12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson

RULE 1 / Stand up straight with your shoulders back

• It is the least dominant and most stressed birds, occupying the lowest rungs of the bird world, who are most likely to sicken and die.
• When the aristocracy catches a cold, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia.
• In one of the more staggering demonstrations of the evolutionary continuity of life on Earth, Prozac even cheers up lobsters.
• It’s winner - take - all in the lobster world, just as it is in human societies, where the top 1 percent have as much loot as the bottom 50 percent and where the richest eighty - five people have as much as the bottom three and a half billion.
• The majority of scientific papers are published by a very small group of scientists. A tiny proportion of musicians produces almost all the recorded commercial music. Just a handful of authors sell all the books. A million and a half separately titled books ( ! ) sell each year in the US. However, only five hundred of these sell more than a hundred thousand copies.
• Similarly, just four classical composers ( Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky ) wrote almost all the music played by modern orchestras.
• Matthew Principle ( Matthew 25: 29 ), derived from what might be the harshest statement ever attributed to Christ: “to those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.”
• Females outsource the problem to the machine-like calculations of the dominance hierarchy. They let the males fight it out and peel their paramours from the top. This is very much what happens with stock - market pricing, where the value of any particular enterprise is determined through the competition of all.
• In consequence, males who stay on top longer are those who form reciprocal coalitions with their lower - status compatriots, and who pay careful attention to the troupe’s females and their infants.
• A third of a billion years ago, brains and nervous systems were comparatively simple. Nonetheless, they already had the structure and neurochemistry necessary to process information about status and society. The importance of this fact can hardly be overstated.
• However, yin and yang are more accurately understood as chaos and order.
• There is nothing so certain that it cannot vary … Likewise, there is nothing so mutable that it cannot be fixed.
• “ you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. ”
• It’s permanent. It’s real. The dominance hierarchy is not capitalism. It’s not communism, either, for that matter. It’s not the military - industrial complex. It’s not the patriarchy — that disposable, malleable, arbitrary cultural artefact. It’s not even a human creation.
• Dominance hierarchies are older than trees.
• This is why, when we are defeated, we act very much like lobsters who have lost a fight. Our posture droops. We face the ground. We feel threatened, hurt, anxious and weak.
• Low serotonin means less happiness, more pain and anxiety, more illness, and a shorter lifespan — among humans, just as among crustaceans.
• Change might be an opportunity, instead of a disaster. The serotonin flows plentifully.
• Every system must play its role properly, and at exactly the right time, or noise and chaos ensue. It is for this reason that routine is so necessary. The acts of life we repeat every day need to be automatized.
• This can be perceived most clearly in the case of small children, who are delightful and comical and playful when their sleeping and eating schedules are stable, and horrible and whiny and nasty when they are not.
• Addiction to alcohol or another mood - altering drug is a common positive - feedback process.
• When the medication causes the disease, a positive feedback loop has been established.
• Depressed people, for example, can start feeling useless and burdensome, as well as grief - stricken and pained. This makes them withdraw from contact with friends and family. Then the withdrawal makes them more lonesome and isolated, and more likely to feel useless and burdensome. Then they withdraw more. In this manner, depression spirals and amplifies.
• If you can bite, you generally don’t have to.
• There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character. This is one of the most difficult lessons of life.
• Your nervous system responds in an entirely different manner when you face the demands of life voluntarily. You respond to a challenge, instead of bracing for a catastrophe. You see the gold the dragon hoards, instead of shrinking in terror from the all - too - real fact of the dragon. You step forward to take your place in the dominance hierarchy, and occupy your territory, manifesting your willingness to defend, expand and transform it. That can all occur practically or symbolically, as a physical or as a conceptual restructuring.
• To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order.
• To stand up straight with your shoulders back means building the ark that protects the world from the flood, guiding your people through the desert after they have escaped tyranny, making your way away from comfortable home and country, and speaking the prophetic word to those who ignore the widows and children.
• So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them — at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence
• Thus emboldened, you will embark on the voyage of your life, let your light shine, so to speak, on the heavenly hill, and pursue your rightful destiny.
• Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom. Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.

RULE 2 / Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping

• If your heart malfunctions, even momentarily, everything changes. Friendly old dogs can still bite.
• Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are choosy maters.
  • It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness.
• Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged.
• To treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping is, instead, to consider what would be truly good for you.
• This is not “ what you want. ” It is also not “ what would make you happy.”
• You must help a child become a virtuous, responsible, awake being, capable of full reciprocity — able to take care of himself and others, and to thrive while doing so. Why would you think it acceptable to do anything less for yourself ?
• You need to consider the future and think, “ What might my life look like if I were caring for myself properly ?
• What should I be doing, when I have some freedom, to improve my health, expand my knowledge, and strengthen my body?
• You must determine where you are going, so that you can bargain for yourself, so that you don’t end up resentful, vengeful and cruel.
• You must discipline yourself carefully. You must keep the promises you make to yourself, and reward yourself so that you can trust and motivate yourself.
• Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities.
• German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.”
• Once having understood Hell, researched it, so to speak — particularly your own individual Hell — you could decide against going there or creating that.

RULE 3 / Make friends with people who want the best for you

• Marijuana isn’t bad for everyone any more than alcohol is bad for everyone.
• Was it the nihilistic philosophy he nurtured that paved the way to his eventual breakdown?
• Was that nihilism, in turn, a consequence of genuine ill health, or just an intellectual rationalization of his unwillingness to dive responsibly into life?
• Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better — so they don’t go looking for it.
• Freud called this a “ repetition compulsion. ” He thought of it as an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past — sometimes, perhaps, to formulate those horrors more precisely, sometimes to attempt more active mastery and sometimes, perhaps, because no alternatives beckon.
• People choose friends who aren’t good for them for other reasons, too. Sometimes it’s because they want to rescue someone.
• But it is not easy to distinguish between someone truly wanting and needing help and someone who is merely exploiting a willing helper.
• Counsellors place a delinquent teen among comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability. Down is a lot easier than up.
• It’s easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today, and drown the upcoming months and years in today’s cheap pleasures.
• Maybe I should at least wait, to help you, until it’s clear that you want to be helped.
• Carl Rogers, the famous humanistic psychologist, believed it was impossible to start a therapeutic relationship if the person seeking help did not want to improve
• It’s a good thing, not a selfish thing, to choose people who are good for you. It’s appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improve.
• This will help bolster your resolve to do what you should do, in the most appropriate and careful manner. People who are not aiming up will do the opposite. They will offer a former smoker a cigarette and a former alcoholic a beer. They will become jealous when you succeed, or do something pristine.
• When you dare aspire upward, you reveal the inadequacy of the present and the promise of the future.
• A good, healthy person is 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 else is today

• If you’re one in a million now, but originated in modern New York, there’s twenty of you — and most of us now live in cities.
• We are not equal in ability or outcome, and never will be. A very small number of people produce very much of everything. The winners don’t take all, but they take most, and the bottom is not a good place to be.
• It is for such reasons that a whole generation of social psychologists recommended “positive illusions” as the only reliable route to mental health. Their credo? Let a lie be your umbrella. A more dismal, wretched, pessimistic philosophy can hardly be imagined: things are so terrible that only delusion can save you.
• It’s also unlikely that you’re playing only one game. You have a career and friends and family members and personal projects and artistic endeavors and athletic pursuits.
• Should victory in the present always take precedence over trajectory across time ?
• Who are you? You think you know, but maybe you don’t. You are, for example, neither your own master, nor your own slave. You cannot easily tell yourself what to do and compel your own obedience (any more than you can easily tell your husband, wife, son or daughter what to do, and compel theirs). You are interested in some things and not in others. You can shape that interest, but there are limits. Some activities will always engage you, and others simply will not.
• How do you need to be spoken to? What do you need to take from people? What are you putting up with, or pretending to like, from duty or obligation? Consult your resentment. It’s a revelatory emotion, for all its pathology.
• 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.
• We always encounter the world in a state of insufficiency and seek its correction. We can imagine new ways that things could be set right, and improved, even if we have everything we thought we needed.
• We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better.
• We can construct new, hypothetical worlds, where problems we weren’t even aware of can now show themselves and be addressed. The advantages of this are obvious: we can change the world so that the intolerable state of the present can be rectified in the future.
• Imagine that you are someone with whom you must negotiate. Imagine further that you are lazy, touchy, resentful and hard to get along with.
• Five hundred small decisions, five hundred tiny actions, compose your day, today, and every day. Could you aim one or two of these at a better result? Better, in your own private opinion, by your own individual standards? Could you compare your specific personal tomorrow with your specific personal yesterday? Could you use your own judgment, and ask yourself what that better tomorrow might be?
  • This is like James Clear's decision tree.
• “ What could I do, that I would do, that would accomplish that, and what small thing would I like as a reward? ”
• And, with each day, your baseline of comparison gets a little higher, and that’s magic. That’s compound interest. Do that for three years, and your life will be entirely different. Now you’re aiming for something higher.
• Seeing is very difficult, so you must choose what to see, and let the rest go.
• You use a set of tools to screen most things out and let some things in. You have spent a lot of time building those tools. They’ve become habitual.
• Life doesn’t have the problem. You do. At least that realization leaves you with some options.
• Perhaps you are holding on to your desires, in the present, so tightly that you cannot see anything else — even what you truly need.
• to aim somewhere better, you have to think it through, bottom to top. You have to scour your psyche. You have to clean the damned thing up. And 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.
• You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don’t know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.
• 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. Maybe there is a stack of paper on your desk, and you have been avoiding it.
• You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can’t even set the clock on your microwave. Don’t over-estimate your self-knowledge.
• The Sermon on the Mount outlines the true nature of man, and the proper aim of mankind: concentrate on the day, so that you can live in the present, and attend completely and properly to what is right in front of you — but do that only after you have decided to let what is within shine forth, so that it can justify Being and illuminate the world.

RULE 5 / Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them

• Well, a reproductively successful daughter might gain you eight or nine children. The Holocaust survivor Yitta Schwartz, a star in this regard, had three generations of direct descendants who matched such performance. She was the ancestor of almost two thousand people by the time of her death in 2010.77
• In general, people improve with age, rather than worsening, becoming kinder, more conscientious, and more emotionally stable as they mature.
• Chimps can literally tear each other to pieces — and they do. Human societies and their complex technologies cannot be blamed for that.
• And the less said about Unit 731, a covert Japanese biological warfare research unit established at that time, the better. Read about it at your peril. You have been warned.
• Observing the consequences of teasing and taunting enables chimp and child alike to discover the limits of what might otherwise be a too - unstructured and terrifying freedom. Such limits, when discovered, provide security, even if their detection causes momentary disappointment or frustration.
• Violence is the default. It’s easy. It’s peace that is difficult: learned, inculcated, earned. ( People often get basic psychological questions backwards. Why do people take drugs ? Not a mystery. It’s why they don’t take them all the time that’s the mystery. Why do people suffer from anxiety ? That’s not a mystery. How is it that people can ever be calm ? There’s the mystery. We’re breakable and mortal. A million things can go wrong, in a million ways. We should be terrified out of our skulls at every second.
• A patient adult can defeat a two - year - old, hard as that is to believe. As the saying goes: “ Old age and treachery can always overcome youth and skill. ”
• Anger is one of the most common reasons for crying. Careful analysis of the musculature patterns of crying children has confirmed this.
• Don’t cast pearls before swine, as the old saying goes. And you might think that’s harsh.
• You can teach virtually anyone anything with such an approach. First, figure out what you want. Then, watch the people around you like a hawk. Finally, whenever you see anything a bit more like what you want, swoop in (hawk, remember) and deliver a reward.
  • Your daughter has been very reserved since she became a teenager. You wish she would talk more. That’s the target: more communicative daughter. One morning, over breakfast, she shares an anecdote about school. That’s an excellent time to pay attention. That’s the reward. Stop texting and listen. Unless you don’t want her to tell you anything ever again.
• Given this, the fundamental moral question is not how to shelter children completely from misadventure and failure, so they never experience any fear or pain, but how to maximize their learning so that useful knowledge may be gained with minimal cost.
• If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends. The research literature is quite clear on this.
• The first: limit the rules. The second: use the least force necessary to enforce those rules.
• Intuitive rules for parenting
  • Do not bite, kick or hit, except in self - defence. Do not torture and bully other children, so you don’t end up in jail. Eat in a civilized and thankful manner, so that people are happy to have you at their house, and pleased to feed you. Learn to share, so other kids will play with you. Pay attention when spoken to by adults, so they don’t hate you and might therefore deign to teach you something. Go to sleep properly, and peaceably, so that your parents can have a private life and not resent your existence. Take care of your belongings, because you need to learn how and because you’re lucky to have them. 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.
• This must be established experimentally, starting with the smallest possible intervention. Some children will be turned to stone by a glare. A verbal command will stop another. A thumb - cocked flick of the index finger on a small hand might be necessary for some.
• children will definitely misbehave more in public, because they are experimenting: trying to establish if the same old rules also apply in the new place.
• They could see that people liked them. This also reinforced their good behaviour. That was the reward.
• If you flick your two - year - old with your finger just after he smacks the baby on the head with a wooden block, he will get the connection, and be at least somewhat less willing to smack her again in the future. That seems like a good outcome. He certainly won’t conclude that he should hit her more, using the flick of his mother’s finger as an example. He’s not stupid. He’s just jealous, impulsive and not very sophisticated.
• time out can be an extremely effective form of punishment, particularly if the misbehaving child is welcome as soon as he controls his temper. An angry child should sit by himself until he calms down. Then he should be allowed to return to normal life. That means the child wins — instead of his anger. The rule is “ Come be with us as soon as you can behave properly. ” This is a very good deal for child, parent and society. You’ll be able to tell if your child has really regained control. You’ll like him again, despite his earlier misbehaviour.
• If your child is the kind of determined varmint who simply runs away, laughing, when placed on the steps or in his room, physical restraint might have to be added to the time out routine.
• A parent who is seriously aware of his or her limited tolerance and capacity for misbehaviour when provoked can therefore seriously plan a proper disciplinary strategy — particularly if monitored by an equally awake partner — and never let things degenerate to the point where genuine hatred emerges.
• It is the primary duty of parents to make their children socially desirable. That will provide the child with opportunity, self - regard, and security.
• you take the next step, and you make your children behave. You take responsibility for their discipline. You take responsibility for the mistakes you will inevitably make while disciplining. You can apologize, when you’re wrong, and learn to do better.
• If their actions make you dislike them, think what an effect they will have on other people, who care much less about them than you.

RULE 6 / Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world

• Carl Panzram
  • American serial killer, rapist, arsonist, robber, and burglar.
• But people emerge from terrible pasts to do good, and not evil, although such an accomplishment can seem superhuman.
• if one parent abused three children, and each of those children had three children, and so on, then there would be three abusers the first generation, nine the second, twenty - seven the third, eighty - one the fourth — and so on exponentially. After twenty generations, more than ten billion would have suffered childhood abuse: more people than currently inhabit the planet. But instead, abuse disappears across generations. People constrain its spread. That’s a testament to the genuine dominance of good over evil in the human heart.
• She says she hopes that all her suffering is her own fault. The psychiatrist is taken aback. He asks why.
  • if it’s her fault, she might be able to do something about it. If it’s God’s fault, however — if reality itself is flawed, hell - bent on ensuring her misery — then she is doomed.
• But success makes us complacent. We forget to pay attention.
• Willful blindness and corruption took the city down.
• A hurricane is an act of God. But failure to prepare, when the necessity for preparation is well known — that’s sin.
• Are you working hard on your career, or even your job, or are you letting bitterness and resentment hold you back and drag you down ?
• Are there things that you could do, that you know you could do, that would make things around you better ?
• Have you cleaned up your life ? If the answer is no, here’s something to try: Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong.
• The wisdom of the past was hard - earned, and your dead ancestors may have something useful to tell you ).. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city ?

RULE 7 / Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

• LIFE IS SUFFERING. THAT’S CLEAR. There is no more basic, irrefutable truth. It’s basically what God tells Adam and Eve, immediately before he kicks them out of Paradise.
• We learned that behaving properly now, in the present — regulating our impulses, considering the plight of others — could bring rewards in the future, in a time and place that did not yet exist.
• The act of making a ritual sacrifice to God was an early and sophisticated enactment of the idea of the usefulness of delay.
• It is much easier and far more likely to selfishly and immediately wolf down everything in sight.
• Here’s a productive symbolic idea: the future is a judgmental father.
• Adapting to the necessary discipline of medical school will, for example, fatally interfere with the licentious lifestyle of a hardcore undergraduate party animal. Giving that up is a sacrifice.
• So, sacrifices are necessary, to improve the future, and larger sacrifices can be better.
• We’ve already established the basic principle — sacrifice will improve the future.
• “ What would be the largest, most effective — most pleasing — of all possible sacrifices ? ” and then “ How good might the best possible future be, if the most effective sacrifice could be made ? ”
• The realization that pleasure could be usefully forestalled dawned on us with great difficulty. It runs absolutely contrary to our ancient, fundamental animal instincts, which demand immediate satisfaction
• To share does not mean to give away something you value, and get nothing back. That is instead only what every child who refuses to share fears it means.
• That’s something that lasts. That’s something that’s reliable. And, at this point of abstraction, we can observe how the groundwork for the conceptions reliable, honest and generous has been laid.
• The productive, truthful sharer is the prototype for the good citizen, and the good man. We can see in this manner how from the simple notion that “ leftovers are a good idea ” the highest moral principles might emerge.
• So, practise sacrificing, and sharing, until you become expert at it, and things will go well for you. ”
• The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.
• If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore, it’s time to examine your values. It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions.
• It’s time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying who you are.
• Thus, the person who wishes to alleviate suffering — who wishes to rectify the flaws in Being; who wants to bring about the best of all possible futures; who wants to create Heaven on Earth — will make the greatest of sacrifices, of self and child, of everything that is loved, to live a life aimed at the Good. He will forego expediency. He will pursue the path of ultimate meaning. And he will in that manner bring salvation to the ever - desperate world.
• If you cease to utter falsehoods and live according to the dictates of your conscience, you can maintain your nobility, even when facing the ultimate threat; if you abide, truthfully and courageously, by the highest of ideals, you will be provided with more security and strength than will be offered by any short - sighted concentration on your own safety; if you live properly, fully, you can discover meaning so profound that it protects you even from the fear of death.
• But sacrifice — and work — serves far more effectively than short - term impulsive pleasure at keeping suffering at bay.
• Adam and Eve when they eat the forbidden Fruit, wake up, and open their eyes. They were also granted (or cursed by) the knowledge of Good and Evil.
• once you become consciously aware that you, yourself, are vulnerable, you understand the nature of human vulnerability, in general. You understand what it’s like to be fearful, and angry, and resentful, and bitter. You understand what pain means. And once you truly understand such feelings in yourself, and how they’re produced, you understand how to produce them in others.
• It’s much worse, however, if he had actually foregone the pleasures of the moment — if he had strived and toiled and things still didn’t work out — if he was rejected, despite his efforts. Then he’s lost the present and the future. Then his work — his sacrifice — has been pointless.
• Earthquakes, floods, poverty, cancer — we’re tough enough to take on all of that. But human evil adds a whole new dimension of misery to the world.
• But the hard lot of life, magnified by the consequence of continually rejected sacrifices ( however poorly conceptualized; however half - heartedly executed ) ? That will bend and twist people into the truly monstrous forms who then begin, consciously, to work evil;
• In that manner, a truly vicious circle takes hold: begrudging sacrifice, half - heartedly undertaken; rejection of that sacrifice by God or by reality ( take your pick ); angry resentment, generated by that rejection; descent into bitterness and the desire for revenge; sacrifice undertaken even more begrudgingly, or refused altogether. And it’s Hell itself that serves as the destination place of that downward spiral.
• This means that the central problem of life — the dealing with its brute facts — is not merely what and how to sacrifice to diminish suffering, but what and how to sacrifice to diminish suffering and evil — the conscious and voluntary and vengeful source of the worst suffering.
• Cain is neither content nor happy, as we have seen. He’s working hard, or so he thinks, but God is not pleased. Meanwhile, Abel is, by all appearances, dancing his way through life. His crops flourish. Women love him. Worst of all, he’s a genuinely good man. Everyone knows it. He deserves his good fortune. All the more reason to envy and hate him.
• “ No tree can grow to Heaven, ” adds the ever - terrifying Carl Gustav Jung, psychoanalyst extraordinaire, “ unless its roots reach down to Hell. ”
• It is for this reason that enlightenment is so rare. Who is willing to do that ? Do you really want to meet who’s in charge, at the very bottom of the most wicked thoughts ?
• Soldiers who develop post - traumatic stress disorder frequently develop it not because of something they saw, but because of something they did.
  • Involvement in warfare is something that can open a gateway to Hell. Now and then something climbs through and possesses some naive farm - boy from Iowa, and he turns monstrous. He does something terrible. He rapes and kills the women and massacres the infants of My Lai. And he watches himself do it. And some dark part of him enjoys it — and that is the part that is most unforgettable
• In consequence, the metaphysical conception of the implicit transcendent worth of each and every soul established itself against impossible odds as the fundamental presupposition of Western law and society.
• Christianity made explicit the surprising claim that even the lowliest person had rights, genuine rights — and that sovereign and state were morally charged, at a fundamental level, to recognize those rights.
• We think that it is the desire to enslave and dominate that requires explanation. We have it backwards, yet again.
• This is not to say that Christianity was without its problems. But it is more appropriate to note that they were the sort of problems that emerge only after an entirely different set of more serious problems has been solved.
• The society produced by Christianity was far less barbaric than the pagan — even the Roman — ones it replaced.
• It objected to infanticide, to prostitution, and to the principle that might means right.
• As the Christian revolution progressed, however, the impossible problems it had solved disappeared from view. That’s what happens to problems that are solved. And after the solution was implemented, even the fact that such problems had ever existed disappeared 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 vanished from view. People stricken with poverty don’t care about carbon dioxide. It’s not precisely that CO2 levels are irrelevant. It’s that they’re irrelevant when you’re working yourself to death, starving, scraping a bare living from the stony, unyielding, thorn - and - thistle - infested ground. It’s that they’re irrelevant until after the tractor is invented and hundreds of millions stop starving. In any case, by the time Nietzsche entered the picture, in the late nineteenth century, the problems Christianity had left unsolved had become paramount.
• Nietzsche believed that Paul, and later the Protestants following Luther, had removed moral responsibility from Christ’s followers.
• Dogmatic belief in the central axioms of Christianity ( that Christ’s crucifixion redeemed the world; that salvation was reserved for the hereafter; that salvation could not be achieved through works ) had three mutually reinforcing consequences:
  • First, devaluation of the significance of earthly life, as only the hereafter mattered
  • Second, passive acceptance of the status quo, because salvation could not be earned in any case through effort in this life
  • third, the right of the believer to reject any real moral burden ( outside of the stated belief in salvation through Christ ), because the Son of God had already done all the important work.
• Marx also derided, with his proposition that religion was the opiate of the masses);
• In his masterwork, The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky has his atheist superman, Ivan, tell a little story, “ The Grand Inquisitor. ”
• We rebel against our own totalitarianism, as much as that of others. I cannot merely order myself to action, and neither can you. “ I will stop procrastinating, ” I say, but I don’t. “ I will eat properly, ” I say, but I don’t. “ I will end my drunken misbehavior, ” I say, but I don’t. I cannot merely make myself over in the image constructed by my intellect ( particularly if that intellect is possessed by an ideology ).
• Now, an idea is not the same thing as a fact. A fact is something that is dead, in and of itself. It has no consciousness, no will to power, no motivation, no action. There are billions of dead facts.
  • But an idea that grips a person is alive. It wants to express itself, to live in the world.
  • An idea has an aim. It wants something. It posits a value structure
• This is to say nothing other than that the future can be made better if the proper sacrifices take place in the present. No other animal has ever figured this out, and it took us untold hundreds of thousands of years to do it.
• It took further eons of observation and hero - worship, and then millennia of study, to distill that idea into a story. It then took additional vast stretches of time to assess that story, to incorporate it, so that we now can simply say, “ If you are disciplined and privilege the future over the present you can change the structure of reality in your favour. ”
• Arbeit macht frei, said the sign over the camp entrance — “ Work will set you free ” — and the freedom was death.
• It was from this that I drew my fundamental moral conclusions. Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don’t be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture and death. Become aware of your own insufficiency — your cowardice, malevolence, resentment and hatred. Consider the murderousness of your own spirit before you dare accuse others, and before you attempt to repair the fabric of the world. Maybe it’s not the world that’s at fault. Maybe it’s you. You’ve failed to make the mark. You’ve missed the target. You’ve fallen short of the glory of God. You’ve sinned. And all of that is your contribution to the insufficiency and evil of the world. And, above all, don’t lie. Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell. It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of people.
• Consider then that the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering is a good. Make that an axiom: to the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering.
• To place the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering at the pinnacle of your hierarchy of value is to work to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth.
• Expedience is the following of blind impulse. It’s short - term gain. It’s narrow, and selfish. It lies to get its way. It takes nothing into account. It’s immature and irresponsible. Meaning is its mature replacement. Meaning emerges when impulses are regulated, organized and unified. Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure operating within that world. If the value structure is aimed at the betterment of Being, the meaning revealed will be life - sustaining. It will provide the antidote for chaos and suffering. It will make everything matter. It will make everything better.
• you may come to notice things you could fix to reduce even by a bit some unnecessary pain and suffering. You may come to ask yourself, “ What should I do today ? ” in a manner that means “ How could I use my time to make things better, instead of worse ? ” Such tasks may announce themselves as the pile of undone paperwork that you could attend to, the room that you could make a bit more welcoming, or the meal that could be a bit more delicious and more gratefully delivered to your family.
• Paradise. Expedience — that’s hiding all the skeletons in the closet. That’s covering the blood you just spilled with a carpet. That’s avoiding responsibility. It’s cowardly, and shallow, and wrong. It’s wrong because mere expedience, multiplied by many repetitions, produces the character of a demon.
• Meaning is something that comes upon you, of its own accord. You can set up the preconditions, you can follow meaning, when it manifests itself, but you cannot simply produce it, as an act of will. Meaning signifies that you are in the right place, at the right time, properly balanced between order and chaos, where everything lines up as best it can at that moment.
• Meaning is the ultimate balance between, on the one hand, the chaos of transformation and possibility and on the other, the discipline of pristine order, whose purpose is to produce out of the attendant chaos a new order that will be even more immaculate, and capable of bringing forth a still more balanced and productive chaos and order. Meaning is the Way, the path of life more abundant, the place you live when you are guided by Love and speaking Truth and when nothing you want or could possibly want takes any precedence over precisely that.

RULE 8 / Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie

• Taking the easy way out or telling the truth — those are not merely two different choices. They are different pathways through life. They are utterly different ways of existing.
• Someone living a life - lie is attempting to manipulate reality with perception, thought and action, so that only some narrowly desired and pre - defined outcome is allowed to exist.
• Such speaking and thinking requires the arrogance and certainty that the English poet John Milton’s genius identified with Satan, God’s highest angel gone most spectacularly wrong. The faculty of rationality inclines dangerously to pride: all I know is all that needs to be known. Pride falls in love with its own creations, and tries to make them absolute.
• I have seen people define their utopia and then bend their lives into knots trying to make it reality. A left - leaning student adopts a trendy, anti - authority stance and spends the next twenty years working resentfully to topple the windmills of his imagination.
• One forty - something client told me his vision, formulated by his younger self: “ I see myself retired, sitting on a tropical beach, drinking margaritas in the sunshine. ” That’s not a plan. That’s a travel poster. After eight margaritas, you’re fit only to await the hangover. After three weeks of margarita - filled days, if you have any sense, you’re bored stiff and self - disgusted. In a year, or less, you’re pathetic. It’s just not a sustainable approach to later life.
• This kind of oversimplification and falsification is particularly typical of ideologues. They adopt a single axiom: government is bad, immigration is bad, capitalism is bad, patriarchy is bad. Then they filter and screen their experiences and insist ever more narrowly that everything can be explained by that axiom. They believe, narcissistically, underneath all that bad theory, that the world could be put right, if only they held the controls.
• If you will not reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself.
• It means that so much of what you could be will never be forced by necessity to come forward. This is a biological truth, as well as a conceptual truth.
• When you explore boldly, when you voluntarily confront the unknown, you gather information and build your renewed self out of that information. That is the conceptual element. However, researchers have recently discovered that new genes in the central nervous system turn themselves on when an organism is placed ( or places itself ) in a new situation. These genes code for new proteins. These proteins are the building blocks for new structures in the brain. This means that a lot of you is still nascent, in the most physical of senses, and will not be called forth by stasis.
  • You have to say something, go somewhere and do things to get turned on. And, if not … you remain incomplete, and life is too hard for anyone incomplete.
• If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character. If you have a weak character, then adversity will mow you down when it appears, as it will, inevitably.
• Willful blindness is the refusal to know something that could be known. It’s refusal to admit that the knocking sound means someone at the door. It’s refusal to acknowledge the eight - hundred - pound gorilla in the room, the elephant under the carpet, the skeleton in the closet. It’s refusal to admit to error while pursuing the plan.
• insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. If you’re lucky, and you fail, and you try something new, you move ahead. If that doesn’t work, you try something different again. A minor modification will suffice in fortunate circumstances. It is therefore prudent to begin with small changes, and see if they help. Sometimes, however, the entire hierarchy of values is faulty, and the whole edifice has to be abandoned. The whole game must be changed. That’s a revolution, with all the chaos and terror of a revolution.
• The prideful, rational mind, comfortable with its certainty, enamoured of its own brilliance, is easily tempted to ignore error, and to sweep dirt under the rug.
• “ Did what I want happen ? No. Then my aim or my methods were wrong. I still have something to learn. ” That is the voice of authenticity.
• He may even forget that he lied and so be unconscious of that fact. But he was conscious, in the present, during the commission of each error, and the omission of each responsibility. At that moment, he knew what he was up to. And the sins of the inauthentic individual compound and corrupt the state.
• Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Nazi concentration camp survivor who wrote the classic Man’s Search for Meaning, drew a similar social - psychological conclusion: deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism.
  • What is going to save you ? The totalitarian says, in essence, “ 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. That is faith in the sacrifice of the current self for the self that could be. The totalitarian denies the necessity for the individual to take ultimate responsibility for Being.
• It is deceit that makes people miserable beyond what they can bear. It is deceit that fills human souls with resentment and vengefulness.
• Set your ambitions, even if you are uncertain about what they should be. 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.
• Articulate your experience as clearly and carefully to yourself and others as you possibly can. In this manner, you will learn to proceed more effectively and efficiently towards your goal. And, while you are doing this, do not lie. Especially to yourself
• If you allow yourself to be informed by the reality manifesting itself, as you struggle forward, your notions of what is important will change. You will reorient yourself, sometimes gradually, and sometimes suddenly and radically.
• Your conception of what is important will become more and more appropriate, as you incorporate the wisdom of your experience. You will quit wildly oscillating and walk ever more directly towards the good — a good you could never have comprehended if you had insisted despite all evidence that you were right, absolutely right, at the beginning.
• We can open our eyes and modify what we have where necessary and keep the machinery running smoothly. Or we can pretend that everything is alright, fail to make the necessary repairs, and then curse fate when nothing goes our way.
• Things fall apart: this is one of the great discoveries of humanity. And we speed the natural deterioration of great things through blindness, inaction and deceit.
• If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise. Tell the truth. Or, at least, don’t lie.

RULE 9 / Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t

• The present can change the past, and the future can change the present
• Memory is not a description of the objective past. Memory is a tool. 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.
• The people I listen to need to talk, because that’s how people think. People need to think. Otherwise they wander blindly into pits. When people think, they simulate the world, and plan how to act in it. If they do a good job of simulating, they can figure out what stupid things they shouldn’t do.
• People think they think, but it’s not true. It’s mostly self - criticism that passes for thinking. True thinking is rare — just like true listening. Thinking is listening to yourself. It’s difficult. To think, you have to be at least two people at the same time. Then you have to let those people disagree. Thinking is an internal dialogue between two or more different views of the world.
• Thinking is the process by which these internal avatars imagine and articulate their worlds to one another. You can’t set straw men against one another when you’re thinking, either, because then you’re not thinking. You’re rationalizing, post - hoc. You’re matching what you want against a weak opponent so that you don’t have to change your mind. You’re propagandizing. You’re using double - speak. You’re using your conclusions to justify your proofs. You’re hiding from the truth.
• If you’re going to insist on bending the world to your way, you better have your reasons. If you’re going to stand your ground, you better have your reasons. You better have thought them through. You might otherwise be in for a very hard landing.
• A good therapist will tell you the truth about what he thinks. (That is not the same thing as telling you that what he thinks is the truth.) Then at least you have the honest opinion of at least one person. That’s not so easy to get. That’s not nothing. That’s key to the psychotherapeutic process: two people tell each other the truth — and both listen.
• “ Stop the discussion for a moment, and institute this rule: ‘ Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker’s satisfaction. ’ ” I have found this technique very useful, in my private life and in my practice.
• You remember the past not so that it is “ accurately recorded, ” to say it again, but so that you are prepared for the future.
• The emotion - laden speaker must recount the whole experience, in detail. Only then can the central narrative, cause and consequence, come into focus or consolidate itself. Only then can the moral of the story be derived.
• If you listen, instead, without premature judgment, people will generally tell you everything they are thinking — and with very little deceit. People will tell you the most amazing, absurd, interesting things. Very few of your conversations will be boring. (You can in fact tell whether or not you are actually listening in this manner. If the conversation is boring, you probably aren’t.)
• Then there is the conversation where one participant is trying to attain victory for his point of view. This is yet another variant of the dominance - hierarchy conversation. During such a conversation, which often tends toward the ideological, the speaker endeavours to ( 1 ) denigrate or ridicule the viewpoint of anyone holding a contrary position, ( 2 ) use selective evidence while doing so and, finally, ( 3 ) impress the listeners ( many of whom are already occupying the same ideological space ) with the validity of his assertions. The goal is to gain support for a comprehensive, unitary, oversimplified world - view.
• The fact is important enough to bear repeating: people organize their brains with conversation. If they don’t have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds.
  • It takes a village to organize a mind.
• Much of what we consider healthy mental function is the result of our ability to use the reactions of others to keep our complex selves functional. We outsource the problem of our sanity. This is why it is the fundamental responsibility of parents to render their children socially acceptable.
• before a problem can be solved it must be formulated precisely. Women are often intent on formulating the problem when they are discussing something, and they need to be listened to — even questioned — to help ensure clarity in the formulation. Then, whatever problem is left, if any, can be helpfully solved.
• To demonstrate the importance of some set of facts is to tell those audience members how such knowledge could change their behaviour, or influence the way they interpret the world, so that they will now be able to avoid some obstacles and progress more rapidly to some better goals.
• A well - practised and competent public speaker addresses a single, identifiable person, watches that individual nod, shake his head, frown, or look confused, and responds appropriately and directly to those gestures and expressions.
• The conversation of mutual exploration, by contrast, requires people who have decided that the unknown makes a better friend than the known.
  • To have this kind of conversation, it is necessary to respect the personal experience of your conversational partners. You must assume that they have reached careful, thoughtful, genuine conclusions ( and, perhaps, they must have done the work that justifies this assumption ). You must believe that if they shared their conclusions with you, you could bypass at least some of the pain of personally learning the same things ( as learning from the experience of others can be quicker and much less dangerous ).
• It’s as if you are listening to yourself during such a conversation, just as you are listening to the other person. You are describing how you are responding to the new information imparted by the speaker.
  • A conversation like that puts you in the realm where souls connect, and that’s a real place. It leaves you thinking, “ That was really worthwhile. We really got to know each other. ” The masks came off, and the searchers were revealed.
• Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom.
• the priestess of the Delphic Oracle in ancient Greece spoke most highly of Socrates, who always sought the truth. She described him as the wisest living man, because he knew that what he knew was nothing.

RULE 10 / Be precise in your speech

• The limitations of all our perceptions of things and selves manifest themselves when something we can usually depend on in our simplified world breaks down. Then the more complex world that was always there, invisible and conveniently ignored, makes its presence known. It is then that the walled garden we archetypally inhabit reveals its hidden but ever - present snakes.
• She is no longer the “ well - loved, secure wife, and valued partner. ” Strangely enough, despite our belief in the permanent immutability of the past, she may never have been.
• There is a story for children, There’s No Such Thing as a Dragon, by Jack Kent, that I really like.
• But negotiation — that requires forthright admission on the part of both players that the dragon exists. That’s a reality difficult to face, even when it’s still too small to simply devour the knight who dares confront it.
• Living things die, after all, without attention. Life is indistinguishable from effortful maintenance. No one finds a match so perfect that the need for continued attention and work vanishes ( and, besides, if you found the perfect person, he or she would run away from ever - so - imperfect you in justifiable horror ). In truth, what you need — what you deserve, after all — is someone exactly as imperfect as you.
• Here’s the terrible truth about such matters: every single voluntarily unprocessed and uncomprehended and ignored reason for marital failure will compound and conspire and will then plague that betrayed and self - betrayed woman for the rest of her life. The same goes for her husband. All she — he — they — or we — must do to ensure such an outcome is nothing: don’t notice, don’t react, don’t attend, don’t discuss, don’t consider, don’t work for peace, don’t take responsibility. Don’t confront the chaos and turn it into order — just wait, anything but naïve and innocent, for the chaos to rise up and engulf you instead.
• Having the argument necessary to solve a real problem therefore necessitates willingness to confront two forms of miserable and dangerous potential simultaneously: chaos ( the potential fragility of the relationship — of all relationships — of life itself ) and Hell ( the fact that you — and your partner — could each be the person bad enough to ruin everything with your laziness and spite ). There’s every motivation to avoid. But it doesn’t help.
• But 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.
• Do you truly think it wise to let the catastrophe grow in the shadows, while you shrink and decrease and become ever more afraid ? Isn’t it better to prepare, to sharpen your sword, to peer into the darkness, and then to beard the lion in its den ? Maybe you’ll get hurt. Probably you’ll get hurt. Life, after all, is suffering. But maybe the wound won’t be fatal.
• If you wait instead until what you are refusing to investigate comes a - knocking at your door, things will certainly not go so well for you. What you least want will inevitably happen — and when you are least prepared.
• What if she had continually and honestly risked conflict in the present, in the service of longer - term truth and peace ?
• Be careful with what you tell yourself and others about what you have done, what you are doing, and where you are going. Search for the correct words. Organize those words into the correct sentences, and those sentences into the correct paragraphs. The past can be redeemed, when reduced by precise language to its essence. The present can flow by without robbing the future if its realities are spoken out clearly.
• Don’t hide baby monsters under the carpet. They will flourish. They will grow large in the dark. Then, when you least expect it, they will jump out and devour you. You will descend into an indeterminate, confusing hell, instead of ascending into the heaven of virtue and clarity. Courageous and truthful words will render your reality simple, pristine, well - defined and habitable.
• This is so frequently why couples cease communicating. Every argument degenerates into every problem that ever emerged in the past, every problem that exists now, and every terrible thing that is likely to happen in the future.
• Instead, you can say, “ This exact, precise thing — that is what is making me unhappy. This exact, precise thing — that is what I want, as an alternative ( although I am open to suggestions, if they are specific ). This exact, precise thing — that is what you could deliver, so that I will stop making your life and mine miserable. ” But to do that, you have to think: What is wrong, exactly ? What do I want, exactly ?
• Confront the chaos of Being. Take aim against a sea of troubles. Specify your destination, and chart your course. Admit to what you want. Tell those around you who you are. Narrow, and gaze attentively, and move forward, forthrightly

RULE 11 / Do not bother children when they are skateboarding

• The Road to Wigan Pier, which was in part a scathing attack on upper - class British socialists
  • A Wigan Pier coal miner had to walk — crawl would be a better word, given the height of the mine shafts — up to three miles, underground, in the dark, banging his head and scraping his back, just to get to his seven - and - a - half - hour shift of backbreaking work. After that, he crawled back. “ It is comparable, perhaps, to climbing a smallish mountain before and after your day’s work, ” stated Orwell. None of the time spent crawling was paid.
• if you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences — and infer the motivation.
• Boys ’ interests tilt towards things; girls ’ interests tilt towards people.
• Girls can win by winning in their own hierarchy — by being good at what girls value, as girls. They can add to this victory by winning in the boys ’ hierarchy. Boys, however, can only win by winning in the male hierarchy. They will lose status, among girls and boys, by being good at what girls value. It costs them in reputation among the boys, and in attractiveness among the girls. Girls aren’t attracted to boys who are their friends, even though they might like them, whatever that means. They are attracted to boys who win status contests with other boys.
• When they hit their thirties, most of the top - rate female lawyers bail out of their high - pressure careers. Only 15 percent of equity partners at the two hundred biggest US law firms are women.
• If you are earning $ 650 an hour in Toronto as a top lawyer, and your client in Japan phones you at 4 a.m. on a Sunday, you answer. Now. You answer, now, even if you have just gone back to sleep after feeding the baby. You answer because some hyper - ambitious legal associate in New York would be happy to answer, if you don’t — and that’s why the market defines the work.
• The increasingly short supply of university - educated men poses a problem of increasing severity for women who want to marry, as well as date. First, women have a strong proclivity to marry across or up the economic dominance hierarchy.
• Because of this, and because of the decline in high - paying manufacturing jobs for men ( one of six men of employable age is currently without work in the US ), marriage is now something increasingly reserved for the rich.
• Children living with married biological parents are less anxious, depressed and delinquent than children living with one or more non - biological parents. Children in single - parent families are also twice as likely to commit suicide.
• Consider this, as well, in regard to oppression: any hierarchy creates winners and losers. The winners are, of course, more likely to justify the hierarchy and the losers to criticize it. But ( 1 ) the collective pursuit of any valued goal produces a hierarchy ( as some will be better and some worse at that pursuit no matter what it is ) and ( 2 ) it is the pursuit of goals that in large part lends life its sustaining meaning. We experience almost all the emotions that make life deep and engaging as a consequence of moving successfully towards something deeply desired and valued.
• Absolute equality would therefore require the sacrifice of value itself — and then there would be nothing worth living for.
• Did Muruganantham, Simpson and Haas oppress women, or free them ? What about Gregory Goodwin Pincus, who invented the birth control pill ? In what manner were these practical, enlightened, persistent men part of a constricting patriarchy ?
• The Khmer Rouge evacuated Cambodia’s cities, drove all the inhabitants into the countryside, closed the banks, banned the use of currency, and destroyed all the markets. A quarter of the Cambodian population were worked to death in the countryside, in the killing fields.
• No one could stand up for communism after The Gulag Archipelago — not even the communists themselves.
• Power is a fundamental motivational force ( “ a, ” not “ the ” ). People compete to rise to the top, and they care where they are in dominance hierarchies. But ( and this is where you separate the metaphorical boys from the men, philosophically ) the fact that power plays a role in human motivation does not mean that it plays the only role, or even the primary role.
• I do not understand why our society is providing public funding to institutions and educators whose stated, conscious and explicit aim is the demolition of the culture that supports them.
• If radical right - wingers were receiving state funding for political operations disguised as university courses, as the radical left - wingers clearly are, the uproar from progressives across North America would be deafening.
• In societies that are well - functioning — not in comparison to a hypothetical utopia, but contrasted with other existing or historical cultures — competence, not power, is a prime determiner of status. Competence. Ability. Skill. Not power.
• Furthermore, the most valid personality trait predictors of long - term success in Western countries are intelligence ( as measured with cognitive ability or IQ tests ) and conscientiousness ( a trait characterized by industriousness and orderliness ). There are exceptions. Entrepreneurs and artists are higher in openness to experience, another cardinal personality trait, than in conscientiousness.
• Gender is constructed, but an individual who desires gender re - assignment surgery is to be unarguably considered a man trapped in a woman’s body ( or vice versa ). The fact that both of these cannot logically be true, simultaneously, is just ignored ( or rationalized away with another appalling post - modern claim: that logic itself — along with the techniques of science — is merely part of the oppressive patriarchal system ).
• What this means, approximately, is that two identical twins, separated at birth, will differ in IQ by fifteen points if the first twin is raised in a family that is poorer than 85 percent of families and the second is raised in a family richer than 95 percent of families.
• If the brain is a tree, then aggression ( along with hunger, thirst and sexual desire ) is there in the very trunk.
• There are only two major reasons for resentment: being taken advantage of ( or allowing yourself to be taken advantage of ), or whiny refusal to adopt responsibility and grow up.
• You might think, “ if they loved me, they would know what to do. ” That’s the voice of resentment. Assume ignorance before malevolence. No one has a direct pipeline to your wants and needs — not even you.
• Swiss anthropologist named Johann Jakob Bachofen. Bachofen proposed that humanity had passed through a series of developmental stages in its history.
• Men enforce a code of behaviour on each other, when working together. Do your work. Pull your weight. Stay awake and pay attention. Don’t whine or be touchy. Stand up for your friends. Don’t suck up and don’t snitch. Don’t be a slave to stupid rules. Don’t, in the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, be a girlie man. Don’t be dependent. At all. Ever. Period. The harassment that is part of acceptance on a working crew is a test: are you tough, entertaining, competent and reliable ?
• There was a famous advertisement in the form of a comic strip issued a few decades ago by the bodybuilder Charles Atlas. It was titled “ The Insult that Made a Man out of Mac ”
• A woman should look after her children — although that is not all she should do. And a man should look after a woman and children — although that is not all he should do. But a woman should not look after a man, because she must look after children, and a man should not be a child. This means that he must not be dependent.
• Men have to toughen up. Men demand it, and women want it, even though they may not approve of the harsh and contemptuous attitude that is part and parcel of the socially demanding process that fosters and then enforces that toughness
• This often makes it hard for tough, smart, attractive women to find mates: there just aren’t that many men around who can outclass them enough to be considered desirable ( who are higher, as one research publication put it, in “ income, education, self - confidence, intelligence, dominance and social position ” ).
• And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.

RULE 12 / Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

• Cooperation is for safety, security and companionship. Competition is for personal growth and status. However, if a given group is too small, it has no power or prestige, and cannot fend off other groups. In consequence, being one of its members is not that useful. If the group is too large, however, the probability of climbing near or to the top declines. So, it becomes too hard to get ahead.
• I came to realize through such thoughts that what can be truly loved about a person is inseparable from their limitations.
• existence and limitation are inextricably linked.
• By the 1980s, Superman was suffering from terminal deus ex machina — a Latin term meaning “ god from a machine.”
• A superhero who can do anything turns out to be no hero at all. He’s nothing specific, so he’s nothing. He has nothing to strive against, so he can’t be admirable. Being of any reasonable sort appears to require limitation. Perhaps this is because Being requires Becoming, as well as mere static existence — and to become is to become something more, or at least something different.
• What is a reasonable person to think when faced, for example, with a suffering child ? Is it not precisely the reasonable person, the compassionate person, who would find such thoughts occupying his mind ? How could a good God allow such a world as this to exist ?
• Hating life, despising life — even for the genuine pain that life inflicts — merely serves to make life itself worse, unbearably worse.
• Set aside some time to talk and to think about the illness or other crisis and how it should be managed every day. Do not talk or think about it otherwise.
• To me, cats are a manifestation of nature, of Being, in an almost pure form. Furthermore, they are a form of Being that looks at human beings and approves.
• If you pay careful attention, even on a bad day, you may be fortunate enough to be confronted with small opportunities of just that sort. Maybe you will see a little girl dancing on the street because she is all dressed up in a ballet costume. Maybe you will have a particularly good cup of coffee in a café that cares about their customers. Maybe you can steal ten or twenty minutes to do some little ridiculous thing that distracts you or reminds you that you can laugh at the absurdity of existence. Personally, I like to watch a Simpsons episode at 1.5 times regular speed: all the laughs; two - thirds the time.

Coda

• Alone, trying to calm down, we would each ask ourselves the same single question: What had we each done to contribute to the situation we were arguing about ? However small, however distant … we had each made some error.
• You don’t get peace by being right. You just get to be right, while your partner gets to be wrong — defeated and wrong. Do that ten thousand times and your marriage will be over ( or you will wish it was ). To choose the alternative — to seek peace — you have to decide that you want the answer, more than you want to be right.
• your heart must be open to the terrible truth. You must be receptive to that which you do not want to hear. When you decide to learn about your faults, so that they can be rectified, you open a line of communication with the source of all revelatory thought.
• What shall I do with my parents ? Act such that your actions justify the suffering they endured
• People sacrificed immensely to bring about what we have now. In many cases, they literally died for it — and we should act with some respect for that fact.
• It is my firm belief that the best way to fix the world — a handyman’s dream, if ever there was one — is to fix yourself,
• Failure to make the proper sacrifices, failure to reveal yourself, failure to live and tell the truth — all that weakens you.
• And I have learned through painful experience that nothing is going so badly that it can’t be made worse. This is why Hell is a bottomless pit.