Peterson defines wisdom as the continual search for knowledge, and he values examining a breadth of information in that search. As a psychologist, he finds it valuable to look deep into history to understand human behavior. This includes looking far back into the evolutionary past and also looking at how humans have thought about and symbolized their actions and standards of behavior for millennia—often through myths and other literature, historical events, and even science. For example, the biological simplicity of lobsters can help us understand more complex human behavior, especially how we respond to challenges. Peterson also finds archetypal meanings in stories ranging from humans’ ejection from the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis to modern “myths,” like Disney adaptations of fairy tales. Such stories express the age-old pattern of a person emerging into maturity by embracing the burden of consciousness. Finally, Peterson draws illustrations from history, like Solzhenitsyn’s experiences in Soviet labor camps, to show how embracing lies, even on an individual level, can lead to societal tyranny.
Peterson doesn’t see any of these bodies of knowledge as infallible. In fact, he argues that it’s always important to be mindful of what you don’t know and be open to hearing other people’s perspectives and changing your mind, instead of insisting that you already know all you need to know and merely trying to reinforce your preexisting beliefs (which he suggests is the path to tyranny). Instead, he describes how open and honest conversation helps us learn, clarify our ideas, and better understand ourselves. And looking to science, to the past, and to enduring stories provides a starting point and a measure of stability from which humans can develop, change, and grow wiser—which, in turn, will help them navigate the boundary between order and chaos.
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Knowledge and Wisdom Quotes in 12 Rules for Life
Over the previous decades I had read more than my share of dark books about the twentieth century, focusing particularly on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn […] once wrote that the “pitiful ideology” holding that “human beings are created for happiness” was an ideology “done in by the first blow of the work assigner’s cudgel.” In a crisis, the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual. On the radio show, I suggested, instead, that a deeper meaning was required.
Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail. Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos.
During this time, I came to a more complete, personal realization of what the great stories of the past continually insist upon: the centre is occupied by the individual. The centre is marked by the cross, as X marks the spot. Existence at that cross is suffering and transformation—and that fact, above all, needs to be voluntarily accepted. It is possible to transcend slavish adherence to the group and its doctrines and, simultaneously, to avoid the pitfalls of its opposite extreme, nihilism. It is possible, instead, to find sufficient meaning in individual consciousness and experience.
The ancient Jews always blamed themselves when things fell apart. They acted as if God’s goodness—the goodness of reality—was axiomatic, and took responsibility for their own failure. That’s insanely responsible. But the alternative is to judge reality as insufficient, to criticize Being itself, and to sink into resentment and the desire for revenge.
During [tens or hundreds of thousands of years], the twin practices of delay and exchange began to emerge, slowly and painfully. Then they became represented, in metaphorical abstraction, as rituals and tales of sacrifice, told in a manner such as this: “It’s as if there is a powerful Figure in the Sky, who sees all, and is judging you. Giving up something you value seems to make Him happy—and you want to make Him happy, because all Hell breaks loose if you don’t. So, practice sacrificing, and sharing, until you become expert at it, and things will go well for you.”
Each human being has an immense capacity for evil. Each human being understands, a priori, perhaps not what is good, but certainly what is not. And if there is something that is not good, then there is something that is good. If the worst sin is the torment of others, merely for the sake of the suffering produced—then the good is whatever is diametrically opposed to that. The good is whatever stops such things from happening.
You may find that if you attend to these moral obligations, once you have placed “make the world better” at the top of your value hierarchy, you experience ever-deepening meaning. It’s not bliss. It’s not happiness. It is something more like atonement for the criminal fact of your fractured and damaged Being. […] It’s adoption of the responsibility for being a potential denizen of Hell. It is willingness to serve as an angel of Paradise.
If you say no to your boss, or your spouse, or your mother, when it needs to be said, then you transform yourself into someone who can say no when it needs to be said. If you say yes when no needs to be said, however, you transform yourself into someone who can only say yes, even when it is clearly time to say no. If you ever wonder how perfectly ordinary, decent people could find themselves doing the terrible things the gulag camp guards did, you now have your answer. By the time no seriously needed to be said, there was no one left capable of saying it.
Consider the following situation: A client in my practice recounts a long, meandering, emotion-laden account of a difficult period in his or her life. We summarize, back and forth […] It is now a different memory, in many ways—with luck, a better memory […] We have extracted the moral of the story […] That’s the purpose of memory. You remember the past not so that it is “accurately recorded” […] but so that you are prepared for the future.
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 […] You must meditate, too, instead of strategizing towards victory. If you fail, or refuse, to do so, then you merely and automatically repeat what you already believe, seeking its validation and insisting on its rightness.
Chaos emerges in a household, bit by bit. Mutual unhappiness and resentment pile up. Everything untidy is swept under the rug, where the dragon feasts on the crumbs. But no one says anything […] Communication would require admission of terrible emotions […] But in the background […] the dragon grows. One day it bursts forth, in a form that no one can ignore. […] Every one of the three hundred thousand unrevealed issues, which have been lied about, avoided, rationalized away, hidden like an army of skeletons in some great horrific closet, bursts forth like Noah’s flood, drowning everything.
It might be objected […] that a woman does not need a man to rescue her. That may be true, and it may not […] In any case, it is certain that a woman needs consciousness to be rescued, and, as noted above, consciousness is symbolically masculine and has been since the beginning of time […] The Prince could be a lover, but could also be a woman’s own attentive wakefulness, clarity of vision, and tough-minded independence.
