12 rules for life. An antidote to chaos. Jordan Peterson. Part 1 (Rules 1 to 6)

Here you will find some extracts from the book 12 Rules for life. An antidote for chaos.

Jordan Peterson is a prominent Canadian clinical psychologist. Offers " rules for sorting yourself out, setting your house in order and improving the world by first improving yourself." 

“Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself.

It’s unexplored territory. Chaos is what extends, eternally and without limit, beyond the boundaries of all states, all ideas, and all disciplines. It’s the foreigner, the stranger, the member of another gang, the rustle in the bushes in the night-time, the monster under the bed, the hidden anger of your mother, and the thickness of your child. Chaos is the despair and horror you feel when you have been profoundly betrayed. It’s the place you end when all things fall apart; when your dreams die, your career collapses, or your marriage ends. It’s the underworld of fairytale and myth, where the dragon and the gold it guards eternally co-exist. Chaos is where we are when we don’t know where we are and what we are doing. It is, in short, all those things and situations when neither know nor understand. 

Order, by contrast, is explored territory.

That’s the hundreds – of – millions – of – years old hierarchy of place, position, and authority. That’s the structure of society. Order is tribe, religion, hearth, home, and country. It’s the warm, secure living room where the fireplace glows, and the children play. It’s the flag of the nation, It’s the value of the currency, Order is the floor beneath your feet, and your plan for the day. It’s the greatness of tradition, the row of desks in the school classroom, that trains that leave on time, the calendar and the clock. Order is the public façade we’re called upon to wear, the politeness of gathering of strangers, and the thin ice on which we all skate. Order is the place where the behavior of the world matches our expectations and desires. The place where all things turn out the way we want them to. When everything is certain we are in order.”

Rule # 1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back.

If your posture is poor, for example, - if you slump, shoulders forward and rounded, chest tucked in, head down, looking small, defeated, and ineffectual ( protected, in theory, against attach from behind) – then you will feel small, defeated, and ineffectual. If you present yourself as defeated, then people will react to you as if you are loosing. If you start to straighten up, then people will look at and treat you differently. Standing up physically also implies and invokes a demands standing up metaphysically. Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of Being. Your nervous system responds in an entirely different manner when you face the demands of life voluntarily.

It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order.

So attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them – at last the same right as others.

Rule # 2 Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping

You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself. You should take care of, help, and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help, and be good to someone you loved and valued.

You need to know where you are, so you can start to chart your course. You need to know who you are so that you understand your armament and bolster yourself concerning your limitations. You need to understand where you are going so that you can limit the extent of chaos in your life, restructure order, and bring the divine force of Hope to bear on the world.

You must determine where you are going so that you can bargain for yourself so that you don’t end resentful, vengeful, and cruel. Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care of yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Chose your destination and articulate your Being.

Rule # 3. Make friends with people who want the best for you

Friendship is a reciprocal arrangement. You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worst place. Quite the opposite. You should choose people who want things to be better, not worse. It’s a good thing, not a selfish thing, to choose people that are good for you. It’s appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improve.

If you surround yourself with people who support your upward aim, they will not tolerate your cynicism and destructiveness. They will instead encourage you when you do good for yourself and others and punish you carefully when you do not.

Don’t think that it is easy to surround yourself 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 judgment, and protect yourself from too-uncritical compassion and pity.

Rule #4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday. Not to who someone is today.

When we are very young we are neither individual nor informed. We had no had the time nor gained the wisdom to develop our standards. In consequence, we must compare ourselves to others, because standards are necessary. Without them, there is nowhere to go and nothing to do. As we mature we become, by contrast, increasingly individual and unique. The conditions of our lives become more and more personal and less and less comparable with those of others

Be cautious when you are comparing yourself to others. You are a singular being, once you are an adult. You have your particular problems- financial, intimate, physiological, and otherwise. Those are embedded in the unique broader context of your existence.

Your career or job works for you in a personal manner, or it does not, and it does so in unique interplay with the other specifics of your life. You must decide how much of your time to spend on this, and how much on that. You must decide what to let go and what to pursue.

Rule # 5. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them 

Because of children, like other human beings, are not only good, they can not simply be left to their own devices, untouched by society and bloom into perfection. This means that they are much likely to go completely ashtray if they are not trained, disciplined, and properly encouraged.

Children must be shaped and informed, or they cannot thrive. This fact is reflected starkly in their behavior: kids are utterly desperate for attention from both peers and adults because such attention, which renders them effective and sophisticated communal players, is vitally necessary.

Parents are the arbiters of society. They teach the 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. Parental interventions that make children happy clearly can and should be used to shape behavior.

Rule #6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world

Have you cleaned up your life?

If the answer is no, here is something to try: Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today. Don’t waste time questioning how you know what you are going to do is wrong if you are certain that it is.

So simply stop, when you apprehend, however dimly that you should stop. Stop in that particular despicable manner. 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 honor.