# 12 Rules for Life  ## Metadata - Author: [[Jordan B. Peterson, Norman Doidge (Forward), Ethan Van Sciver (Illustrator)]] - Full Title: 12 Rules for Life - Category: #books ## Highlights - But the story of the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions—and there’s nothing freeing about that. ([Location 71](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=71)) - Tags: [[pink]] - he illustrates and explains why the best rules do not ultimately restrict us but instead facilitate our goals and make for fuller, freer lives. ([Location 78](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=78)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: Rules make us free. - Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it. Ideologues are people who pretend they know how to “make the world a better place” before they’ve taken care of their own chaos within. ([Location 178](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=178)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence. ([Location 182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=182)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Above all, he alerted his students to topics rarely discussed in university, such as the simple fact that all the ancients, from Buddha to the biblical authors, knew what every slightly worn-out adult knows, that life is suffering. ([Location 216](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=216)) - Tags: [[pink]] - It is because we are born human that we are guaranteed a good dose of suffering. ([Location 220](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=220)) - Tags: [[pink]] - alongside our wish to be free of rules, we all search for structure. ([Location 243](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=243)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Aristotle defined the virtues simply as the ways of behaving that are most conducive to happiness in life. Vice was defined as the ways of behaving least conducive to happiness. ([Location 264](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=264)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Cultivating judgment about the difference between virtue and vice is the beginning of wisdom, something that can never be out of date. ([Location 267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=267)) - Tags: [[pink]] - But if it’s uncertain that our ideals are attainable, why do we bother reaching in the first place? Because if you don’t reach for them, it is certain you will never feel that your life has meaning. ([Location 331](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=331)) - Tags: [[pink]] - And perhaps because, as unfamiliar and strange as it sounds, in the deepest part of our psyche, we all want to be judged. ([Location 333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=333)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail.*1 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. For the Taoists, meaning is to be found on the border between the ever-entwined pair. To walk that border is to stay on the path of life, the divine Way. ([Location 402](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=402)) - Tags: [[pink]] - I came to realize that shared belief systems made people intelligible to one another—and that the systems weren’t just about belief. ([Location 432](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=432)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Shared beliefs simplify the world, as well, because people who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world. There is perhaps nothing more important than the maintenance of this organization—this simplification. If ([Location 436](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=436)) - Tags: [[pink]] - They will fight to maintain the match between what they expect and how everyone is acting. ([Location 439](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=439)) - Tags: [[pink]] - In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all. ([Location 459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=459)) - Tags: [[pink]] - the soul of the individual eternally hungers for the heroism of genuine Being, and that the willingness to take on that responsibility is identical to the decision to live a meaningful life. ([Location 508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=508)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Being (with a capital “B”) is what each of us experiences, subjectively, personally and individually, as well as what we each experience jointly with others. As such, it includes emotions, drives, dreams, visions and revelations, as well as our private thoughts and perceptions. ([Location 518](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=518)) - Tags: [[pink]] - If a dominant lobster is badly defeated, its brain basically dissolves. Then it grows a new, subordinate’s brain—one more appropriate to its new, lowly position.8 Its original brain just isn’t sophisticated to manage the transformation from king to bottom dog without virtually complete dissolution and regrowth. Anyone who has experienced a painful transformation after a serious defeat in romance or career may feel some sense of kinship with the once successful crustacean. ([Location 627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=627)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Serotonin and octopamine also regulate the tail-flick reflex, which serves to propel a lobster rapidly backwards when it needs to escape. Less provocation is necessary to trigger that reflex in a defeated lobster. You can see an echo of that in the heightened startle reflex characteristic of the soldier or battered child with post-traumatic stress disorder. ([Location 644](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=644)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: This is the psychology of defeat, causes low confidence and it can be seen from the constantly dejected look and how the person resorts to escaping as soon as being provoked to avoid conflict or potential loss. - This principle is sometimes known as Price’s law, after Derek J. de Solla Price,13 the researcher who discovered its application in science in 1963. It can be modelled using an approximately L-shaped graph, with number of people on the vertical axis, and productivity or resources on the horizontal. The basic principle had been discovered much earlier. Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), an Italian polymath, noticed its applicability to wealth distribution in the early twentieth century, and it appears true for every society ever studied, regardless of governmental form. It also applies to the population of cities (a very small number have almost all the people), the mass of heavenly bodies (a very small number hoard all the matter), and the frequency of words in a language (90 percent of communication occurs using just 500 words), among many other things. Sometimes it is known as the 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.” ([Location 662](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=662)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: Principle of Unequal Distribution. Drawing synonimities between Price Law, Pareto Law, and Matthew Law - Mark Twain once said, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” ([Location 720](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=720)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Every revolution produces a new order. Every death is, simultaneously, a metamorphosis. ([Location 727](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=727)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Leaves change more quickly than trees, and trees more quickly than forests. Weather changes faster than climate. ([Location 743](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=743)) - Tags: [[pink]] - It’s chaos, within order, within chaos, within higher order. ([Location 745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=745)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: Brilliantly relating chaos to change and order to the unchanging, static. Leaves change quicker and trees and trees slower than nature. - The order that is most real is the order that is most unchanging—and that is not necessarily the order that is most easily seen. The leaf, when perceived, might blind the observer to the tree. The tree can blind him to the forest. And some things that are most real (such as the ever-present dominance hierarchy) cannot be “seen” at all. ([Location 745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=745)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Unfortunately, “the environment” is also elephantiasis and guinea worms (don’t ask), anopheles mosquitoes and malaria, starvation-level droughts, AIDS and the Black Plague. ([Location 751](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=751)) - Tags: [[pink]] - This is because “nature” is “what selects,” and the longer a feature has existed the more time it has had to be selected—and to shape life. ([Location 757](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=757)) - Tags: [[pink]] - All that matters, from a Darwinian perspective, is permanence—and the dominance hierarchy, however social or cultural it might appear, has been around for some half a billion years. It’s permanent. It’s real. ([Location 759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=759)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy is therefore exceptionally ancient and fundamental.17 It is a master control system, modulating our perceptions, values, emotions, thoughts and actions. ([Location 766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=766)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Higher spots in the dominance hierarchy, and the higher serotonin levels typical of those who inhabit them, are characterized by less illness, misery and death, even when factors such as absolute income—or number of decaying food scraps—are held constant. ([Location 777](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=777)) - Tags: [[pink]] - If you are judged by your peers as of little worth, the counter restricts serotonin availability. That makes you much more physically and psychologically reactive to any circumstance or event that might produce emotion, particularly if it is negative. You need that reactivity. Emergencies are common at the bottom, and you must be ready to survive. ([Location 798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=798)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: Why people get easily offended. Why people have a natural tendency to react physically and emotionally when they are "offended" or question or attackeded - The ancient counter will even shut down your immune system, expending the energy and resources required for future health now, during the crises of the present. ([Location 808](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=808)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The physical demands of emergency preparedness will wear you down in every way. ([Location 812](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=812)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Change might be opportunity, instead of disaster. ([Location 816](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=816)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Erratic habits of sleeping and eating can interfere with its function. ([Location 821](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=821)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The body, with its various parts, needs to function like a well-rehearsed orchestra. Every system must play its role properly, and at exactly the right time, or noise and chaos ensue. ([Location 823](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=823)) - Tags: [[pink]] - They must be turned into stable and reliable habits, so they lose their complexity and gain predictability and simplicity. ([Location 825](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=825)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Anxiety and depression cannot be easily treated if the sufferer has unpredictable daily routines. The systems that mediate negative emotion are tightly tied to the properly cyclical circadian rhythms. ([Location 830](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=830)) - Tags: [[pink]] - To say it again: 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. ([Location 954](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=954)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Circumstances change, and so can you. Positive feedback loops, adding effect to effect, can spiral counterproductively in a negative direction, but can also work to get you ahead. That’s the other, far more optimistic lesson of Price’s law and the Pareto distribution: those who start to have will probably get more. ([Location 965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=965)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Emotion is partly bodily expression, and can be amplified (or dampened) by that expression. ([Location 970](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=970)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of Being. Your nervous system responds in an entirely different manner when you face the demands of life voluntarily. ([Location 981](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=981)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language). ([Location 985](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=985)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. ([Location 994](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=994)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Because we are so scientific now—and so determinedly materialistic—it is very difficult for us even to understand that other ways of seeing can and do exist. ([Location 1063](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1063)) - Tags: [[pink]] - But those who existed during the distant time in which the foundational epics of our culture emerged were much more concerned with the actions that dictated survival (and with interpreting the world in a manner commensurate with that goal) than with anything approximating what we now understand as objective truth. ([Location 1064](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1064)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Before the dawn of the scientific worldview, reality was construed differently. Being was understood as a place of action, not a place of things.31 ([Location 1066](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1066)) - Tags: [[pink]] - the world of experience has primal constituents, as well. These are the necessary elements whose interactions define drama and fiction. One of these is chaos. Another is order. The third (as there are three) is the process that mediates between the two, which appears identical to what modern people call consciousness. It is our eternal subjugation to the first two that makes us doubt the validity of existence—that makes us throw up our hands in despair, and fail to care for ourselves properly. It is proper understanding of the third that allows us the only real way out. ([Location 1082](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1082)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Things or objects are part of the objective world. They’re inanimate; spiritless. They’re dead. This is not true of chaos and order. Those are perceived, experienced and understood (to the degree that they are understood at all) as personalities—and that is just as true of the perceptions, experiences and understanding of modern people as their ancient forebears. It’s just that moderners don’t notice. ([Location 1137](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1137)) - Tags: [[pink]] - They have been male or female, for example, for a billion years. That’s a long time. The division of life into its twin sexes occurred before the evolution of multi-cellular animals. It was in a still-respectable one-fifth of that time that mammals, who take extensive care of their young, emerged. Thus, the category of “parent” and/or “child” has been around for 200 million years. That’s longer than birds have existed. ([Location 1151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1151)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Reality itself is whatever we contend with when we are striving to survive and reproduce. A lot of that is other beings, their opinions of us, and their communities. And that’s that. ([Location 1160](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1160)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Our categories are far older than our species. Our most basic category—as old, in some sense, as the sexual act itself—appears to be that of sex, male and female. ([Location 1169](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1169)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The most profound religious symbols rely for their power in large part on this underlying fundamentally bipartisan conceptual subdivision. ([Location 1199](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1199)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Elkhonon Goldberg, student of the great Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, has proposed quite lucidly and directly that the very hemispheric structure of the cortex reflects the fundamental division between novelty (the unknown, or chaos) and routinization (the known, order).44 He doesn’t make reference to the symbols representing the structure of the world in reference to this theory, but that’s all the better: an idea is more credible when it emerges as a consequence of investigations in different realms.45 ([Location 1211](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1211)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: Our brain is fundamentally divided into novelty and routinization. In other words, chaos and order. The unknown and the known. The feminine and the masculine. - The Taoist juxtaposition of yin and yang, for example, doesn’t simply portray chaos and order as the fundamental elements of Being—it also tells you how to act. The Way, the Taoist path of life, is represented by (or exists on) the border between the twin serpents. The Way is the path of proper Being. It’s the same Way as that referred to by Christ in John 14:6: I am the way, and the truth and the life. The same idea is expressed in Matthew 7:14: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. ([Location 1224](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1224)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: The way of life shared by Taoist Yin Yang and the way of Christ, is to walk the narrow path between order and chaos - The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity for evil. The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal. No walls, however tall, will keep that out. ([Location 1288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1288)) - Tags: [[pink]] - It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them. ([Location 1297](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1297)) - Tags: [[pink]] - And so we return to our original query: Why would someone buy prescription medication for his dog, and then so carefully administer it, when he would not do the same for himself? Now you have the answer, derived from one of the foundational texts of mankind. Why should anyone take care of anything as naked, ugly, ashamed, frightened, worthless, cowardly, resentful, defensive and accusatory as a descendant of Adam? Even if that thing, that being, is himself? ([Location 1394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1394)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: The reason why we do not take care of ourselves and hate ourselves based on the Bible Genesis story. - Unlike us, predators have no comprehension of their fundamental weakness, their fundamental vulnerability, their own subjugation to pain and death. But we know exactly how and where we can be hurt, and why. That is as good a definition as any of self-consciousness. ([Location 1416](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1416)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. ([Location 1739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1739)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Someone might object, “It is only right to see the best in people. The highest virtue is the desire to help.” But not everyone who is failing is a victim, and not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise, although many do, and many manage it. ([Location 1747](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1747)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble. You shouldn’t merely assume that he or she is a noble victim of unjust circumstances and exploitation. It’s the most unlikely explanation, not the most probable. ([Location 1815](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1815)) - Tags: [[pink]] - It is far more likely that a given individual has just decided to reject the path upward, because of its difficulty. Perhaps that should even be your default assumption, when faced with such a situation. ([Location 1819](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1819)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Here’s something to consider: If you have a friend whose friendship you wouldn’t recommend to your sister, or your father, or your son, why would you have such a friend for yourself? ([Location 1855](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1855)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Life is a zero-sum game. Worthlessness is the default condition. ([Location 1904](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1904)) - Tags: [[pink]] - It is for such reasons that a whole generation of social psychologists recommended “positive illusions” as the only reliable route to mental health.69 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. ([Location 1905](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1905)) - Tags: [[pink]] - If the internal voice makes you doubt the value of your endeavours—or your life, or life itself—perhaps you should stop listening. If the critical voice within says the same denigrating things about everyone, no matter how successful, how reliable can it be? Maybe its comments are chatter, not wisdom. ([Location 1910](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1910)) - Tags: [[pink]] - There will always be people better than you—that’s a cliché of nihilism, like the phrase, In a million years, who’s going to know the difference? The proper response to that statement is not, Well, then, everything is meaningless. It’s, Any idiot can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters. Talking yourself into irrelevance is not a profound critique of Being. It’s a cheap trick of the rational mind. ([Location 1912](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1912)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The idea of a value-free choice is a contradiction in terms. Value judgments are a precondition for action. ([Location 1918](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1918)) - Tags: [[pink]] - You have a nature. You can play the tyrant to it, but you will certainly rebel. ([Location 1960](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1960)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Before you can articulate your own standards of value, you must see yourself as a stranger—and then you must get to know yourself. ([Location 1962](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1962)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Do you ask yourself what you want? Do you negotiate fairly with yourself? Or are you a tyrant, with yourself as slave? ([Location 1966](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1966)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Consult your resentment. It’s a revelatory emotion, for all its pathology. It’s part of an evil triad: arrogance, deceit, and resentment. Nothing causes more harm than this underworld Trinity. ([Location 1979](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1979)) - Tags: [[favorite]] [[pink]] - But resentment always means one of two things. Either the resentful person is immature, in which case he or she should shut up, quit whining, and get on with it, or there is tyranny afoot—in which case the person subjugated has a moral obligation to speak up. ([Location 1980](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1980)) - Tags: [[pink]] - When you have something to say, silence is a lie—and tyranny feeds on lies. ([Location 1983](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=1983)) - Tags: [[pink]] [[favorite]] - We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better. If we did not see things this way, we would not act at all. ([Location 2013](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2013)) - Tags: [[pink]] - But where you start might not be as important as the direction you are heading. Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak. Much of happiness is hope, no matter how deep the underworld in which that hope was conceived. ([Location 2031](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2031)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Who wants to work for a tyrant like that? Not you. That’s why you don’t do what you want yourself to do. You’re a bad employee—but a worse boss. ([Location 2043](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2043)) - Tags: [[pink]] - What you aim at determines what you see. ([Location 2068](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2068)) - Tags: [[pink]] - That’s how you deal with the overwhelming complexity of the world: you ignore it, while you concentrate minutely on your private concerns. You see things that facilitate your movement forward, toward your desired goals. You detect obstacles, when they pop up in your path. You’re blind to everything else (and there’s a lot of everything else—so you’re very blind). And it has to be that way, because there is much more of the world than there is of you. You must shepherd your limited resources carefully. Seeing is very difficult, so you must choose what to see, and let the rest go. ([Location 2103](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2103)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Your eyes are tools. They are there to help you get what you want. The price you pay for that utility, that specific, focused direction, is blindness to everything else. ([Location 2110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2110)) - Tags: [[pink]] - You look at the world in your particular, idiosyncratic manner. 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. They’re not mere abstract thoughts. They’re built right into you. They orient you in the world. They’re your deepest and often implicit and unconscious values. They’ve become part of your biological structure. They’re alive. ([Location 2119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2119)) - Tags: [[pink]] - You won’t—can’t, in fact—just change yourself that easily. You have to dig deeper. You must change what you are after more profoundly. ([Location 2133](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2133)) - Tags: [[pink]] - This is not theology. It’s not mysticism. It’s empirical knowledge. There is nothing magical here—or nothing more than the already-present magic of consciousness. We only see what we aim at. The rest of the world (and that’s most of it) is hidden. If we start aiming at something different—something like “I want my life to be better”—our minds will start presenting us with new information, derived from the previously hidden world, to aid us in that pursuit. ([Location 2155](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2155)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: You see what you aim. Your perceived reality start from your aim. Your aim decides what sort of information comes your way. - We can’t just get the one particular thing we especially want just now, along with everything else we usually want, because our desires can produce conflict with our other desires, as well as with other people, and with the world. Thus, we must become conscious of our desires, and articulate them, and prioritize them, and arrange them into hierarchies. That makes them sophisticated. ([Location 2164](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2164)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Our values, our morality—they are indicators of our sophistication. ([Location 2169](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2169)) - Tags: [[pink]] - He’s striving, instead, to be a “good person.” It may be the case that to him “good” means nothing but “obedient”—even blindly obedient. Hence the classic liberal Western enlightenment objection to religious belief: obedience is not enough. But it’s at least a start (and we have forgotten this): You cannot aim yourself at anything if you are completely undisciplined and untutored. ([Location 2176](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2176)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. ([Location 2193](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2193)) - Tags: [[pink]] - You can find such somethings by asking yourself (as if you genuinely want to know) three questions: “What is it that is bothering me?” “Is that something I could fix?” and “Would I actually be willing to fix it?” If you find that the answer is “no,” to any or all of the questions, then look elsewhere. Aim lower. 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. ([Location 2273](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2273)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Don’t tell yourself, “I shouldn’t need to do that to motivate myself.” What do you know about yourself? 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. ([Location 2288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2288)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Realization is dawning. Instead of playing the tyrant, therefore, you are paying attention. You are telling the truth, instead of manipulating the world. You are negotiating, instead of playing the martyr or the tyrant. You no longer have to be envious, because you no longer know that someone else truly has it better. You no longer have to be frustrated, because you have learned to aim low, and to be patient. You are discovering who you are, and what you want, and what you are willing to do. You are finding that the solutions to your particular problems have to be tailored to you, personally and precisely. You are less concerned with the actions of other people, because you have plenty to do yourself. Attend to the day, but aim at the highest good. Now, your trajectory is heavenward. That makes you hopeful. Even a man on a sinking ship can be happy when he clambers aboard a lifeboat! And who knows where he might go, in the future. To journey happily may well be better than to arrive successfully…. Ask, and ye shall receive. Knock, and the door will open. If you ask, as if you want, and knock, as if you want to enter, you may be offered the chance to improve your life, a little; a lot; completely—and with that improvement, some progress will be made in Being itself. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. ([Location 2315](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2315)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The belief that children have an intrinsically unsullied spirit, damaged only by culture and society, is derived in no small part from the eighteenth-century Genevan French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. ([Location 2443](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2443)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Children are damaged when their “mercifully” inattentive parents fail to make them sharp and observant and awake and leave them, instead, in an unconscious and undifferentiated state. Children are damaged when those charged with their care, afraid of any conflict or upset, no longer dare to correct them, and leave them without guidance. ([Location 2499](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2499)) - Tags: [[pink]] - It is difficult to figure out what is wrong and what is right and why. It is difficult to formulate just and compassionate strategies of discipline, and to negotiate their application with others deeply involved in a child’s care. Because of this combination of responsibility and difficulty, any suggestion that all constraints placed on children are damaging can be perversely welcome. ([Location 2526](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2526)) - Tags: [[pink]] - We assume that rules will irremediably inhibit what would otherwise be the boundless and intrinsic creativity of our children, even though the scientific literature clearly indicates, first, that creativity beyond the trivial is shockingly rare96 and, second, that strict limitations facilitate rather than inhibit creative achievement. ([Location 2530](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2530)) - Tags: [[pink]] - They are also perfectly willing to provoke adults, while exploring the complex contours of the social environment, just like juvenile chimps harassing the adults in their troupes.98 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. ([Location 2538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2538)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. But we’re not. The same can be said for depression, laziness and criminality.) ([Location 2552](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2552)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Consistent correction of such action indicates the limits of acceptable aggression to the child. Its absence merely heightens curiosity—so the child will hit and bite and kick, if he is aggressive and dominant, until something indicates a limit. ([Location 2565](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2565)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Kids do this frequently. Scared parents think that a crying child is always sad or hurt. This is simply not true. Anger is one of the most common reasons for crying. Careful analysis of the musculature patterns of crying children has confirmed this. ([Location 2605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2605)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Modern parents are terrified of two frequently juxtaposed words: discipline and punish. They evoke images of prisons, soldiers and jackboots. The distance between disciplinarian and tyrant or punishment and torture is, indeed, easily traversed. ([Location 2624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2624)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. ([Location 2669](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2669)) - Tags: [[pink]] - IT DOES NOT SEEM REASONABLE to describe the young man who shot twenty children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 as a religious person. This is equally true for the Colorado theatre gunman and the Columbine High School killers. But these murderous individuals had a problem with reality that existed at a religious depth. As one of the members of the Columbine duo wrote:108 ([Location 2895](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=2895)) - Tags: [[pink]] - He took himself apart, piece by piece, let what was unnecessary and harmful die, and resurrected himself. Then he wrote The Gulag Archipelago, a history of the Soviet prison camp system. ([Location 3033](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3033)) - Tags: [[pink]] - One man’s decision to change his life, instead of cursing fate, shook the whole pathological system of communist tyranny to its core. It crumbled entirely, not so many years later, and Solzhenitsyn’s courage was not the least of the reasons why. He was not the only such person to perform such a miracle. Václav Havel, the persecuted writer who later, impossibly, became the president of Czechoslovakia, then of the new Czech Republic, comes to mind, as does Mahatma Gandhi. ([Location 3039](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3039)) - Tags: [[pink]] - When his wise words are not completely ignored, they are heeded too late. God smites his wayward people, dooming them to abject defeat in battle and generations of subjugation. The Hebrews repent, at length, blaming their misfortune on their own failure to adhere to God’s word. They insist to themselves that they could have done better. They rebuild their state, and the cycle begins again. This is life. ([Location 3052](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3052)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: From covenant, to complacent, to downfall, to repentance and reconciliation and back to covenant again - A hurricane is an act of God. But failure to prepare, when the necessity for preparation is well known—that’s sin. That’s failure to hit the mark. And the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). 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. ([Location 3064](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3064)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Don’t blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city? ([Location 3086](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3086)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. To share means, properly, to initiate the process of trade. A child who can’t share—who can’t trade—can’t have any friends, because having friends is a form of trade. ([Location 3228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3228)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Action came first (as it had to, as the animals we once were could act but could not think). Implicit, unrecognized value came first (as the actions that preceded thought embodied value, but did not make that value explicit). ([Location 3249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3249)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future. A great idea begins to emerge, taking ever-more-clearly-articulated form, in ever more-clearly-articulated stories: What’s the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful? The successful sacrifice. Things get better, as the successful practise their sacrifices. ([Location 3251](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3251)) - Tags: [[pink]] - In Christ’s case, however—as He sacrifices Himself—God, His Father, is simultaneously sacrificing His son. It is for this reason that the Christian sacrificial drama of Son and Self is archetypal. It’s a story at the limit, where nothing more extreme—nothing greater—can be imagined. That’s the very definition of “archetypal.” That’s the core of what constitutes “religious.” ([Location 3290](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3290)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. ([Location 3295](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3295)) - Tags: [[pink]] - It’s this: 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 is in this manner that the self-conscious beings that we are become voluntarily and exquisitely capable of tormenting others (and ourselves, of course—but it’s the others we are concerned about right now). We see the consequences of this new knowledge manifest themselves when we meet Cain and Abel, the sons of Adam and Eve. ([Location 3351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3351)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: This is Jordan's understanding of the consequence of the knowledge of good and evil. - Evil enters the world with self-consciousness. ([Location 3378](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3378)) - Tags: [[pink]] - It has been my experience, however, that human beings are strong enough to tolerate the implicit tragedies of Being without faltering—without breaking or, worse, breaking bad. I have seen evidence of this repeatedly in my private life, in my work as a professor, and in my role as a clinical practitioner. 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. ([Location 3381](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3381)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: Human evil adds a dimension of suffering to being at a cosmic magnitude. - 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; who then begin to generate for themselves and others little besides pain and suffering (and who do it for the sake of that pain and suffering). ([Location 3393](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3393)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: The source of evil is in the continuous rejected sacrifices - The problem of evil remained unsolved even by the divinely acceptable sacrifices of Abel. It took thousands of additional years for humanity to come up with anything else resembling a solution. The same issue emerges again, in its culminating form, in the story of Christ and his temptation by Satan. But this time it’s expressed more comprehensively—and the hero wins. ([Location 3407](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3407)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Jesus was led into the wilderness, according to the story, “to be tempted by the Devil” (Matthew 4:1), prior to his crucifixion. This is the story of Cain, restated abstractly. ([Location 3411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3411)) - Forty days is a deeply symbolic period of time, echoing the forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the desert after escaping the tyranny of Pharaoh and Egypt. ([Location 3429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3429)) - “No tree can grow to Heaven,” adds the ever-terrifying Carl Gustav Jung, psychoanalyst extraordinaire, “unless its roots reach down to Hell.”134 Such a statement should give everyone who encounters it pause. There was no possibility for movement upward, in that great psychiatrist’s deeply considered opinion, without a corresponding move down. ([Location 3441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3441)) - Tags: [[pink]] - In the desert, Christ encounters Satan (see Luke 4:1–13 and Matthew 4:1–11). This story has a clear psychological meaning—a metaphorical meaning—in addition to whatever else material and metaphysical alike it might signify. It means that Christ is forever He who determines to take personal responsibility for the full depth of human depravity. It means that Christ is eternally He who is willing to confront and deeply consider and risk the temptations posed by the most malevolent elements of human nature. It means that Christ is always he who is willing to confront evil—consciously, fully and voluntarily—in the form that dwelt simultaneously within Him and in the world. This is nothing merely abstract (although it is abstract); nothing to be brushed over. It’s no merely intellectual matter. ([Location 3449](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3449)) - Note: The psychological meaning behind Christ's encounter with the devil in the dessert. - Satan embodies the refusal of sacrifice; he is arrogance, incarnate; spite, deceit, and cruel, conscious malevolence. He is pure hatred of Man, God and Being. He will not humble himself, even when he knows full well that he should. Furthermore, he knows exactly what he is doing, obsessed with the desire for destruction, and does it deliberately, thoughtfully and completely. It has to be him, therefore—the very archetype of Evil—who confronts and tempts Christ, the archetype of Good. It must be him who offers to the Savior of Mankind, under the most trying of conditions, what all men most ardently desire. ([Location 3468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3468)) - Note: Satan and Christ the archetypes of good and bad - Satan first tempts the starving Christ to quell His hunger by transforming the desert rocks into bread. Then he suggests that He throw Himself off a cliff, calling on God and the angels to break His fall. Christ responds to the first temptation by saying, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” What does this answer mean? It means that even under conditions of extreme privation, there are more important things than food. To put it another way: Bread is of little use to the man who has betrayed his soul, even if he is currently starving.*3 Christ could clearly use his near-infinite power, as Satan indicates, to gain bread, now—to break his fast—even, in the broader sense, to gain wealth, in the world (which would theoretically solve the problem of bread, more permanently). But at what cost? And to what gain? Gluttony, in the midst of moral desolation? That’s the poorest and most miserable of feasts. Christ aims, therefore, at something higher: at the description of a mode of Being that would finally and forever solve the problem of hunger. If we all chose instead of expedience to dine on the Word of God? That would require each and every person to live, and produce, and sacrifice, and speak, and share in a manner that would permanently render the privation of hunger a thing of the past. And that’s how the problem of hunger in the privations of the desert is most truly and finally addressed. ([Location 3472](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3472)) - Note: The answer to the first temptation. This draws relevance to a later verse in the Bible telling us to not worry about our food tomorrow - tomorrow takes care of itself - The deus ex machina—the emergence of a divine force that magically rescues the hero from his predicament—is the cheapest trick in the hack writer’s playbook. It makes a mockery of independence, and courage, and destiny, and free will, and responsibility. Furthermore, God is in no ways a safety net for the blind. He’s not someone to be commanded to perform magic tricks, or forced into Self-revelation—not even by His own Son. ([Location 3493](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3493)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. Christianity put forward, explicitly, the even more incomprehensible idea that the act of human ownership degraded the slaver (previously viewed as admirable nobility) as much or even more than the slave. We fail to understand how difficult such an idea is to grasp. We forget that the opposite was self-evident throughout most of human history. We think that it is the desire to enslave and dominate that requires explanation. We have it backwards, yet again. ([Location 3559](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3559)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The individual must be constrained, moulded—even brought close to destruction—by a restrictive, coherent disciplinary structure, before he or she can act freely and competently. ([Location 3656](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3656)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Nietzsche, for his part, posited that individual human beings would have to invent their own values in the aftermath of God’s death. But this is the element of his thinking that appears weakest, psychologically: we cannot invent our own values, because we cannot merely impose what we believe on our souls. ([Location 3671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3671)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Faith in the part of us that continues across those deaths is a prerequisite to thinking itself. ([Location 3703](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3703)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. You have now placed at the pinnacle of your moral hierarchy a set of presuppositions and actions aimed at the betterment of Being. Why? Because we know the alternative. The alternative was the twentieth century. The alternative was so close to Hell that the difference is not worth discussing. And the opposite of Hell is Heaven. 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. That’s a state, and a state of mind, at the same time. ([Location 3763](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3763)) - Tags: [[pink]] - For Jung, whatever was at the top of an individual’s moral hierarchy was, for all intents and purposes, that person’s ultimate value, that person’s god. It was what the person acted out. It was what the person believed most deeply. ([Location 3770](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3770)) - Tags: [[pink]] - A sin of commission occurs when you do something you know to be wrong. A sin of omission occurs when you let something bad happen when you could do something to stop it. The former is regarded, classically, as more serious than the latter—than avoidance. I’m not so sure. ([Location 3970](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3970)) - Tags: [[pink]] - If you will not reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself. ([Location 3981](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=3981)) - Tags: [[pink]] - “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. ([Location 4020](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4020)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. Sigmund Freud, for his part, analogously believed that “repression” contributed in a non-trivial manner to the development of mental illness (and the difference between repression of truth and a lie is a matter of degree, not kind). Alfred Adler knew it was lies that bred sickness. C.G. Jung knew that moral problems plagued his patients, and that such problems were caused by untruth. All these thinkers, all centrally concerned with pathology both individual and cultural, came to the same conclusion: lies warp the structure of Being. Untruth corrupts the soul and the state alike, and one form of corruption feeds the other. ([Location 4042](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4042)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: Repression of truth or lying (they are the same thing) is the cause of the corruption of the being, whether that leads to sickness, mental illness or social totalitarianism. So you either tuck up your mind, or your body, if you lie. The truth sets you free, redeems your sins and heals you make sense. The emphasis on truth and untruth as the primary deciding factor of the well being of an individual - The capacity of the rational mind to deceive, manipulate, scheme, trick, falsify, minimize, mislead, betray, prevaricate, deny, omit, rationalize, bias, exaggerate and obscure is so endless, so remarkable, that centuries of pre-scientific thought, concentrating on clarifying the nature of moral endeavour, regarded it as positively demonic. This is not because of rationality itself, as a process. That process can produce clarity and progress. It is because rationality is subject to the single worst temptation—to raise what it knows now to the status of an absolute. ([Location 4074](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4074)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: The rational mind becomes dangerous close to levels near demonic when we believe we know everything. The rational mind that could be used to venture into the unknown inquisitively to gain insight and understanding is also the rational mind that defends against all unknown in order to protect the already established world of what is known. - Lucifer, in Milton’s eyes—the spirit of reason—was the most wondrous angel brought forth from the void by God. This can be read psychologically. Reason is something alive. It lives in all of us. It’s older than any of us. It’s best understood as a personality, not a faculty. It has its aims, and its temptations, and its weaknesses. It flies higher and sees farther than any other spirit. But reason falls in love with itself, and worse. It falls in love with its own productions. It elevates them, and worships them as absolutes. Lucifer is, therefore, the spirit of totalitarianism. He is flung from Heaven into Hell because such elevation, such rebellion against the Highest and Incomprehensible, inevitably produces Hell. ([Location 4088](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4088)) - Milton believed that stubborn refusal to change in the face of error not only meant ejection from heaven, and subsequent degeneration into an ever-deepening hell, but the rejection of redemption itself. Satan knows full well that even if he was willing to seek reconciliation, and God willing to grant it, he would only rebel again, because he will not change. Perhaps it is this prideful stubbornness that constitutes the mysterious unforgivable sin against the Holy Ghost: ([Location 4116](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4116)) - The idea that hell exists in some metaphysical manner is not only ancient, and pervasive; it’s true. Hell is eternal. It has always existed. It exists now. It’s the most barren, hopeless and malevolent subdivision of the underworld of chaos, where disappointed and resentful people forever dwell. ([Location 4125](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4125)) - Those who have lied enough, in word and action, live there, in hell—now. Take a walk down any busy urban street. Keep your eyes open and pay attention. You will see people who are there, now. These are the people to whom you instinctively give a wide berth. These are the people who are immediately angered if you direct your gaze toward them, although sometimes they will instead turn away in shame. ([Location 4132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4132)) - Note: Hell on earth. So exactly what is hell? Hell is the place of deceit. The refusal to change in the face of error. The refusal of redemption. The deceit of knowing everything. The reluctance to face the truth. That is hell. - An aim provides a destination, a point of contrast against the present, and a framework, within which all things can be evaluated. An aim defines progress and makes such progress exciting. An aim reduces anxiety, because if you have no aim everything can mean anything or nothing, and neither of those two options makes for a tranquil spirit. ([Location 4144](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4144)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Some reliance on tradition can help us establish our aims. It is reasonable to do what other people have always done, unless we have a very good reason not to. ([Location 4148](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4148)) - Tags: [[pink]] - You must make friends, therefore, with what you don’t know, instead of what you know. ([Location 4151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4151)) - Tags: [[pink]] - First, that the encounter with malevolence and evil is of sufficient terror to damage even the vision of a god; second, that the attentive son can restore the vision of his father. ([Location 4168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4168)) - Tags: [[pink]] - It was for this reason that Nietzsche said that a man’s worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate. You are by no means only what you already know. You are also all that which you could know, if you only would. Thus, you should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are. You should never give up the better that resides within for the security you already have—and certainly not when you have already caught a glimpse, an undeniable glimpse, of something beyond. ([Location 4177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4177)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The Word that produces order from chaos sacrifices everything, even itself, to God. That single sentence, wise beyond comprehension, sums up Christianity. ([Location 4183](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4183)) - Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us. In such cases, we might never recover or, if we do, we change a lot. ([Location 4184](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4184)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. ([Location 4190](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4190)) - Tags: [[pink]] - All people serve their ambition. In that matter, there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don’t know, what God they serve. ([Location 4204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4204)) - Tags: [[pink]] - You accept the burden of your own mistakes. You become your own person. By rejecting your father’s vision, you develop your own. And then, as your parents age, you’ve become adult enough to be there for them, when they come to need you. They win, too. But both victories had to be purchased at the cost of the conflict engendered by your truth. As Matthew 10:34 has it, citing Christ—emphasizing the role of the spoken Truth: “Think not that I have come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” ([Location 4218](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4218)) - Tags: [[pink]] - This is the “act of faith” whose necessity was insisted upon by the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard. You cannot know ahead of time. Even a good example is insufficient for proof, given the differences between individuals. The success of a good example can always be attributed to luck. Thus, you have to risk your particular, individual life to find out. It is this risk that the ancients described as the sacrifice of personal will to the will of God. It is not an act of submission (at least as submission is currently understood). It is an act of courage. It is faith that the wind will blow your ship to a new and better port. It is the faith that Being can be corrected by becoming. It is the spirit of exploration itself. ([Location 4232](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4232)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. Without attention, culture degenerates and dies, and evil prevails. ([Location 4265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4265)) - Tags: [[pink]] - “Being itself is susceptible to my manipulations. Thus, it deserves no respect.” ([Location 4283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4283)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. ([Location 4411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4411)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. Then they can not do them. Then they don’t have to suffer the consequences. That’s the purpose of thinking. ([Location 4440](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4440)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. ([Location 4450](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4450)) - Tags: [[pink]] - That’s the purpose of memory. You remember the past not so that it is “accurately recorded,” to say it again, but so that you are prepared for the future. ([Location 4547](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4547)) - Tags: [[pink]] - A good lecturer speaks directly to and watches the response of single, identifiable people,*2 instead of doing something clichéd, such as “presenting a talk” to an audience. Everything about that phrase is wrong. You don’t present. You talk. There is no such thing as “a talk,” unless it’s canned, and it shouldn’t be. There is also no “audience.” There are individuals, who need to be included in the conversation. ([Location 4627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4627)) - Tags: [[pink]] - It is for this reason that we must be precise in our aim. Absent that, we drown in the complexity of the world. ([Location 4769](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4769)) - Tags: [[pink]] - It is precisely then that we can understand, although we seldom deeply consider, the staggeringly low-resolution quality of our vision and the inadequacy of our corresponding understanding. In a crisis, when our thing no longer goes, we turn to those whose expertise far transcends ours to restore the match between our expectant desire and what actually happens. ([Location 4820](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4820)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. ([Location 4827](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4827)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The thin veneer of perceptual sufficiency cracks, however, when something fundamental goes wrong. The dreadful inadequacy of our senses reveals itself. ([Location 4852](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4852)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Furthermore, in the absence of agreed-upon tradition (and the constraints—often uncomfortable; often even unreasonable—that it imposes) there exist only three difficult options: slavery, tyranny or negotiation. ([Location 4926](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4926)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Living things die, after all, without attention. ([Location 4951](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4951)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Why avoid, when avoidance necessarily and inevitably poisons the future? Because the possibility of a monster lurks underneath all disagreements and errors. ([Location 4980](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=4980)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Why refuse to specify? Because while you are failing to define success (and thereby rendering it impossible) you are also refusing to define failure, to yourself, so that if and when you fail you won’t notice, and it won’t hurt. But that won’t work! You cannot be fooled so easily—unless you have gone very far down the road! ([Location 5010](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=5010)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Precision specifies. When something terrible happens, it is precision that separates the unique terrible thing that has actually happened from all the other, equally terrible things that might have happened—but did not. ([Location 5069](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=5069)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Kids need playgrounds dangerous enough to remain challenging. People, including children (who are people too, after all), don’t seek to minimize risk. They seek to optimize it. They drive and walk and love and play so that they achieve what they desire, but they push themselves a bit at the same time, too, so they continue to develop. Thus, if things are made too safe, people (including children) start to figure out ways to make them dangerous again.165 ([Location 5162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=5162)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Of course, culture is an oppressive structure. It’s always been that way. It’s a fundamental, universal existential reality. ([Location 5440](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=5440)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Every word we speak is a gift from our ancestors. Every thought we think was thought previously by someone smarter. ([Location 5444](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=5444)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. The price we pay for that involvement is the inevitable creation of hierarchies of success, while the inevitable consequence is difference in outcome. ([Location 5449](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=5449)) - Tags: [[pink]] - We might instead note with gratitude that a complex, sophisticated culture allows for many games and many successful players, and that a well-structured culture allows the individuals that compose it to play and to win, in many different fashions. ([Location 5455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=5455)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Here’s the fundamental problem: group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual. That sentence should be written in capital letters. Every person is unique—and not just in a trivial manner: importantly, significantly, meaningfully unique. Group membership cannot capture that variability. Period. ([Location 5673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=5673)) - Tags: [[pink]] - I teach excessively agreeable people to note the emergence of such resentment, which is a very important, although very toxic, emotion. 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. ([Location 5731](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=5731)) - Tags: [[pink]] - You must also know clearly what you want out of the situation, and be prepared to clearly articulate your desire. It’s a good idea to tell the person you are confronting exactly what you would like them to do instead of what they have done or currently are doing. You might think, “if they loved me, they would know what to do.” That’s the voice of resentment. ([Location 5743](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=5743)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Agreeable, compassionate, empathic, conflict-averse people (all those traits group together) let people walk on them, and they get bitter. They sacrifice themselves for others, sometimes excessively, and cannot comprehend why that is not reciprocated. ([Location 5749](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=5749)) - Tags: [[pink]] - It would be lovely if the opposite of a criminal was a saint—but it’s not the case. The opposite of a criminal is an Oedipal mother, which is its own type of criminal. ([Location 5757](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=5757)) - Tags: [[pink]] - In a household like that, the choicest cut of child is the spirit, and it’s always consumed first. Too much protection devastates the developing soul. ([Location 5777](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=5777)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The witch in the Hansel and Gretel tale is the Terrible Mother, the dark half of the symbolically feminine. ([Location 5778](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=5778)) - Tags: [[pink]] - A problem of this sort emerges, for example, because of the antipathy between cooperation and competition, both of which are socially and psychologically desirable. 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. Perhaps people identify with groups at the flip of a coin because they deeply want to organize themselves, protect themselves, and still have some reasonable probability of climbing the dominance hierarchy. Then they favour their own group, because favouring it helps it thrive—and climbing something that is failing is not a useful strategy. ([Location 6000](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=6000)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The idea that life is suffering is a tenet, in one form or another, of every major religious doctrine, as we have already discussed. Buddhists state it directly. Christians illustrate it with the cross. Jews commemorate the suffering endured over centuries. Such reasoning universally characterizes the great creeds, because human beings are intrinsically fragile. We can be damaged, even broken, emotionally and physically, and we are all subject to the depredations of aging and loss. This is a dismal set of facts, and it is reasonable to wonder how we can expect to thrive and be happy (or even to want to exist, sometimes) under such conditions. ([Location 6014](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=6014)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. ([Location 6143](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=6143)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Something supersedes thinking, despite its truly awesome power. When existence reveals itself as existentially intolerable, thinking collapses in on itself. In such situations—in the depths—it’s noticing, not thinking, that does the trick. ([Location 6179](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=6179)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: The greatest asset of being a human is not the ability to think, but the ability to notice. - Orient yourself properly. Then—and only then—concentrate on the day. Set your sights at the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, and then focus pointedly and carefully on the concerns of each moment. Aim continually at Heaven while you work diligently on Earth. Attend fully to the future, in that manner, while attending fully to the present. Then you have the best chance of perfecting both. ([Location 6366](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=6366)) - Tags: [[pink]] - How shall I deal with the enlightened one? Replace him with the true seeker of enlightenment. There is no enlightened one. There is only the one who is seeking further enlightenment. Proper Being is process, not a state; a journey, not a destination. It’s the continual transformation of what you know, through encounter with what you don’t know, rather than the desperate clinging to the certainty that is eternally insufficient in any case. That accounts for the importance of Rule 4 (Compare yourself…). Always place your becoming above your current being. That means it is necessary to recognize and accept your insufficiency, so that it can be continually rectified. That’s painful, certainly—but it’s a good deal. ([Location 6418](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=6418)) - Tags: [[pink]] - To give is to do what you can to make things better. The good in people will respond to that, and support it, and imitate it, and multiply it, and return it, and foster it, so that everything improves and moves forward. ([Location 6449](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=6449)) - Tags: [[pink]] - What shall I do with my infant’s death? Hold my other loved ones and heal their pain. It is necessary to be strong in the face of death, because death is intrinsic to life. It is for this reason that I tell my students: aim to be the person at your father’s funeral that everyone, in their grief and misery, can rely on. There’s a worthy and noble ambition: strength in the face of adversity. That is very different from the wish for a life free of trouble. ([Location 6476](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FPGY5T0&location=6476)) - Tags: [[pink]]