, not because you are avoiding, but because you have learned through the vicissitudes of your experience that what you seek is not to be found where you were looking or is simply not attainable in the manner by which you chose to pursue it.

So what might you do? What should you do as an alternative to hiding things in the fog? Admit to your feelings. This is a very tricky matter, and it does not simply mean give in to them. First, noting, much less communicating feelings of petty anger or pain due to lonesomeness or anxiety about something that might be trivial, or jealousy that is likely unwarranted, is embarrassing. The admission of such feelings is a revelation of ignorance, insufficiency, and vulnerability.

Second, it is unsettling to allow for the possibility that your feelings, however overwhelming and convincing, might be misplaced, and in your ignorance, pointing you in the wrong direction. It is possible that you have misinterpreted the situation entirely for reasons of which you remain fundamentally unconscious. It is for such reasons that trust is vital—but trust of the mature and tragic sort. A naive person trusts because he or she believes that people are essentially or even universally trustworthy.

But any person who has truly lived has been or has betrayed someone. With experience knows that people are capable of deception and willing to deceive. That knowledge brings with it an arguably justified pessimism about human nature, personal and otherwise. But it also opens the door to another kind of faith in humanity: one based on courage rather than naivete. I will trust you. I will extend my hand to you despite the risk of betrayal, because it is possible through trust to bring out the best in you, and perhaps in me.

So I will accept substantial risk to open the door to cooperation and negotiation. And even if you do betray me in a not too unforgivable manner, assuming a certain degree, shall we say, of genuine apology and contrition on your part, I will continue to extend my hand. And part of the way I will do that is by telling you what I am feeling.

A certain necessary humility must accompany such raw revelations. I should not say—at least not ideally—"You have been ignoring me lately." I should say instead, "I feel isolated and lonely and hurt and cannot help but feel that you have not been as attentive to me over the last few months as I would have liked or that might have been best for us as a couple."

But I'm unsure if I am just imagining all this because I'm upset or if I'm genuinely seeing what's going on. The latter statement gets the point across but avoids the accusatory stance that so often serves as a first defense against a serious "get to the bottom of things" conversation.

And it's very possible that you are wrong about just what it is that is causing you to feel the way you do. If you are, you need to know it, because there's no point in propagating errors that are causing you and others pain and interfering with your future. Best to find out what is true. Best to disperse the fog and find out if the sharp objects you feared were lurking there are real or fantastical.

And there is always the danger that some of them are real, but it is better to see them than to keep them occluded by the fog, because you can at least sometimes avoid the danger that you are willing to see.

This is an excerpt from Rule 8: "Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible." It's from a subsection entitled "Memory and Vision."

"The pride of the peacock is the glory of God; the lust of the goat is the bounty of God; the wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God; the nakedness of woman is the work of God; excess of sorrow laughs; excessive joy weeps; the roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man." —William Blake, from Proverbs of Hell, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

When I was a child, I knew the contours and details of all the houses in my immediate neighborhood. I knew the back alleys, the places behind the fences, the location of each crack in the pavement, and the shortcuts that could be taken from one place to another. My geographical locale was not large, but I had explored it thoroughly, and my knowledge of it was very detailed.

Now that I am an adult, the same is not true. I lived in Fairview, the town I grew up in, for most of my childhood and adolescence for only nine years, but I'm still able to picture in high resolution the street I lived on. I have lived in Toronto on the same street for more than twice that long, but I still have only a vague sense of the houses that surround me. I do not think that is a good thing.

I feel far less at home because of it. It is as if when I walk down the street and glance at a local house, I think house as an icon—because really, what practical difference does it make to me what particularities characterize each house? And then my attention is turned to something else. I did not see the house with its specific shingles, colors, flowers, and architectural details despite the interest that might have been elicited in me had I paid careful attention.

By this point in my life, I have seen so many houses in so many places that I know what a house is likely to do when I walk by, which is very little. Thus, I ignore the engaging idiosyncrasies and beauties of its details, its unique character. For better or worse, I see just enough to stay oriented as I walk past and continue to think and be elsewhere as I do so.

There is real loss in that. I am simply not there in my adult neighborhood the same way I was as a child in my hometown. I'm separated from the reality of the world, and a very deep sense of belonging is missing in some important way because of that. Perception has been replaced for me with functional, pragmatic memory. This has made me more efficient in some ways, but the cost is an impoverished experience of the richness of the world.

I remember when I started working as a junior professor in Boston when my kids were about two and three years old. I was very preoccupied with my work, trying to keep up, trying to advance my career, trying to make enough money to support my family on a single income. I would come home and take a walk with Tammy and our children, Michaela and Julian. I found it very difficult to remain patient with them.

I had too much work to do, always—or believed I did—and had disciplined myself through years of effort to focus continually on that. If we went for a walk, I wanted to know exactly where we were going, just how long it would take to get there, and precisely when we were going to get back. This is no attitude to adopt when trying to have a pleasant and reasonable time with toddlers—not if you want to immerse yourself in the experience, not if you want to watch and participate in the pleasure they take in their timeless discovery—not unless you want to risk missing something of crucial import.

It was very difficult for me to relax and focus on the present and watch my little kids pursue their meandering route through the neighborhood with no particular destination, purpose, or schedule in mind—engaging themselves deeply in an encounter with a local dog, bug, or earthworm, or in some game they invented on the way. Now and then, however, I could snap briefly into that same frame of reference that is one of the wonderful gifts provided by young children and see the pristine world they inhabited, still untrammeled by practiced and effective memory, capable of producing pure joy in the newness of everything.

But I was still possessed enough by my future concerns to be involuntarily pulled back into intense preoccupation with getting the next thing done. I knew perfectly well I was missing out on beauty and meaning and engagement regardless of whatever advantages and efficiency my impatience bought. I was narrow, sharp, and focused and did not waste time, but the price I paid for that was the blindness demanded by efficiency, accomplishment, and order.

I was no longer seeing the world; I was only seeing the little I needed to navigate it with maximum speed and lowest cost. None of that was surprising. I had the responsibilities of an adult, I had a demanding job, I had to take care of my family, and that meant sacrificing the present and attending to the future.

But having little children around and noticing their intense preoccupation with the present and their fascination with what was directly around them made me very conscious of the loss that accompanied maturity. Great poets are expressly aware of this, and they do what they can to remind the rest of us.

"There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, the earth and every common sight to me did seem appareled in celestial light, the glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of your turn wheresoever I may, by night or day, the things which I have seen I now can see no more. Ye blessed creatures! I have heard the call ye to each other make. I see the heavens laugh with you in your jubilee. My heart is at your festival, my head half it's coronal. The fullness of your bliss I feel; I feel it all. Oh evil day! If I were sullen while earth herself is adorning this sweet May morning and the children are culling on every side in a thousand valleys far and wide fresh flowers while the sun shines warm and the babe leaps up on his mother's arm."

"I hear, I hear with joy, I hear!"

"But there's a tree of many one, a single field which I have looked upon; both of them speak of something that is gone. The pansy at my feet doth the same tale repeat: wither has fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?" —William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Early Childhood.

Some, in fact, never lose the glorious vision of childhood. This is particularly true of artists, and indeed seems a vital part of what makes them artists. William Blake, the English painter, printmaker, and poet, appears to have been one such person. He inhabited a uniquely visionary world.

Blake perceived something closer to what the philosopher Immanuel Kant termed the "thing in itself" than most mortals left as we are with the pale reflection of our surroundings that are increasingly restricted. Mature perceptions deliver to us. Blake was also exquisitely sensitive to the metaphoric or dramatic significance of each apparently isolated event—the manner in which each event is rife with endless poetically echoing connotations.

"Every farmer understands: every tear from every eye becomes a babe in eternity. This is caught by females bright and returned to its own delight. The bleak, the bark, ballow and roar, are waves that beat on heaven's shore. The babe that weeps, the rod beneath, writes revenge in realms of death. The beggar's rags fluttering in air do to rags the heavens tear. The soldier armed with sword and gun palsey'd strikes the summer's sun. The poor man's farthing is worth more than all the gold on Afric's shore. One might run from the laborer's hands shall buy and sell the miser's lands; or if protected from on high does that whole nation sell and buy. He who mocks the infant's faith shall be mocked in age and death. He who shall teach the child to doubt the rotting grave shall never get out. He who respects the infant's faith triumphs over hell and death." —William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

The vision of a true artist, such as Blake, is truly too much because what is beyond our memory, restricted perceptions, is too much. It is the unfathomable totality of the world—past, present, and future—bound up together, every level connected to every other level, nothing existing in isolation, everything implying something vital but beyond our comprehension, and all of it speaking of the overwhelming mystery of being.

The visionary concentrates on something we all see hypothetically—a vase of flowers, perhaps—and all its complexity and beauty, each bloom springing forth out of nothingness before its dissolution and return, a haystack in the spring and its appearance in the summer, autumn, and winter, observing and portraying the absolute mystery of its existence with its different shades of light and color, as well as the underlying commonality of form—which we can easily confuse with the full and incomprehensible actuality of what is there.

"How do you know, but every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight closed by your senses?" —William Blake, from A Memorable Fancy, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

To perceive, then, goes painting irises, from which the illustration that begins this chapter is derived, is, for example, to gaze through a window back into the eternity that our perceptions once revealed so that we can remember how awe-inspiring and miraculous the world really is under the mundane familiarity to which we have reduced it.

To share in the artist's perception reunites us with the source of inspiration that can rekindle our delight in the world, even if the drudgery and repetition of daily life has reduced what we see to the narrowest and most pragmatic of visions.

"But for those first affections, those shadowy recollections, which, be they what they may, are yet the fountain light of all our day, are yet a master light of all our seeing; uphold us, cherish, and have power to make our noisy years see moments in the being of the eternal silence; truths that wake to perish never, which neither listlessness nor mad endeavor, nor man nor boy, nor all that is at enmity with joy can utterly abolish or destroy." —William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Early Childhood.

All of this is very frightening. It is frightening to perceive the shells of ourselves that we have become. It is frightening to glimpse even for a moment the transcendent reality that exists beyond. We think we border our great paintings with luxurious, elaborate frames to glorify them, but we do it at least as much to insist to ourselves that the glory of the painting itself ends at the frame.

That bounding, that bordering, leaves the world we are familiar with comfortably intact and unchanged. We do not want that beauty reaching out past the limitations imposed on it and disturbing everything that is familiar. We do the same with museums—those asylums for genius. We isolate everything that is great, everything that could in principle be distributed throughout the world.

Why cannot every small town have a shrine devoted to one great piece of art instead of having every piece collected in a manner impossible for anyone to ever take in at once? Is not one masterpiece enough for a room, or even for a building? Ten great works of art, or a hundred, in a single room is absurd, given that each is a world in and of itself. Such mass collection is degrading of the unique, singular, particularity and worth of what is priceless and irreplaceable.

It is fear that entices us to imprison art. And no wonder.

"Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much? Have you practiced so long to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems. You possess the good of the earth and sun; there are millions of suns left. You shall no longer take things at second or third hand nor look through the eyes of the dead nor feed on the specters in books. You shall not look through my eyes either nor take things from me. You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself." —Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.

It can be overwhelming to open ourselves up to the beauty in the world that we—as adults—have painted over with simplicity. In not doing so, however, in not taking a proper walk with a young child, for example, we lose track of the grandeur and the awe that the untrammeled world is constantly capable of producing and reduce our lives to bleak necessity.

That's from my new book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. Thanks for your attention. Bye-bye.