Summary of Beyond Order by Jordan Peterson

Rule IX: If Old Memories Still Upset You, Write Them Down Carefully and Completely

But Is Yesterday Finished With You?

Imagine you have done something bad in the past. You lied, betrayed, cheated, stole, or hurt.

Or imagine that you were victim of such actions.

In both cases, the memories evoke fear, guilt, and shame. Why?

Because you suffered in both cases, and you don’t want these things to happen again.

Now, if you recall the memory, or if it comes back unbidden, complete with terror, shame, and guilt, this means something specific.

It means you fell into a whole, and that the emotional system does not want you to repeat the mistake.

It means that you are not sharp or aware enough that your emotional system trusts you not to make the mistake yourself, which is why it feels the need to intervene and remind you.

Learn from the past. Or repeat its horrors, in imagination, endlessly.

People don’t repress as much as they chase away the things they don’t want to think about.

When it comes to trauma, trauma comes back because we can’t come up with a rational explanation that would motivate why anyone did the trauma to us.

The refusal to think about these leaves an area of the memory unexplored and dangerous.

Anything sufficiently threatful cannot be forgotten if it is not understood.

We need to know where we are and where we are going. If you don’t know where you came from (what you have gone through), you can’t know where you are.

Where we are going is the ultimate person we’d like to be, with its values, characters, etc.

Successes towards becoming that person feel good. Failures feel bad. They indicate that we don’t understand the world enough.

It indicates that there is something flawed in what we’ve built.

So must go back to these memories, and make sure we’ve learned our lesson.

Otherwise, we remain in the past, plagued by reminiscences, tormented by conscience, cynical for the loss of what might have been, unforgiving of ourselves, and unable to accept the challenges and tragedies facing us.

We must gather from the past the things we have avoided.

We must put ourselves back together.

Cynicism about the future rationalizes the avoidance and deception. That is hell, and there is no limit to its depth.

The humility you need to get out of this situation is as big as the size of the errors that you’ve made.

We can’t get out of our responsibilities if we want to actualize potential.

Potential Into Actuality

We don’t decide what to do based on our past. We do so based on our future, on what we want. We directly confront the future when looking for the right course of action.

We face different options, choose one, and by doing so, we transform potential into actuality. We transform what could be, into what is, while simultaneously deciding what will never be.

Our ethics shape the reality we create.

• Taking responsibility
• Making things better
• Avoiding temptation and facing what we want to avoid
• Acting voluntarily, courageously, and truthfully

These make the future better than the present, while avoiding responsibility, being resentful, make the future worse.

Everyone knows when they do something right, and when they do something wrong, and everyone is tormented by the latter.

The Word as Savior

The fact that we actively shape reality (and its quality) is reflected in our relationships.

These ideas exist in the stories that are at the basis of our culture. If we have these stories, it means we are watching ourselves live to make them up. We make stories because we need to know where we came from to know where we are going.

That’s why we love stories.

In the Bible, God establishes something from nothing with words. Speech is important as it establishes what is, that is, Truth.

It appears necessarily allied, however, with the courage to confront unrealized possibility in all its awful potential, so that reality itself may be brought forth.

So, Truth isn’t enough, and must be allied with Courage.

These two principles must be united with Love itself – Love for Being.

Love, Courage, and Truth form the Ideal that makes up the best possible future for individuals.

When you have a problem, you know you should solve it or it will grow bigger and cause more problems.

In the same way, the refusal to come to terms with the errors of your past extend them into the present and the future. That makes you weak and a shallow version of yourself. You are less than you could be because you did not change.

Since you didn’t learn, you may commit the same error in the future.

So you must confess, repent, and change.

If the chaos of your past has not been ordered, it will keep on haunting you.

Trauma is the indication that your “map of the world” isn’t enough to guide you. You need to update it.

And it is not the expression of emotion associated with unpleasant events that has curative power. It is the development of a sophisticated causal theory: Why was I at risk? What was it about the world that made it dangerous?

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

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Rule X: Plan and Work Diligently to Maintain The Romance in Your Relationship

Bedrock

Many times the state of a relationship is embodied in the sex life, but not always. Some couples hate each other yet have sex all the time, and others like each other but don’t. Sex is not all, so fixing a sex life won’t fix the relationship.

You need a strategy to maintain romance with your partner. The first thing to do is to know what you want out of the relationship so you know when you succeed/fail at getting it.

If you can’t formulate your desires, your partner will have to guess, and you’ll likely punish them if they guess wrong.

The alternative (namely, knowing what you want), unfortunately, isn’t better: if you know what you want and tell your partner, you’ve given them a weapon they can use against you.

Many people eventually get hurt by someone they loved, learned the true nature of mankind, and replaced their naivete with cynicism. Cynicism is better, but it’s not ideal.

The ideal is non-naive trust. Non-naive trust requires courage.

This is risky, but such is the price of intimacy.

Trust, furthermore, has an important requirement: truth. You cannot maintain trust if you lie.

Christ in the Candle

When couples get married, it may happen that they jointly hold a candle together. Why?

There is the idea that before Eve, Adam was hermaphroditic. Eve was made out of one of Adam’s ribs. Understand: man needs to unite with woman to be whole again.

Who is subordinate to whom in a relationship? Answer: neither. Both are subordinate to the principle of truth.

Both are oriented and willing to build the best possible future for them.

We have this innate desire to find that one person that will complete us.

Being single leads to a feeling of incompletion.

There is a lot of utility in marriage. The vow not to split isn’t a vow per se, but a threat. The meaning is “we are not getting rid of each other, so we need to make it work whatever the cost”.

The part of us attached to freedom wishes for a safety exit door in a marriage, but this isn’t wise to get one. If you know you can get out of it at any time, you won’t make enough effort to make your marriage work. Marriage is a forcing function for the good development of your character.

Hope for a good marriage isn’t enough. You need desperation, which you get when you don’t have a choice.

And it’s going to be difficult.

You will fight with your partner. You will make mistakes. And you will suffer.

There are three states of social being.

• Slavery
• Tyranny
• Negotiation

Neither slavery nor tyranny is good. So you must negotiate.

Negotiation, Tyranny, or Slavery

Negotiations start when partners are outlying what they want. Most of the time, they don’t know what they want.

One must absolutely force the other to define what they want, for their own good, and no matter the cost (screams, tears, insults, etc).

If you don’t force people to solve their unresolved problems, they might never do so.

In the short-term, negotiation is the hardest option, but it is by far the best one in the long term. If you do end up escaping, you won’t achieve the transformation.

Negotiating furthermore means that you might succeed. And then you could have children, then grandchildren, etc.

Many people say they don’t want children, but they almost always end up regretting it (particularly women).

So don’t waste time finding a good mate and getting married. You don’t have much of it.

The Domestic Economy

Prior to the invention of birth control, men did male things and women did female things. It was good, as it gave a template of who would do what.

Whether you want to follow this role or not, you will have to decide who does what in your relationship.

Eg:

• Who makes the bed?
• Whose career is a priority?
• Who cleans?
• Who educates the children?
• How are the bank accounts managed?
• Who shops for groceries?
• Who pays the taxes?

You need to define the responsibilities of everyone.

To ease things out, talk to your partner for at least 90 minutes per week about practical matters. What needs to be done, how is life at work, how do you feel about x and y, etc.

This will make your household much more peaceful than if it’s not done.

When you are young, you make two assumptions about relationships.

1. There is out there someone who is perfect.
2. There is out there someone who is perfect for you.

No one is perfect. And if there were a perfect person, they wouldn’t date you, which is good. If they did, they’d be blind, desperate, or as lame as you are.

Finally: Romance

Romance comes last because romance is play, and play comes out when all other problems have been solved.

Couples who work full time and have children usually manage to have sex 1-3 times a week.

Whatever you do, don’t let it go down to zero.

If you do, someone is going to have an affair.

You should also plan which day you will have sex. When you are as busy as people are nowadays, you cannot hope for spontaneity.

You must make space and time for sex, or you won’t do it (eg: Tuesday at 21h).

Buy some lingerie, buy some sexy outfit, and wear it. Buy some candles and light them up. And do not punish your partner for doing something you enjoy. Do not be ashamed either.

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Rule XI: Do Not Allow Yourself to Become Resentful, Deceitful, or Arrogant

The Story Is the Thing

You have your reasons for becoming resentful, deceitful, or arrogant. If you want to resist this decline, you need to understand your own motivation for evil.

Let’s start with the following question: what is the world made of? The world is made of everything perceived by an individual.

Imagine you wake up in the morning. What do you perceive? You perceive your day, week, month, or entire life, and the myriad of possibilities ahead.

What are you going to make out of these possibilities? This is the potential you have, and it is limitless. There is everything good that awaits you, but also everything bad.

What could be is the question you need to answer. It’s the purpose of life. What is is already gone. It’s the present, and it goes fast. What could be is what is really interesting.

So, how do you investigate what could be?

You do so with stories.

We use stories to communicate, to represent the past, and the present. We can also use them for the future.

Let’s have a look at the characters of that story.

The Eternal Characters of the Human Drama

The Dragon of Chaos

Potential can be a place for unimaginable chaos.

Eg: one minute you’re camping, the next the forest caught fire and you need to run for your life.

Psychologically, this means that the malevolence that exists in people’s hearts can suddenly arise – and that’s the case for your malevolence too.

Nature: Creation and Destruction

Nature creates trees, cute animals, nice landscapes. But nature is also death, worms, mold.

Nature creates, but nature takes back as well.

In tales, nature is the Evil Queen, and the Fairy Godmother. You need to be acquainted with these two characters.

Some only know abuse in their childhood. It’s then difficult to grow up and avoid hate, distrust, and revenge.

Should it be the case, you need to find your Fairy Godmother. When you understand the duality and the polarity of nature, you understand sacrifice.

Sacrifice is giving up something good now to keep evil at bay for later.

Culture: Security and Tyranny

The Tyrant King and the Wise King are used to conceptualizing culture. The Wise King insists on safekeeping the culture as it is because it has always worked this way. The Tyrant King is the revolutionary that wants to change everything.

You need both.

The Individual: Hero and Adversary

If the night is chaos, the ocean is nature, and the island is culture, then the individual – the hero is locked on the island in a combat with his twin (hero and adversary).

The hero can sacrifice, is awake, and is responsible. The adversary is everything despicable.

To summarize, the seven characters are:

1. The Hero
2. The Adversary
3. The Wise King
4. The Tyrant
5. A positive maternal figure
6. A negative maternal figure
7. Chaos itself

You need to understand that

• You have within you the seeds of both successes (hero) and destruction (adversary).
• Culture constantly tends toward tyranny.
• Someone who is benevolent can become malevolent pretty quickly.

Resentment

You are resentful because of the absolute unknown and its terrors, because nature conspires against you, because you are a victim of the tyrannical element of culture, and because of the malevolence of yourself and other individuals.

You’re angry at the world because the world isn’t fair, and you’re angry at yourself because you do things you shouldn’t.

Now, it’s important to see exactly what is your fault in your misfortune, and what isn’t.

It’s also important to realize that most of what happened to you didn’t happen personally – that it was part of the tragedies of life.

Finally, not all tragedies have tragedic consequences.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

When you confront the difficulties of life directly, you become stronger – and less resentful.

Deceit and Arrogance

There are two types of deceit:

• Sins of Commission: stuff you do but you know you shouldn’t (lying).
• Sins of Ommission: stuff you don’t do which you know you should (clean your room).

Why do we do this? Because we’re resentful. We justify these bad deeds as defense against the bad things that were done to us.

Commissions

When God creates the universe out of nothing, he does it out of love. Arrogance and deceit oppose this idea, and instead say that any childish desire can exist, even if self-serving.

Understand: arrogance and deceit tell you you have no ideal to serve, that you can do whatever you want for selfish reasons.

There is a second type of arrogance that enables deceit. Someone who lies is arrogant enough to change the structure of reality because they think that their selfish desire to change it will give a better version of what would exist otherwise (the truth).

That is the arrogance of someone who believes that he can alter the structure of reality through pretense, and that he can get away with it.

This leads to two problems.

1. This person won’t be trusted.
2. This person will inhabit a world that isn’t true, hence will be weaker.

The third form of arrogance comes from the fact that the liar thinks that the lie won’t be uncovered. But it will.

The fourth form of arrogance comes from a sense of justice. “Because I have been hurt, I am entitled to hurt too”.

Ommissions

Why do we stand by when we witness things we know to be wrong?

1. Nihilism: one who is too proud is certain that nothing matters. It’s a dangerous assumption. Humility would dictate that we don’t know that for sure.
2. It’s ok to take the easy path: this way, you avoid taking responsibility on your shoulders.
3. You lack faith in yourself: so you don’t react because you don’t believe you can make a difference.

The Existential Danger of Arrogance and Deceit

Deception corrupts the instinct that enables you to orientate yourself in life.

Garbage in, garbage out. If you feed this instinct lie, you will be disoriented. The more you do it, the less you can rely on this instinct, the more lost you become.

The Place You Should Be

When we wake up in the morning, we know we can do good things, and we know we can do bad things.

The right attitude to have is that there is enough of you, society, and the world to justify its existence.

That is, having faith in your capacity to build a good life for yourself.

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

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Rule XII: Be Grateful in Spite of Your Suffering

Down Can Define Up

We can confront our suffering. We can transcend it.

If you confront the limitations of life courageously, that provides you with a certain psychological purpose that serves as an antidote to the suffering.

If you act in a noble manner, you can decrease your own suffering and the suffering of other people. You can actively work on it.

Furthermore, it is by going through episodes of intense suffering that you can find intense joy at the end.

The act of peering into the darkness as deeply as possible reveals a light that appears unquenchable.

The same goes for gratitude. You can’t appreciate all that you have unless you lose it all.

The Mephistophelian Spirit

In the play Faust, Faust sells his soul to the devil Mephistopheles against knowledge. Mephistopheles is a character that works against positive intent.

We all have Mephistopheles inside us: we do stuff we know we shouldn’t and ignore stuff we know we should not.

We’re not entirely in control of ourselves. But then, who is? Why don’t you do what you should? Sometimes, it’s just easier.

Sometimes, we don’t know. It’s due to a “spirit” that manifests itself when we say “I don’t know why I did this”. Why does such a spirit exist?

Because we have limits to morality. We are subjugated by the suffering we, nature, and society, inflict upon us.

Given all that, it’s difficult to assume that you will inherently be satisfied with yourself.

The whole thing becomes a vicious circle: you are unhappy, so you inflict more unhappiness upon yourself.

The natural follow-up to this is antinatalism. Since everyone suffers, shouldn’t we just halt it all? That would make things worse.

No. If things don’t go well, you don’t want to make them worse. This is illogical.

When someone dies, you should be the person everyone counts on. A failure to be so would betray the person that has died (since they likely didn’t want you to suffer). If you can be that person, it means you’re strong enough in the face of adversity.

You should be grateful for that. Life is not easy but you have the means to confront the suffering and triumph.

Even if you see the bitterness, you choose to be grateful because it is the courageous thing to do.

Courage-but Superordinate, Love

The reasons for bitterness, cynicism, anger, resentment, etc are so many that it’s difficult to rationally counter them. Instead, it should be a leap of faith, a decision that we make to keep on doing the right things no matter what happens.

This is where courage and love intervene. It’s when you decide you won’t stop making things better for yourself – no matter what happens.

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