Table of Contents
A Religious Problem
Peterson starts this chapter by stating that while the Columbine High School killers might not have been religious – they had a problem with reality, a problem that that had religious connotations. One of the members of the Columbine Duo writes about how he believed that the human race wasn’t worth fighting for.
Peterson then cites an excerpt from Faust: A Tragedy by Goethe. The play’s devil Mephistopheles describes himself as the “spirit who negates and rightfully so, for all that comes to be deserves to perish, wretchedly.” This shouldn’t sound strange. People often think like Mephistopheles but rarely act upon their thoughts.
Leo Tolstoy also reasoned that life was meaningless. His rational knowledge led him to deny life while faith led him to deny reason. The latter was more difficult. He could not escape these thoughts, but was able to identify four ways of dealing with them.
1) Retreat into childlike ignorance of the problem.
2) Pursue mindless pleasure.
3) Live an evil, meaningless life expecting nothing from it.
He saw the third choice as a form of weakness. People who belonged to this category knew that death was better than life but don’t have the courage to commit suicide. The fourth category was suicide, but it involved strength and energy.
The dark reality is that Tolstoy’s views aren’t pessimistic enough – as it has become a recent trend to commit mass suicide before killing oneself.
“There have been one thousand mass killings in the US in twelve hundred and sixty days by 2016.”
Many people claim to not understand why these things happen, but such motivations have been understood for a very long time. These motivations were explained in Biblical stories and by celebrated authors such as Tolstoy.
Vengeance or Transformation
“Truly terrible things happen to people. It’s no wonder they’re out for revenge.”
But some people choose to transform their lives, and make peace with their tragic past. Nietzsche insinuated that it was possible for people to become nihilistic after experiencing evil, but it was also possible to “learn good by experiencing evil.” The child tormented by his parent can become a good mother to her children.
Solzhenitsyn could have become nihilistic after being imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp, where he was beaten by his own people before learning he had cancer. But instead, he refused to allow his mind to become corrupted, and determined to take responsibility for the mistakes he made.
“He took himself apart, piece by piece, let what was unnecessary and harmful die, and resurrected himself.”
He then wrote the Gulag Archipelago.
Things Fall Apart
“Success makes us complacent. We forget to pay attention. We take what we have for granted. We turn a blind eye. We fail to notice that things are changing, or that corruption is taking root. And everything falls apart. Is that the fault of reality—of God? Or do things fall apart because we have not paid sufficient attention?”
The damage that came from Hurricane Katrina was not just nature’s fault. It was a result of willful blindness. The Dutch prepare their dikes for the worst storm in ten thousand years. New Orleans had prepared their dikes for the worst storm in a hundred year. Had New Orleans followed the Dutch example, they would have averted tragedy. Suffering is often arbitrary, and in many cases, there is nothing that could have been done. But the less we leave to chance, and the more effort we make, the better off we are likely to be.
Clean up your Life
Make sure everything in your life is in order, before you try to change the world.
“If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?”
Fix the things that you can fix and start small. Don’t say things that make you feel weak.
“When you’re speaking properly you’ll experience a feeling of integration and strength. When you’re speaking deceitfully you feel you’re starting to come apart at the seams. What you need to do is practice only saying things that make you feel stronger.”
Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning Lectures
Don’t continually behave in the same despicable manner that has brought you misery in the past.
If you did that for months, and years, your life will become simpler. Tragedies will simply be tragedies, instead of being compounded with bitterness and deceit. And perhaps, one day, your life will cease to be a tragedy.
Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
Read 12 Rules For Life
If you are interested in reading books about unmasking human nature, consider reading The Dichotomy of the Self, a book that explores the great psychoanalytic and philosophical ideas of our time, and what they can reveal to us about the nature of the self.