12 Rules for Life

Favourite Quotes

“as unfamiliar and strange as it sounds, in the deepest part of our psyche, we all want to be judged.” p. xxiv Norman Doidge ¹

“what saves is the willingness to learn from what you don’t know” - p. 218

Summary

NOTE: subheadings within a chapter are primarily my own creation and not Jordan Peterson’s.

Forward by Norman Doidge

• “without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions - and there’s nothing freeing about that.” p. viii
• “the best rules do not ultimately restrict us but instead facilitate our goals and make for fuller, freer lives.” p. viii

Jordan Peterson’s inspiration for writing Maps of Meanings:

• growing up during the Cold War, he saw how people were going to WAR over ideology, and were willing to destroy the world for it
• this is why JP always preaches to be wary of ideology, no matter who or where it came from

Ideology

• ideology: “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” - p. xiv
• ideologues: “peoples who pretend to know how they can make the world a better place before they’ve taken care of their own chaos within” - p. xiv
• why are ideologies dangerous?
  • the world is complex, and the simply-minded “I know it all” approach of ideology cannot figure out the world.
  • they are especially dangerous when ideologies come into power
• ideologies commonly use religious stories to support their ideas and beliefs, except their eliminate the narrative and psychological richness from the stories
  • example: Communism took from the story of Children of Israel in Egypt, with an enslaved class and ruling class.

Suffering

• suffering is simply part of life. Jordan Peterson teaches this, but didn’t invent this idea. Every ancient writer knew this
• unfortunately today we think suffering is not inherent on the human condition and instead is an ‘anomaly’. This way of thinking is what often gives rise to dangerous ideologies like Communism
  • Communists will say there’s suffering in the world because of the proletariat, etc, disregarding the fact that suffering is INHERENT in the human condition

The Desire for Order

• there’s a reason why Jordan’s ideas that he was posting online amidst the whole ‘compelled speech’ debacle were resonating with the youth and people in general
• people do NOT like rules. At the same time, we all search for structure (order).
• Today especially, we’re deprived of order and structure, which is why we desire it even more. This desire is fueled by two contradictory ideas we are taught about morality:
  • people today are taught that morality is relative
  • *the ways of the ideologue

Moral Relativity

• morality is a ‘personal value judgement’ and there is no such thing as objective morality
• morality is simply a matter of personal opinion or related to a framework such as one’s ethnicity, culture, or historical moment they were born into
• postmodernists claim that morality is nothing but the attempt of one group to exert power and their will over another group
• our morality is so arbitrary, therefore we should show tolerance for people who think differently and who come from diverse backgrounds
• the one who is not tolerant is labelled as “judgmental”
• since we don’t know right and wrong objectively, the worse thing an adult can do is tell a young person how to live or give them advice on that

Virtue

• virtue is not the same as morality
• morality = right and wrong, good and evil
• virtue = the ways of behaving that are most conducive to happiness in life
  • as opposed to ‘vice’ = the ways of behaving least conducive to happiness in life
  • Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethnics studies virtues and vices
• making judgements about virtue and vice is necessary

Virtue According to Postmodernists

• just like morality, the moral relativists / postmodernists believe virtue is relative too
  • you can’t know the best way to live because there is no real good and no true virtue, both are relative
• the closest thing they have to virtue is ‘tolerance’
  • they claim only tolerance “will provide social cohesion between different groups, and save us from harming each other.”
• this is why see them always ‘virtue-signaling’, telling people how tolerant they are
• intolerance towards others’ views is not just wrong, even if these views are crazy, but rather it indicates something worse; you are unsophisticated, intellectually handicapped, and quite possible dangerous
  • this is why people like Jordan Peterson are attacked so heavily

The Result of Relativism

• what has the relativism movement produced? A vacuum in people’s lives. A lack of a moral compass. It has led to the spread of nihilism and despair.
• This has also led to the rise of the opposite of relativism: ideology, which provides blind certainty and claims to have an answer for everything
  • people who are nihilist, lost without a moral compass, and in despair crave ideology

The Ideologue

• young adults sign up for humanities courses and study the great works written in the past. But they’re not taught the books themselves but rather given ideological attacks on them
• the ideologue is one who is hyper-judgmental and censorious, always knows what’s wrong with others, and what the solution is. These are the types that are attacking the great works of the past

Philosophy

• the fact that different societies have different rules, morality, and customs, was known to the ancients as well. The difference with them and us is they didn’t claim morality was therefore relative and become depressed and nihilistic. They instead invented philosophy to understand these differences
• philosophy helps us to reason and understand the reason for these differences
• Aristotle spoke a lot about this. One thing he found that all societies shared was the fact that laws and rules DID exist.
  • this proves to us that laws and rules, and a moral system, is inherent in the human condition

Overture by JP:

Maps of Meaning

• this was JPs first book
• in it, he proposed that the stories and myths of religions and other traditions were not descriptive but rather moral in their intent
  • they concerned themselves with how one should act, not describing what the world is
• these stories and myths depict the world as a stage or a drama (like a play) and the constituent elements in this drama are order and chaos
• this reason for writing this book was he was trying to figure out the reasons for the Cold War; specifically, he was perplexed how belief systems could be so important to people that they were willing to destroy the world for their sake
  • it wasn’t just about the belief system, but the fact they were shared

What is Order?

• this is where people around you play according to the rules, societal norms, and customs
• order is explored territory and familiarity
• order is typically portrayed by the masculine
• The wise king and the tyrant are both symbols of order
  • therefore order can be both structure (represented by the former) and oppression (represented by the latter)

What is Chaos?

• the unexpected
• when you suddenly lose your job, or lose a loved one, or get cheated on - these are all instances of chaos
• chaos is typically portrayed by the feminine
• creation and destruction are both symbols of chaos
• nature is the perfect representation of chaos as nature both creates and destroys
• lots of people have the idea that chaos is bad. It’s not. Something new, something that improves on the old structured way, is also considered ‘chaos’ yet it is good.

Shared Belief System

• a shared belief system simplifies life for everyone under that belief system; they can cooperate, understand each other, etc in other words this shared system is the BEDROCK of civilization. Anything that threatens it must be eliminated
• the shared belief system allows people to live together peacefully, predictably, and productively. It reduces the amount of chaos that can creep into society
• a violation of the shared belief system can lead to dangerous consequences
  • think about if you get cheated on. You feel betrayed, vulnerable, angry, some even get violent. This is similar to when the shared belief system is violated.
  • so by having a shared belief system, these emotions can be regulated and controlled

Shared Values

• a shared belief system also provides a system of value, specifically a hierarchy of values
• without values, you cannot act or perceive. Both action and perception require a goal or a target, and your value acts as that.
• without values you can never improve. Progress requires a goal, which is a value.
• values also provide meaning to our suffering
  • i.e. you are suffering for the sake of x value
• no values = no meaning in life

Conflict Between Values

• if you have two groups with two different sets of value systems, conflict is inevitable
• so is the solution to get rid of value systems? This is what the west is currently doing, slowly getting rid of our value systems: culture, religion, nationalism, etc
• the removal of value systems is what leads to meaninglessness and nihilism, and we can easily see this in society today

What’s the Solution?

• we can’t get rid of value systems because then our lives will be meaningless. We can’t stick with value systems either because of the conflict that comes as a result.
• now a days, we simply cannot AFFORD conflict. We live in a technologically advance society. Conflict can lead to the destruction of the world (nuclear war).
  • this is the case with ‘ideology’, i.e. rigid value systems that you are enslaved to
• the solution:
  • “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.” p. xxxiii
  • “through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path. We must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society and the world. We must each tell the truth and repair what is in disrepair and break down and recreate what is old and outdated.” - p. xxxiii
• in other words, the solution is to live properly:
  • “Perhaps, if we lived properly, we would be able to tolerate the weight of our own self-consciousness. Perhaps, if we lived properly, we could withstand the knowledge of our own fragility and mortality, without the sense of aggrieved victimhood that produces, first, resentment, then envy, and then the desire for vengeance and destruction. Perhaps, if we lived properly, we wouldn’t have to turn to totalitarian certainty to shield ourselves from the knowledge of our own insufficiency and ignorance.’ p. xxxiv

Rule 1: Stand Up Straight with your Shoulders Back

• “When the aristocracy catches a cold, the working class dies of pneumonia.” p. 4
  • Meaning, the working class (poor people in society) have it a lot worse
  • we see in this in the animal world as well: the weaker animals, those lower in the dominance hierarchy, are more likely to get sick and die

Dominance Hierarchies

• animals compete in dominance hierarchies, afterall, not everyone can occupy the best territory, have the best mates, the best access to food, etc, so they engage in activity to determine the strongest among them
• this activity to fight for the top could easily turn violent, but that is in no one’s interest
  • if two birds fight for the best nest, the victor even if he is significantly bigger and stronger will likely become injured. That gives a third bird the opportunity to swoop in. The first two birds do not want a third bird coming in.
  • therefore in the animal world we see that animals have developed ways to establish dominance with the least damage possible
  • the defeated wolf will turn on its back and expose its throat as a sign of submission. The alpha could tear out its throat but it doesn’t because the defeated wolf is willingly submitting

Lobsters: Dominance Hierarchies

• lobsters are always trying to find good shelter spots, especially when its time to shed their shell they would require a good shelter to protect themselves
• this leads to conflict between lobsters fighting for a shelter
  • even lobsters raised in isolated have the same defensive and aggressive behaviors. This proves it is biological and not social/learned behavior.
• when determining dominance, we observe 3 levels of dispute resolution in the lobster world - p. 6
  • level 1 = if one lobster is significantly bigger than their opponent, the smaller one often backs down
  • level 2 = if they are of the same size, then show off their claws and one of them charges the other while the other backs away, and then vice-versa. This goes on a few times until one lobster gives up
  • level 3 = both lobsters charge at each other and combat ensues. The lobsters partake in a grappling match with each trying to flip the other on its back. Once flipped, the defeated lobster will give up and leave
  • level 4 = if neither can be flipped, or if the flipped lobster continues to fight, both lobsters now fight for the sake of trying to kill the other. They use their claws to grab body parts to pull them off. Typically, there is a clear winner and loser because the loser often dies.
• the losing lobster, especially if it was in a dominant position before the fight, will ‘dissolve’ its brain and grow a new one, a more subordinate brain appropriate for its new lowly status - p. 7
• Back to the lobsters - after the winner wins a few fights, a new hierarchy is established and is quite stable. This dominant lobster will sometimes go around touting his dominance, to remind the weaker lobsters who’s in charge - p. 9
• The female lobsters wait for the fighting to stop, then chase after the dominant fighter. This is genius. Instead of them figuring out who the strong lobster is on their own, they outsource this tedious task to the dominance hierarchy, i.e. let the males fight and ‘choose’ amongst themselves who the dominant ones are - p. 10
  • so the dominant males get the best land, the best shelters, and the best females to mate with
• What does this study on lobsters teach us? - p. 11
  • they have been around for 350 million years. This means dominance hierarchies have been around for a LONG time and this means the neurochemical parts to process the ideas of status and society have been around for a long time too.
  • Dominance hierarchies are ingrained in our biological and neurochemistry. And by ‘our’ I mean the animal kingdom and even humans too

Serotonin

• the same neurochemical that in humans increases happiness is the same neurochemical that characterizes the dominant or victorious lobster - p. 7
• these lobsters are confident, sort of on a ‘high’
• lobsters low in serotonin are often ‘depressed’, sulking, rarely aggressive, and inhibited.
• the differences in level of serotonin between two humans or two lobsters has a tremendous impact on them, even when other factors are held constant, like income, food, etc - p. 15
  • the low serotonin humans/lobsters are more depressed, will have shorter life spans, get sick easier, have more anxiety, etc
  • this proves just how much of an impact brain chemistry has on us

The Matthew Principle

• The principle of unequal distribution, also known as ‘Price’s law’, or the ‘Mathew principle’ (derived from Matthew 25:29)
  • This principle/law applies in all spheres of life. The top 1% have as much wealth as the bottom 50%. The losing lobster is statistically more likely to keep on losing his future fights, while the winner is more likely to keep winning future fights. This applies to all creative fields too. The majority of scientific papers are only published by a small amount of scientists. The majority of big music hits are made by a small group of singers. The majority of classical music still played today was composed by only 4 composers (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky)
  • the verse 25:29: “to those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.”

Strength VS Smarts

• In the lobster world, the physically stronger you are, the higher you will be in the hierarchy. But lobsters are very primitive. Chimps are more advanced - p. 10
• The dominant chimps who are leaders for a long time are not usually the strongest, but rather the smartest. They know how to form alliances with the weaker chimps to produce a strong coalition. They look after the females in their group and the infants. In other words, they are good and capable leaders

Dominance Hierarchies and The Brain

• The part of our brain that records our position on the dominance hierarchy (i.e. our social status) is very ancient and fundamental, as the study on lobsters proved (see above) - p. 14
  • furthermore, the fact that this system has stuck around for so long (millions of years) proves that is it absolutely crucial for animal and human existence. We can’t simply get rid of it.
• that part of our brain that records dominance also observes how we are treated by the people around us. If you are treated as having little worth by your peers, then your brain restricts serotonin availability - p. 16
• If we are low on the hierarchy, that part of the brain will force the body into a state of stress and expend energy to take care of your health (instead of saving it for the future, so you die young), amongst other things. If you are low on the hierarchy, you would most likely choose instant gratification rather than think about the long-term because you are so desperate. - p. 16-17
• it’s a never ending downwards loop based on the Matthew Principle: the lower you are on the dominance hierarchy, the less serotonin your brain will produce, which means your entire life will be working against you, which only further drops your level on the dominance hierarchy
• If someone is hurt early in life as a child, whether its bullying or trauma, then the dominance counter in the brain can make it more likely that they will experience more hurt in their adult life - p. 22
  • An adult who was bullied as a child still retains a habitual assumption of subordination which renders them more stressed and uncertain, which lowers them on the dominance hierarchy

The Importance of Habits

• a habit something that is regularly done
  • this includes a consistent sleep schedule
• This brain function is not fool-proof, rather it can malfunction due to bad sleeping/eating habits, and lack of any habits or schedule in general - p. 17
• Biologically we need simplicity in our life, this means a schedule. For example, babies who have a sleep and eating schedule are happy, but when that’s thrown out, they get whiny and agitated. Adults are the same way
  • When JP is dealing with depressed/anxious patients, first thing he asks is about sleep schedule. If it is not good, then that’s the first thing to be fixed

Positive Feedback Loop

• when addicted to something you experience a positive feedback loop
• example: you like to drink alcohol. Then you get a hangover which is the withdrawal period. To easily fix this you can have more drinks. At this point you’re in a positive feedback loop. This is how people become alcoholics or addicts
• you can also use this to your advantage. If you do a good thing, you can turn that into a positive feedback loop to further increase
  • study your bodily expressions can change your real emotions. A study showed that when subjects made a sad face, they reported feeling sadder, and vice-versa when they made a happy face
• as mentioned in Dominance Hierarchies and The Brain section above, our brain records how people around us treated and that is what helps in determining your dominance in the hierarchy.
  • we can use this fact to our advantage: if you fix up your posture, stand tall, look strong and big, then others will also view you in a positive light which will further increase the way you carry yourself, thus creating a positive feedback loop that works to our advantage

Dependence

• Being too dependent on people your whole life can cause things like anxiety.
• Example, lets say you have been dependent on your parents til the age of 18, then at that age you get into a relationship and become dependent on your partner. This means you have had no opportunity for independence. This is a bad condition to be in. You must learn to be independent.

The Capability for Evil

• Often people whose fathers were excessively angry and controlling, grow up to be very non-violent and non-confrontational, and tend to limit the emotion of anger
• “If you can bite, you generally don’t have to” - p. 23
  • Don’t ever let yourself be taken advantage of. Its ok to show your aggression and anger if that will prevent a greater oppression against you down the line. If you show this anger/aggression early on, you generally don’t need to get violent because the oppressor/bully will back off
  • Naïve and harmless people are more likely to be abused. Why?
    1. They believe by default all people are good, and no one wants to hurt another
    2. People who are abusers specifically prey on naïve people
• Naïve people who are abused typically have resentment. They also don’t know why they have this. So how do you help them?
  • Make them recognize their resentment as anger, then, as an indication that something needs to be said or done (i.e. stopping the tyrant/oppressor). You need to make the naïve person recognize in themselves the seeds of evil (because everyone has it) and to see themselves as (potentially) dangerous. Only then does their fear decrease and they start to develop self-respect and they are enabled to resist the oppression done against them because they realize that they are terrible too. They also see that they must stand up for themselves, because eventually that resentment in them will turn into evil and destruction
• Many soldiers who have PTSD, don’t have it because they saw something traumatic, but rather because they did something traumatic themselves. At the moment of doing that horrifying thing, they realize they themselves are the monster that they read about in history (like Hitler and Stalin). Perhaps they previously thought that these evil people were people who were totally unlike themselves, so they thought ‘I could never be like that’, but when they come to the realization that ‘damn, I really am a monster’, it totally destroys their world - p. 25
  • Another reason for PTSD, is that the person had a hyper-sheltered upbringing, where nothing terrible was allowed to exist, so at the first sight of something slightly traumatic or evil, they are absolutely destroyed
• “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.” p.25
  • naïve people do not realize the capacity for mayhem within themselves, thus they have weak character.

Stand Up Physically and Metaphysically

• stand tall and strong. Carry yourself with confidence. But don’t just appear this way physically, you must also “stand up” metaphysically, in your soul and Being.
• standing up metaphysically means:
  • to accept the burden of Being and responsibility of life, VOLUNTARILY accepting it.
  • to undertake the sacrifices required to create a meaningful and productive reality. In ancient terms this means “pleasing God”
• that’s the key word: voluntary
  • when you accept it by choice, you are standing up to the challenge, not merely bracing for a catastrophe
• this voluntary acceptance of being will help you transform the chaos around you into habitable order

Overall Lessons from this Rule

• you can change, and you must change. Maybe you just have a bad habit or two. Regardless, you can change your status. If you continue being the loser that you are, society (i.e. those around you) will assign you a low number on the dominance hierarchy. Then your brain will not produce as much serotonin. This will make you less happy and more anxious/sad, and more likely to stand down when you should be standing up for yourself. Since you are on the lower end of the hierarchy, you will more likely live in a ghetto area, less likely to find a desirable mate, more likely to abuse drugs, more likely to develop cancer and other diseases. Overall, you will be living for the present in a world full of uncertain futures
• So what should you do?
  1. STAND UP STRAIGHT WITH YOUR SHOULDERS BACK! How you carry yourself will impact you biologically
  2. get rid of bad habits, instead find some positive ones and create a positive feedback loop
     • develop consistent and healthy sleeping and eating habits too
  3. recognize that you yourself have the seeds of evil within you and use that to develop self-respect and strength of character
     • obviously don’t commit evil yourself…
  4. voluntarily accept the burden of Being and responsibility of life. Make the sacrifices necessary in order to create a meaningful and productive reality for yourself.

Rule 2: Treat Yourself like Someone you are Responsible for Helping

The Problem Statement

• Statistically speaking, people care more for their pets than themselves
  • Many people don’t bother taking medications for themselves even when they need it, but will do everything in their power to cure their pet when sick
  • this just proves that we care so little for ourselves yet so much for our pets… but why?
  • the story in Genesis offers an answer

Scientific vs Religious Worldview

• science views the world as a place of things, a place of matter, composed of atoms, molecules and quarks
• religion views the world as a place of action, a place of subjective experience, like a novel or a movie rather than a scientific description of reality
• take pain: it is a subjective feeling. It is very real, no one can argue against that. Pain matters more than ‘matter’ matters.
  • this is why many religions take suffering in existence as the irreducible truth of Being
• to put it simply
  • science is the domain of matter
  • experience is the domain of what matters
• if science is composed of atoms and molecules, how about the world of experience?
• the world of experience has 3 fundamental constituents
  1. Chaos
  2. Order
  3. The process that mediates the two (consciousness)
• It is our eternal subjugation of the first two that make us fail to care for ourselves. Only with proper understanding of the third can we find a way out
• Chaos and order are fundamental elements of existence because every lived situation is made up of both - p. 44
  • in every situation there are knowns and there are unknowns

Chaos

• the unexplored territory. Domain of ignorance. The foreigner. The stranger. The monster under the bed. The hidden anger of your mom. The sickness of your child. It is the despair and horror you feel when you’ve been betrayed, or when things fall apart, or when you loose your job, or when your dreams die, or when your marriage ends. It is the place you are in when you don’t know where you are.
  • I.e. it is all things and situation we neither know nor understand
  • Chaos is also freedom, which can be dreadful
• in the Genesis story, chaos is the formless potential from which God created order using His word
  • similarly, since we are made in God’s image, we also bring order from the chaos of potential
• chaos can strike even in familiar places. Remember we live both in space and time. So although the place may be the same, the time is different, thus potentially producing a new outcome. For example, you could be driving down the same old road, but your brakes can fail. Your old friends can deceive you. Your old certain ideas can be broken by new ones - p. 38

Order

• Explored territory. Structure of society (also provided by biology). It is tribe, country, and religion. It is the floor beneath you. The plan of your day. The calendar and the clock. The thin ice on which we all skate. The place where the behaviors of the world match our expectations and desires. The place where we’re able to think about the long-term. Where things work and are stable and calm. You are in order when you have a loyal friend.
  • Order can also be tyranny. This happens when the demand for certainty, uniformity, and purity becomes too one-sided

Masculine Feminine Relationship

• Order is represented as masculine. It is God the Father, the judge, the ledger-keeper, the peacetime army, the political culture, the corporate environment, the system, credit cards, classrooms, traffic lights, etc - p. 40
  • But when order is pushed too far, it can manifest itself destructively. Like forced migration, concentration camps, etc
• Chaos is represented as feminine. This is partly because all things that we know were once unknown. Therefore they originated in the unknown. Similarly all beings we encounter were born from mothers. Chaos is the source, origin, mother, the substance from which things are made. It is possibility itself, the source of ideas. It is the predatorial mother, who tears you into shreds if you threaten her kids - p. 41
  • Women are picky maters. Most men do not meet their standards. When the women says “no!” to the date, that brings chaos to the man. Women’s pickiness is what made us the competitive, aggressive, and domineering creatures that we are.
• many religious symbols represent this fundamental divide of male and female
  • the Star of David has the downward pointing triangle of femininity and upward triangle of masculinity
  • the Hexagram of the Hindus is very similar to that of the Jews
  • ancient Egyptians have Osiris as god of the state while ISIS is goddess of the underworld. These are represented as twin cobras with their tails knotted together
    • 
  • Mary and Jesus, as represented in the Pieta
    • 

The Way

• Jesus said “I am the way, and the truth and the life” - John 14:6
• The Taoist way of life is called “The Way”. It demands that you must be on the border of the two serpents
• you must take the balanced path, which is “the Way”: one foot planted in order and security while the other foot planted in chaos, growth, and possibility. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found - p. 44

The Androgynous Man

• Jesus is symbolically the androgynous man.
• God split the original man, Adam, into two, to create Eve.
• Chris is essentially the original man BEFORE the sexual division - p. 45

Life in Eden

• there were 2 trees in Eden:
  • tree of life
  • tree of the knowledge of good and evil: forbidden to eat from
• Adam and Eve were not conscious. They did not recognize their own nakedness as they were not ashamed of it - p. 45
• why was there a serpent in Eden?
  • it represents the fact that chaos can lurk in places of order and can manifest itself
  • in the Taoist symbol (Order and Chaos has an image) there is a black serpent (chaos) lurking in the white area (order)
  • this teaches us that every ‘safe’ space can always have chaos creep into it. It’s simply impossible to shield any space off from chaos.
  • the serpent being in Eden was the lesser of two evils, the other option was to not expose Adam and Eve to the serpent, therefore never exposing the human race to difficulty and danger, therefore keeping us infantilized forever (see Evil As a Fact of Life)

Evil Within Us

• Snakes have been our enemy since the beginning of time. Even if we managed to remove them all (which is quite impossible anyways), there would still be snakes in the form of our fellow humans. Afterall, there was war and conflict all the time. And even if we defeated the human snakes, there is a snake within us all.
  • ‘The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity for evil’ - p .47
• Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago says that the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. In other words, every human has the capacity for evil. This is the snake we must contend with and this is the problem religions often try to tackle.

Evil As a Fact of Life

• evil exists and will always exists
• it is impossible to create a true ‘safe space’. As mentioned above, chaos will always sneak its way in like a snake
• this is why parents who overly protect their kids are doing them a disservice. You cannot protect your kids forever
  • “it is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them” - p. 47
  • parents should ask themselves: do you want to make your kids safe or strong?
• is it even in our best interest to get rid of evil and danger? No!
  • without it, humans will forever be infantilized and immature. We require danger and difficulty to mature, improve, and become useful and competent

Eating of the Tree

• Why did the serpent trick Eve and not Adam?
  • Maybe it was cause Eve had more reason to attend to serpents than Adam did. Maybe serpents were more likely to prey on her infants. Maybe this is why Eve’s daughters (women) are still to this day more protective, self-conscious, fearful, and nervous.
• what happens when Eve eats the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?
  • she becomes conscious, or rather self-conscious
• Why did Eve make Adam eat from it too?
  • No clear-seeing and conscious woman is going to tolerate a blind/unawakened man. This is how its always been. Women have always been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time. They do this by rejecting them, but also by shaming them when they do not take responsibility. Women bear the responsibility of reproduction so they must ensure their man is capable of being a man
  • reminds me of Alamut: “Because only a woman can turn a male into a whole man. She confers knowledge on him…” - p. 176

Vision and the Serpent

• Dr. Lynn Isbell suggested that the acute vision humans have was an adaptation forced on us millions of years ago to detect the danger of snakes
• this is why a snake was in Eden and not any other animal. The snake gave us the vision of God - p. 49
• our color vision was also an adaptation to detect ripe fruit. The snake in Eden offers a fruit.
• basically there’s lots of parallels between the snake/serpent and vision/awakening

Nakedness

• Symbolically speaking, nakedness represents vulnerability and easily damaged. It means being judged for beauty and health.
• When Adam and Eve ‘awoke’ (ate from the tree of good and evil), the first thing they noticed was that they were naked. The first thing they saw was themselves and their faults.
  • Beauty shames ugly, strength shames weakness, and the ideal shames us all. Thus we fear it and resent it. But this doesn’t mean we abandon all ideals of beauty, strength, health, intellect, etc. These ideals are what drives us. Its the price we all pay for aim, ambition, and achievement.
• Adam hides from God when God calls for him. He says “I heard you, God. But I was naked and hid”
  • this means that people unsettled by their vulnerability (i.e. naked) fear to tell the truth, or mediate between chaos and order
  • in other words, they are afraid to walk with God. It’s understandable, afterall, God is a judgmental father

Consequences of Waking Up

• Adam blames Eve for eating from the tree. So, the first woman made the first man self-conscious and resentful. Then the first man blamed the woman. Then the first man blamed God.
  • this is how it is today too. A man’s crush ridicules him, then he calls her a bitch and blames God for making her bitchy and making him useless
• This does not reflect well on Adam. At least Eve had the serpent to blame, and the serpent is a master as deceiving people
• What are the consquences?
  • God curses the serpent and removes their legs. They must now slither around and fear being stomped by humans
  • God tells the woman she must now bear children and be reliant on a sometimes unreliable/resentful man
  • God tells the man that he must now have a life full of working. To sacrifice the present for the future, afterall man now has ‘God vision’ which allows him to see into the future figuratively speaking

Answer to the Problem Statement

• the question initially posed was: why do people purchase and administer carefully the medication for their pets, when they completely neglect themselves?
• the answer given by Genesis tells us that humans are naked, ugly, ashamed, fearful, cowardly, worthless, resentful, and accusatory. Why would anyone take care of something like this??
• the person you know the MOST about is YOURSELF. You know all your bad secrets, transgressions, sins, faults, insufficiencies, and flaws. Therefore the person you most view as pathetic and contemptible is YOURSELF. A dog, an innocent pure dog, is more worthy - p. 53

”Ye Shall Be Gods, Knowing Good and Evil”

• When Adam and Eve are awoken after eating the fruit, as mentioned above they realize their nakedness and God bestows upon them suffering and toil
• the serpent tells them, referring to the fruit, “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” - p. 53. What does this mean?
• animals, especially predators, are not evil for killing other animals. It’s simply how they survive, it’s in their nature and biology. They’re hungry, not evil
  • this is because they are missing self-consciousness
• self-consciousness gives us the knowledge to know our own vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Animals are missing this knowledge. We know what hurts us and makes us suffer.
  • this means we also know how to make other people suffer and can consciously choose to do that
• evil = to inflict suffering for the sake of suffering
  • animals are not evil. They don’t have self-consciousness therefore do not inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. But humans can and do.
• knowing this, how can we provide for ourselves? WHY would we ever be committed to our own care and well-being? Why not just die?

What’s the Solution?

• the solution is revealed when Adam refused to walk with God, instead he hid… the solution is to not do what Adam did and instead to walk with God. This is the remedy for the ‘fall from grace’
• we must embody the image of God: to speak order of chaos, or to bring about the good from chaos
• if we wish to take care of ourselves properly, we must respect ourselves. But how can we when we are fallen creatures? By living and speaking the truth. Then we could once again walk with God and respect ourselves and the world.

Self-Sacrifice

• It is widely known that people are narcissistic, arrogant, and egotistical. No one denies this. This was the case in history and modern times. But nowadays there’s a new trend. People shoulder the burdens of self-disgust, self-contempt, shame, etc. So instead of inflating their own egos, they don’t value themselves at all. These same people won’t hesitate to help fellow humans or their pets but they won’t help themselves.
• Christ’s sacrifice on the cross is interpreted as the ultimate act of self-sacrifice, which is why we see the trend outlined above. But this is wrong.
  • Christ did not victimize himself in service of others. Rather, his death was an example of “how to accept finitude, betrayal, and tyranny heroically - how to walk with God despite the tragedy of self-conscious knowledge” - p. 59
• Sacrificing yourself for the highest good, or God, does not mean suffering willingly and silently at the hands of another person or organization. Don’t allow yourself to be treated like a slave.
  • “It is not virtuous to be victimized by a bully, even if that bully is oneself” - p. 59

Carl Jung on Christian Teachings

• “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “loving your neighbor as yourself” are both very famous teachings in Christianity. What did Carl Jung have to say about them?
• Firstly, neither statement has anything to do about being nice
• Secondly, both statements are equations and not injunctions
• In a relationship, you should always bargain on your own behalf. Because every relationship is better when both partners are strong. Without this negotiation, one partner will become a slave and the other a tyrant

You Do Not Own Yourself

• We do not solely belong to ourselves. How we treat ourselves impacts others too.
  • For example, suicide. Those around you are left traumatized.
• We must treat ourselves well because we are a part of God (He made us in His image). We have the semi-divine capacity for consciousness. We can make order out of chaos, and vice-versa.
  • reminds me of Wahdatul-Wujud and how EVERYTHING is God. So if everything is God including humans, by killing ourselves we are killing god

The Way Forward

• the same way you desire to help others because you feel they provide something to you (a pet, loved one, etc), is the same way that you yourself also provide to the world. YOU have some vital role to play in the destiny of the world - p. 62
  • therefore you have a moral obligation to take care of yourself
• everyone has flaws. If because of their flaws everyone stopped taking care of themselves, we’d have a messed up world. We’re human. Humans will always have flaws.
• develop a vision for yourself.
  • First you must know where you are and who you are, then you can charter the best path forward
  • define who you are and your personality. Strengthen yourself. Choose your destination.
  • Nietzsche said “he whose life has a why can bear almost any how” - p. 63
• devote your life to aiming away from hell, this will give you meaning and justify your existence.
  • this would replace your natural shame and sinful nature with the confidence of someone walking with God
  • you could begin by treating yourself as if you were someone you were responsible for helping

Other

• Our brains are very social because we as humans have always been social. Our environment was always social. Our whole reality is based on others - even when we simply try to survive and reproduce, we contend with others, their opinions of us, and their communities - p. 39

Overall Lessons from this Rule

• order, chaos, and consciousness are the 3 fundamental constituents of the world
• the proper life, the proper way of living is to follow “The Way”: one foot in order, one foot in chaos. This allows you to improve while not drowning. This is where meaning can be found
• there is evil everywhere and within everyone: there is no such thing as a true ‘safe space’
  • just face it. Control the evil within yourself.
• everyone has flaws. Don’t hate yourself or hide because of that (like Adam did).
  • instead, walk with God: embody the image of God and speak order out of chaos
  • to do this, you must respect yourself by living and speaking the truth
  • you are worthy of care just like a pet because YOU provide something to the world
• develop a vision for yourself. Figure out who you are now then decide where you want to go
• begin by treating yourself as if you were someone you were responsible for helping

Rule 3: Make Friends with People Who Want the Best for You

Analyze your Past

• Repetition Compulsion: the unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of your past.
  • when you have a low opinion of your own worth, you typically choose friends that have a troublesome past. These people believe they don’t deserve better, or they don’t want to go through the trouble of having someone better in their life (that might force them to be better)
  • having someone better in your life can help you prevent the repetition of horrors from your past
• People create their realities/worlds with the tools they have at hand. Faulty tools always produce faulty results. This is why those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. It’s partly fate, partly inability, and maybe even partly the unwillingness to learn, or the refusal to learn… sometimes even the motivated refusal to learn.

Helping Others

• Be careful when trying to help others:
  • some people don’t want help / don’t want to be saved
  • some people are not victims, rather they are tyrants. Their lowly position is a product of their own doing.
  • it’s not easy to distinguish between those truly needing help and someone wanting to exploit a willing helper
• Naïve people are more likely to help those who are struggling
  • they say to themselves “it’s only right to see the best in people!” or “the highest virtue to helping others”. They often ignore the reasons stated above
• When it’s not naivete, it’s typically narcissism that fuels the reason to help others
  • this is highlighted in Notes from Underground.
    • The underground man, a man damaged beyond repair, fueled by his own narcissism ‘helps’ the prostitute Liza. He views himself as her savior or messiah. He wasn’t helping her for the sake of being good, but rather as a way to make himself feel good.
    • But what he didn’t realize was that the help she requires goes way beyond what he can offer and he simply does not have the character to see through it all. He realizes this and rationalizes it.
    • He then reveals to her that he was just using her. He felt insulted and humiliated by his friends so he wanted to do that to someone, and Liza came in at the right time. He says to her that she merely imagined he was helping her and that it was never his intention to help her but rather humiliate and use her.
    • She is absolutely crushed by the cynicism of his words and her last hopes are gone.
  • a binge drinker may be helping a raging alcoholic to make his own drinking seem not that bad, and to prove this to himself and those around him. This is narcissism.
• When it’s neither naivete nor narcissism, the reason for associating with people who are bad for you is because it’s the easy way out
  • you are all on the same page. You all are sacrificing the future for the present. There’s an implicit contract between you all about it too so you don’t talk about it openly with them

The Psychology of Degeneration

• down is a lot easier than up, and the psychology literature proves it
• example: if you are a manager and you have one bad employee, putting them with the rest of your terrific team will actually make your entire team WORSE. Basically, degeneration is the norm, not the exception

The Danger of Helping Others

• Helping someone can be dangerous. More times than not YOU will be pulled down, not the lowly person being pulled up. This is proven by the psychology of degeneration
• Before you help someone, you need to find out why that person is in trouble.
  • You should never assume they are a victim. If someone is going through terrible things in life, in more cases than not, that person has some personal responsibility in regards to those terrible things.
  • It is very likely that the person simply has rejected the path upwards because it is difficult. This is usually the case because life is in fact difficult! Its easier to live today and push your duties to tomorrow. It’s easier to not think, not care, and not do. As they say, “that’s an issue for future me”.
• Some lowly people will also seek help not for the sake of actually getting better, but rather trying to drag their helper to their level, or at least lower. This is because this may help them feel better about themselves. Some people use their misery to make others miserable. Sometimes this is to prove a point to the world: to prove that the world is unjust.
• Carl Rogers said that you cannot help a patient until they want to help themselves.
  • This is why court-mandated therapy NEVER works.

Friendships

• If you have a friend whose friendship you wouldn’t recommend to your parent, sibling, or child, then maybe you shouldn’t have that friendship
• What about loyalty? Loyalty is negotiated. It is a reciprocal arrangement. You have no obligation to be loyal to those making the world, or themselves, worse.
• It’s not selfish to choose friends whose friendship would be good for you
• “it’s appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improve.” p. 82
• True friends punish you when they see you are heading downwards. This is exactly what everyone needs in their life.
• Don’t be afraid of letting go of friends who are jealous of you, cause that can lead to your destruction. It is like the story of Abel and Cain.
  • Cain was jealous that Abel was on God’s good side. Abel was his ideal. Abel reminded him that he ceased caring not because of life’s horrors, but because he refused to the lift the world up on his shoulders and take responsibility.
• It is NOT easier to have good friends than bad friends, bad friends are much easier to be around.
  • Having good friends around you requires strength and humility on your part, because you must have courage to stand beside them. You must protect yourself from too-uncritical compassion
  • good friends are an ideal, and ideals are difficult to stand up to. Failing to match the ideal can be a source of shame which is hard to face, but we MUST face it in order to improve

Overall Lessons from this Rule

• bad friends will make you worse than you currently are
• don’t feel guilty for letting go of friends bad for you. It’s not a good situation for either party.
• good friends are harder to have than bad friends because they hold you accountable, but that’s exactly what you need in order to become better
• choose friends who will keep you accountable and look down upon your bad habits

Rule 4: Compare Yourself to Who You Were Yesterday, Not to Who Someone Else is Today

The Necessity of Standards

• bad music is tormenting to listen to. Faulty car design can lead to car crashes. Poor building construction can lead to collapse
• “failure is the price we pay for standards, and because mediocrity has consequences both real and harsh, standards are necessary” - p. 86
• the internal critic upholds these standards. That doesn’t mean though that you should always listen to it

What is the “Internal Critic”?

• it’s the voice inside you that upholds standards.
• sometimes it’s helpful, sometimes it’s damaging.
• you shouldn’t always listen to it especially when it’s being unreasonable

Value in Actions

• There will always be people better than you. There’s no point in listening to your inner critic if it’s always putting you down.
• At the same time, value is always gonna be there. To do an action means it has value, thus meaning it can be done better or worse, which makes things meaningful. So ignoring the value of things/actions is NOT the way to go about handling your inner critic because then you’ll be forgoing meaning
  • forgoing meaning is NOT a sustainable way of living
• in other words: meaning requires value. Every action you could possibly take has value, i.e. you can do it better or worse

Success and Failure

• “success” and “failure” are very black-and-white terms. The world isn’t built like that
• whenever you do anything, you can succeed, you can fail, or you can land anywhere in the middle. In most cases, you will in fact land in the middle

Life “Games”

• Life is just a series of games. Career, athletic pursuits, side hobbies, personal projects, family, etc, are all games, where you can succeed, fail, or land somewhere in the middle.
• You may be winning some of these games and failing others. But don’t you want to win all of them?
  • NO! Winning all of them indicates you’re not doing anything difficult or challenging, therefore you’re not learning and growing, and growing is perhaps the most important form of winning.
• Some games have ‘rules’ that are just too specific to you, so comparing yourself to others is simply inappropriate. Everyone has their own life and games.
  • The colleague at work who you aspire to be may have a troubled marriage while yours is good, so who has it better? The celebrity you look up to may be a severe alcoholic and rich while you’re not an alcoholic and poor, so who has it better?

How the Inner Critic Operates

• It picks one domain, like fame, power, money, etc, and finds a person who excels in that one domain, and compares you to that person. You must understand that a persons life is not made up of only one domain, rather several or even hundreds of domains. So this is not a fair comparison. No one can excel in all domains.
  • This internal critic is dangerous. It destroys your motivation to do things because it destroys your self-confidence. Be careful around the internal critic. But do not ignore it.

The Creation of Standards

• When we are young, we don’t have the knowledge or wisdom to develop our own standards thus we compare ourselves to others (who have their own standards).
• This is fine as we grow up because having standards is crucial to development. But as you get older, your life becomes more and more personal, and less comparable to others.
• So you must develop your own standards.
  • You can do this by leaving the house of your father and confronting the chaos of your own individual Being.
  • You may still create your standards from the same culture and values as those around you but you must do this on your own so its unique to you and most applicable.
• Before you can create your own standards, you must treat yourself like a stranger then get to know yourself.
  • You must find out what you find valuable or pleasurable, how much leisure you require, how much reward you require, how to treat yourself, consult your deepest darkest desires, etc

Importance of Consulting your Resentment

• part of knowing yourself is consulting your resentment
• resentment is a powerful emotions. It’s part of the ‘underworld Trinity’
  • resentment + arrogance + deceit
• resentment means one of two things:
  • you are immature, in which cause you should quit whining
  • there is tyranny in your life, in which cause you must speak up before it consumes you
• resentment eventually turns into fantasies of revenge, your life will become poisoned, your imagination filled with thoughts of destruction

Listen to your Inner Critic

• your inner critic is like a home inspector.
  • Before you buy a new house, you hire an independent inspector to tell you the flaws of the house. Your inner critic plays this same role.
• You must negotiate with your inner critic.
  • Say, “if you help me do the dishes, I will give you some chocolate”. And after you finish the dishes, do NOT forget to feed yourself chocolate.

Incremental Improvements

• “perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak.” - p. 94
  • the point is to work cooperatively with your inner critic to make your life a bit better.
  • it’s the journey that is most meaningful
• You can set a goal like this:
  1. I want tomorrow to be a bit better than how it was this morning
  2. What could I do, and would do, to accomplish this?
  3. What small thing would I like as a reward?
• Do these small goals. Do it daily. Over time the goals will become better and build up. In 3 years you will be somewhere completely different!
• “What you aim at determines what you see.” - p. 96

Vision is Expensive

• study Daniel Simons, a cognitive psychologist performed a study involving people watching a video. In the video, two groups of people, one dressed in white the other black, were passing a ball amongst each other. The watcher had to count how many passes were made. After the video, Simons asked them how many passes were made and most got it correct. Then he asked them, “did you see the gorilla?“. One out of every two people did NOT see the gorilla.
• this is because vision is expensive. Very little of our retina is high-resolution fovea
• we save our fovea for the important stuff
• “seeing is very difficult, so you must choose what to see, and let the rest go” - p. 98

We See What We Aim At

• You may be unhappy because you are blind to what you need. Most people only see what they desire, and this may not be the thing that you need and makes you happy. Our eyes (metaphorically and physically) can only focus on so much. So when you are so focused on your desires/unneeded things, you cause yourself to be blind to all else.
  • Solution: Your value structure needs some serious retooling.
• ‘We only see what we aim at’ - p.101.
  • So if we feel like we are stuck, we must change our aim to something more broad. Simply changing your aim to “I want my life to better” is a good start. Although you may not know what ‘better’ means or how it may look, you will eventually as your mind starts presenting you with new information since your sight is now broadened

Our Desires

• Our wants, needs, and desires may conflict with each other, and with the world (those around us), so we must consciously articulate them and prioritize them, and arrange them into hierarchies
  • this allows our desires to cooperate with each other and those around us
• then our desires would be organized into values and become moral
  • these would then be known as our values and morality

Religion

• religion is about proper behavior, not science
• religions must have a dogmatic element in order to have a stable structure. This allows you to become disciplined.
  • “you cannot aim yourself at anything if you are completely undisciplined and untutored” - p. 102
• a value system, which is basically what a religion is, should point to a higher order via means of a stable structure
• even if you blindly follow religion, that is fine because at least you’d be a disciplined person, a “well-forged tool”
  • this is not enough though because there must be a vision beyond discipline and dogma
  • a tool needs a purpose

Beliefs = Your Actions

• your actions reflect your deepest beliefs
• you can only find out what you actually believe by analyzing your actions
• this is because we are simply too complex
• the teachings of religion and various cultures is the product of humans carefully watching and documenting how we act
  • these religious stories are part of our attempts to articulate what it is that we believe
• the study of religious texts like the Bible can teach us things about what we believe and how we do and should act

OT vs NT God

• OT god is more of a realist. The people of that time simply saw the world around them. If they walked down one wrong alley, their life could be over (enslaved, miserable, or even death). Is this just? Fair? Reasonable? Well is a hungry lion any of those things? What a silly question. OT god is the force of nature, just like a lion. The Israelites (the people of the OT) knew god is not someone you mess with. Even today, having passed the century of Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, and Mao, we might realize the same thing.
• NT god is more loving, forgiving, etc. In a world like ours, who would believe this? It was for this reason Nietzsche criticized Christianity, and considered the NT to be the worst literary crime in Western history. Only the most naïve of us would posit that such an all-good god rules our terrible world.
• If your aim is towards something petty, like envy if your boss (wanting his job), your world is a place of bitterness and spite. You are unhappy.
  • Imagine you decide to take responsibility and reconsider your unhappiness. You posit that it might be something under your control. Now one of your eyes is cracked open.
  • At this point, you can ask for something better. You sacrifice your pettiness, repent your envy, and open your heart.
  • Instead of cursing the darkness, you let in a little light. You decide to aim better. But not just for yourself, but also for your family, those around you, and even your enemies.
  • At this point you start to see more. The limitations that cornered you are no more. New possibilities emerge. Your life starts to improve.
• To aim better means to aim at the improvement of Being. Realizing all of these points you can take a risk. You decide that you will start treating OT god as if he could also be NT god. In other words, you decide to act as if existence might be justified by its goodness, if only you behaved properly. This declaration of faith is the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being.
  • The NT god is not necessarily what the world is, but actually what it could be when you set your aim/sights higher and better
• in summary:
  • the purpose of the NT God is not to reflect how the world is. In fact, that’s not what religion even is. As said above, religion is about proper behavior, not science.
  • The NT God is here for us to aim better, to aim for proper behaviour, to realize that there is good in the world and Being/existence is justified by its goodness if you behave properly

Pay Attention

• look around you and try to fix things. Ask yourself:
  • what is that is bothering me?
  • is that something I could fix?
  • would I actually be willing to fix it?
  • if the answer is no, look elsewhere
• sometimes simply fixing something around you is enough for the day
• “to journey happily may well be better than to arrive successfully” - p. 111
• focus on your own growth and progress. Pay attention to YOURSELF. Aim high. Once you aim properly your focus in off other people which allows you to compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today

Overall Lessons from this Rule

• listen to your internal critic and learn to negotiate with it / use it to your advantage
• aim at the highest you possible can. Where you aim is where you narrow your vision to. Everything else becomes irrelevant including other people
• analyze your surroundings, find the small things that bother you that you CAN and WANT to fix,

Rule 5: Do Not Let Your Children Do Anything That Makes You Dislike Them

Mothers and Sons

• Many moms will cater to their sons too much. Even those moms that consider themselves advocates for full gender equality do the same.
• These moms do not teach respect for women in their own sons.
  • The future spouses of such sons will hate their mothers-in-law, and they are justified in doing so.
  • This son-catering is especially true in countries like India, Pakistan, and China where sex-selective abortion is practiced
• but why sons?
  • biologically speaking if you’re trying to ensure your line continues, a son is better because he can have a lot more children
• according to Freud, preferential treatment given to sons causes them to be more attractive, well-rounded, and confident in adulthood - p. 115

Purity of Children

• are children inherently pure and untainted, and only damaged by culture and society?
• this idea was expressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau who said ‘yes’ to the above question
  • Rousseau idealized man in his pre-civilized state. This is an ideal and archetype of the Divine Child
• but this idea is wrong: humans are evil AND good. Darkness dwells in all of us including our younger selves
• usually, as we age we become better, kinder, more conscientious, emotionally stable, etc

Society Makes People Better

• contrary to what Rousseau claimed, we have evidence that society actually makes people better
• example: the Kung bushmen of Africa had a murder rate of 40 out of 100k people. When they became subject to state authority their murder rate dropped 30%
• in general it’s known hunter-gatherers were a lot more violent and murderous than us today
• Children are not inherently good or untainted as many say. Rather they need to be trained and socialized to be good.
  • Similar to dogs. Dogs must be trained to be domesticated. If not, they become wild

Paying Attention to Children

• Children need attention from their parents. If a child is neglected by their parent(s), they grow up to be very dependent. Even as an adult. And no one wants to be friends with a dependent/clingy adult.
• the lack of attention in a child’s life is called “damage by omission” rather than commission
• children need guidance. They need their parent to discipline them.
• Parents are hesitant to discipline their children because they want to be their friend. This is wrong. Your child will have many friends but only 2 parents.
  • pay attention to your children like a parent, not like a friend

Reward and Punishment

• when it comes to disciplining children, both reward and punishment should be used
• when your child does something good, reward them
  • in general, when someone does something you want them to do, reward them
• when your child does something bad, discipline them (mercifully)
  • Consistent correction of bad behaviour teaches the child the limits. The earlier (age wise) the better
• we must also not overprotect children. This is setting them up for failure.
• Either YOU will discipline your kids in a gentle manner, or they world/society will discipline them harshly. Its quite obvious which is better
• If a toddler won’t sleep, what do you do? Play his favourite TV show? NO!!! You do NOT reward bad behavior. Instead, be firm. Ask him to lay down in his bed. He obviously won’t. So lay him down by force, but gently. He will probably get back up. So do it again, and maybe keep your hand on his back to make him stay. Eventually he’ll get tired.
  • “don’t cast pearls before swine” - p. 129, i.e. don’t reward bad behaviour

Discipline

• Kids are always experimenting to see how far they can go with breaking the rules. So when a child is hitting his mom, that’s not surprising. He simply wants to dominate her and see if he can get away with it. Violence isn’t a mystery, peace is. Violence is the default. Peace is difficult. Aggression is innate and it facilitates desires.
  • Statistically speaking 2 yr olds are the most violent of people. It is simply innate. It’s not learned behaviour. They hit, kick, bite, etc. Why? To discover the limits of permissible behaviour. And of course to explore, express outrage, and to gratify their impulsive desires.
• General principles of discipline:
  1. Limit the rules
     • Too many rules will confuse and frustrate children
     • If there are too may rules, most likely some of them are bad/stupid. Bad rules make kids loose respect for the good rules, then they won’t bother following any of the rules at all
  2. Use the least force necessary to enforce those rules
     • What is the ‘least force’? You have to experiment. Even a harsh glare might be enough to put a child into their place. Sometimes a firm word.
• Children misbehave more in public because it is a new place and they want to see if their home rules apply in this new environment
• When kids are good in public, people see that and appreciate it. The kids also notice strangers appreciating their good behaviour, so the kids feel more validated. This is the kids reward - public validation

Physical Discipline

• The brain treats physical punishment the same as psychological punishment, such as social isolation (‘timeout’). It activates the same brain areas.
• when you say “no” to your child, it holds weight because you are capable of physically hurting the child. If the child doesn’t know that, they may not treat your “no” seriously, in which case they’d need to experience the physical punishment
• Hitting is a valid punishment, albeit context matters. A punch in the child’s face is never acceptable.
  • Lets say your 3 year old hits your 6 month old on the head. A ‘hard flick’ with your finger on the 3 year old would be appropriate.
• Time is also a good ‘punishment’. If your child is angry, sometimes making him sit by himself until he is calm will do the trick. Because in that case the child wins, and his anger loses.
  • i.e. a time-out. This is basically what prison is for adults. It’s a form of physical punishment

Two Parent Household

• not all families are equal. A two parent household is better in every way than a one parent household
• when one parent is worn out, the second parent can step in. That’s the primary reason for why two parent households are superior.

Parents’ Primary Duty

• The parents primary duty is to make their kids socially desirable. This provides the kids with opportunity, self-regard, and security
  • all other things including fostering creativity, ensuring happiness, boosting self-esteem, fostering individual identity, etc, all come SECOND to the primary duty
• in other words, parents have an obligation to prepare their kids for the world by socializing them appropriately. Social skills trump all else. Social desirability is the single most important thing you can give to your kids.
• If something your kid does makes you dislike them, think about how others would feel who don’t love your kids as much - they would hate your kids and might even punish them
  • don’t let the world punish your kids. You should do it in your own way first, make them socially desirable, then the world won’t punish them

Overall Lessons from this Rule

• don’t let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
  • if you dislike what they’re doing, then the world will HATE it and punish them for it
• establish clear rules for your kids. Rules are important for growth and discipline
• don’t be afraid to use physical punishment when necessary

Rule 6: Set Your House in Perfect Order Before You Criticize the World

Human Existence

• Tolstoy questioned the value of human existence. He gave four means of escaping from such thoughts:
  1. assume a childlike ignorance of the problem
  2. pursue mindless pleasures
  3. accept that life is meaningless but live anyways. Tolstoy said this is weakness. These people know life is worth ending yet they don’t have the strength to kill themselves
  4. destroy life. This is strength according to Tolstoy. Specifically to kill yourself
• what Tolstoy didn’t realize was that the 4th category can also be taken to the extreme of killing others, which is what many mass-murderers and school shooters. They hate existence itself and decide to kill people
• Why did Cain kill Abel? Sure, he hated his brother. But the main reason was to spite God. Abel was God’s favourite and God rejected Cain’s sacrifice

Perpetuating Evil

• Someone who has had evil inflicted on him can easily continue the chain of evil, but they can also become a good person.
  • For example, a bullied boy can easily become a bully or he can learn from his own abuse that it is wrong to abuse others
• Most adults who abuse their kids were abused when they were kids themselves. However, most people who were abused as children do not abuse their own children. This is an established fact
  • How does that work? Lets say a couple had 4 kids. This couple is abusing their kids. This likely means they were abused themselves as children. One of their 4 kids grows up to be an abuser to their own kids, while the other 3 become good parents.
  • If most abused kids grew up to be abusers, the majority of the world would be abusers which is clearly not the case
  • This fact is a testament to the dominance of good inside people

Solzhenitsyn and the Gulags

• Solzhenitsyn was thrown into the gulags by Stalin. Before that, he served on the front lines against Hitler’s invasions. He also got cancer shortly after entering the gulags.
  • he had a hard life, much harder than most. Did he resent existence? No.
• He asked himself: had he contributed in anyway to his current state?
  • he analyzed his life from the start. He did support the communist party at the beginning, so he’s partially to blame for Stalin, etc
• The questions he then asked himself were:
  • can I stop making such mistakes now?
  • Can I repair the damage done by my past failures now?
• Solzhenitsyn took the right approach. He put responsibility on himself rather than blame existence, Being, or God

Prepare for the Chaos

• it’s normal for disasters to happen and for chaos to ensue. This is no reason to blame reality itself
• “A hurricane is an act of God. But failure to prepare, when the necessity for preparation is well known - that’s sin.” p. 157
• we must expect disasters to occur and then plan accordingly
• when our life falls apart, it’s not because of reality or the events around us but rather because we did not pay attention, we did not prepare. God and reality is not to blame.
• In the Old Testament the Jews, when punished by God for their carelessness and not preparing for disaster, take responsibility for it. They do not criticize God or reality.

Fix Your Life

• ask yourself: are you working hard on your career? Are you fine with your family? Do you have bad habits? Are you truly carrying your responsibilities? Are you letting resentment pile up?
• you must clean up your life. Start small.
• Start with this: stop doing the things that you know are wrong.
• “Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience.” p. 158
  • don’t try going after capitalism or communism. Fix your own life first. These things are not to blame, YOU are.
• “If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?” p. 158

Overall Lessons from this Rule

• if we all strived to improve our own lives, aim high for ourselves, and so on, then the whole world might improve
• focus on your own life. Take responsibility for the tragedies that occur because YOU did not prepare for them
• start small: get rid of habits you KNOW are bad and wrong

Rule 7: Pursue What is Meaningful (Not What is Expedient)

Life is Suffering

• when Adam and Eve were cast out from Eden, God told them:
  • “unto the woman I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and they conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee”
  • “unto Adam (man)… cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground” - p. 161, Genesis 3:16-19
• this shows us that suffering is an innate piece of the human condition. We were bound to suffer since day 1 of living on earth.

Religious Stories

• these stories are fabrications of our collective imagination, wisdom, etc - p. 163
• typically action comes first, i.e. ritual. Once we realized what we were doing, we started to tell stories.
  • this is essentially how all religious stories came to be

Sacrifice

• a common theme after the fall of Man from Eden is sacrifice (Cain and Abel, Abraham, etc)
• mankind learned that God’s favour could be gained and his wrath averted via proper sacrifice
  • also, among those unwilling or unable to perform proper sacrifice, feeling of murder might creep in
• Sacrifice can be defined as: “something better might be attained in the future by giving up something of value in the present” - p. 164
• work is the one of the curses placed on man by God (Genesis story above). Work is sacrifice
  • the point of both work and sacrifice is to plan for your future so that you don’t die quickly.
• work/sacrifice = delay of gratification
  • furthermore, we discovered time, causality, and the bargaining nature of reality.
  • in other words, we discovered that proper behaviour today (controlling our impulses and desires, considering the situation of others, etc) could bring rewards in the future
    • the future is a time and place that does not exist. That’s what it means to discover time
    • our actions today dictate the outcome later. That’s what it means to discover causality
    • the above two ideas it what it means for us being able to bargain with reality
• society was built on this fundamental idea of “sacrifice”
  • the social contract was motivated by the fact that we can sacrifice to better the future. We can all store today’s work to prepare for the future. Practically this can mean we all store our crops so when the winter comes we’re all prepared together
• “The future is a judgmental father” - p. 166
  • the future is judging us today. Are we going to work and sacrifice? Or are we going to partake in pleasures and desires?
  • if we don’t work and sacrifice, the judgmental future/father will punish us by giving us a bad future.
• Delaying gratification to the future only works when civilization has stabilized itself enough to guarantee the existence of the delayed reward. If your future reward is at a large risk of being destroyed, stolen, etc, you won’t bother delaying it

The Results of Discovering Sacrifice

• we are faced with two fundamental questions as a result of the discovery of work/sacrifice:
  • what must be sacrificed?
    • a small sacrifice might be sufficient for a small problem while a large sacrifice may be required for a bigger more complex problem
  • not a single question rather a set of related ones:
    • what is implied by the idea that sacrifice will improve the future?
    • Where does that principle find its limits?
    • What would be the more effective of all possible sacrifices?
    • How good might the best possible future be if the most effective sacrifice could be made?

Cain and Abel’s Sacrifices

• the story of Cain and Abel comes right after Adam and Eve, indicating its importance
• Cain and Abel are really the first true humans since Adam and Eve were created by God and not born normally
• Abel’s sacrifices are rewarded yet Cain’s are not
• the reason for Cain’s being rejected are left intentionally vague in the Bible, which is realistic considering life is vague and doesn’t always fully explain itself
• maybe Cain was not dedicated, or his spirit wasn’t fully into it, or maybe God was just angry with him

Emergence of the Social Contract

• in the beginning we’d eat whatever we hunted there and then, for example, a mammoth
• then we realized we have lots of leftover so we saved it for later because we thought “if I save some now, I won’t be hungry later”
• then this thinking evolved into “I can’t eat all this mammoth nor can I store all of it for too long, so let me feed other people. Hopefully they remember and feed me in the future when I have no food. Furthermore, maybe the folks I’m trading with will trust me overtime and then we’ll have a trading relationship forever.”
• so “mammoth” turned into “future mammoth” which turned into “personal reputation” which led to the emergence of the social contract
• it is through the above reasoning the society stabilized itself. This stabilization allows for the reward of sacrifice to be guaranteed in the future

Sharing

• sharing is not about giving up something of value with nothing in return, rather sharing means to initiate the process of trade
• having friends is a form of trade. So you must teach your children the value of sharing to ensure they have friends
• becoming known as someone who shares, i.e. generous, is a very good reputation. This is how honesty, reliability, and generosity are formed
• honesty, reliability, and generosity = an articulated morality; the highest moral principles
  • the person with these qualities is the prototype for the good citizen and good man
  • so the idea of ‘sharing’ or ‘leftovers are a good idea’ gave us our highest moral principles

The Successful People

• over the course of thousands of years, before writing and stories, we were just acting
• we began to watch the successful people succeed amongst us
• we then drew a conclusion: the successful among us delay gratification. The successful bargain with the future
• then this idea started to make itself manifest and began to enter stories
• so this is WHY sacrifice is an idea that resonated with humans: we simply saw the successful making sacrifices and decided this must be important

The Most Valuable Sacrifice

• Something valuable, when given up, ensures future prosperity. So what is most valuable? The best animal in your flock, a valued possession, your child
• this is depicted in the story of Abraham and his son Isaac.
  • this story portrays God in a bad light: “he went too far!” some may say. But this story represents something significant about life
  • why does life impose such harsh demands on us?
• Life is hard. Things don’t go our way. We lose, sometimes greatly. That’s reality.
  • sometimes these hardships are not a result of the world but rather a result of whatever it is that is most valued to us, personally and subjectively - p. 170
  • the world is interpreted to us via our values. Sometimes we see the world in a way we don’t want. That means we must re-evaluate our values. This can mean to sacrifice that which you love the most
  • if you let things keep going the way they are, then your future is full of hardship and uncertain. This is why you must give up what is most valuable in order to ensure future prosperity
• another example of that of Mary and Jesus depicted on Michelangelo’s Pieta sculpture
  • Mary looks at her son, ruined and crucified. It’s her fault because it was through her that he was brought into the world
  • is it worth bringing Being into this world? All mothers ask themselves that. It’s an act of supreme courage if a mother voluntarily brings Being into this world because they KNOW what can happen to their offspring
• Jesus is another great example - p. 171
  • He sacrificed himself for the sake of the advancement of Being
  • God the Father simultaneously is sacrificing his son.
  • this story is archetypal. It’s the most extreme sacrifice. Nothing greater can even be imagined.

Sacrifice, Suffering, and Meaning

• The world is pain and suffering.
• Sacrifice can hold that pain in suspension. Greater sacrifices can do that even more effectively.
• The person who wants to create heaven on earth and alleviate suffering would have to make the greatest sacrifices.
  • He will need to forego expediency.
  • He will pursue the path of ultimate meaning.
  • This is how he brings salvation to the ever-desperate world. Just like Jesus.
• “If you live properly, fully, you can discover meaning so profound that it protects you even from the fear of death” - p. 173
  • this is in relation to the story of Socrates, p. 172-173

Consequences of the Fall

• there were two consequences of the fall from Eden
  1. a life full of work to prepare for the future, to prolong life, prevent disease and death, etc. This is why we sacrifice. This is what has been discussed in-depth so far
  2. we were granted (or cursed by) the knowledge of Good and Evil

Knowledge of Good and Evil

• what does it mean to have the knowledge of good and evil?
• it means this: once you become aware that you are vulnerable, you also know that others are vulnerable too and you learn about the nature of vulnerability itself.
  • you know what pain is and how it feels, same with all other negative emotions. Since you know how these emotions are produced within you, you also know how to produce them in others, i.e. you know how to hurt and torment others
• this is reflected in Cain killing his brother Abel

Rejected Sacrifice Leads to Evil

• Cain’s sacrifice is rejected, causing him to become bitter, vengeful, and angry - p. 175
  • his sacrifice being rejected means BOTH his present and future are shattered. He delayed gratification but lost his future too.
  • what’s even worse is that Cain DID sacrifice, he at least tried. Yet it was still rejected. At least if you never tried to begin with you can blame yourself for your future being lost.
• Cain, being self-conscious as a result of having the knowledge of good and evil, decides to kill his brother, his ideal.
• This is when evil begins. Cain’s descendants commit even more evil
• human evil has the ability to break even the strongest of spirits
  • while tragedy can be overcome, human evil can absolutely destroy you
• what motivates this evil? Continually rejected sacrifices. Just like with Cain.
• Abel is the archetypally incomplete hero. He wasn’t able to overcome human evil
• so how do we defeat human evil? This is the problem of evil that took humanity a very long time to find somewhat a solution for.
  • we can look at the story of Christ and Satan for an example of the hero defeating evil

Facing Evil

• ‘No tree can grow to Heaven, unless its roots reach down to Hell.’ - Carl Yung, p.180 ^12c4af
  • Meaning to reach enlightenment you must experience ‘hell’. In other words, if you want go higher/become enlightened, you must be willing to face evil
• Christ in the desert facing Satan for 40 days portrays this act of facing evil
• The First Temptation: the bread
  • Satan tempts Jesus to quell his hunger be turning rocks into bread.
  • Jesus responds: “one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” - p. 181
  • this means that bread means little to the one who sold his soul
  • “The beneficence of the world manifests itself to those who live properly.” p. 182
  • when you live a moral life, sustenance will come your way
• The Second Temptation: the cliff
  • Satan tells Jesus to throw himself off the cliff
  • Jesus responds: “do not put the Lord your God to the test”
  • God saving the hero is the cheapest trick in the playbook.
  • the hero needs to be responsible for himself. He needs to save himself
  • if Jesus did ask God to save him, that would only be a solution to him but not to anyone else because the rest of us can’t simply jump off a cliff and ask God to save us. Jesus is God’s son afterall
• The Third Temptation: power and control
  • Satan tempts Jesus with worldly power and control
  • this is the highest of temptations because it allows easy access to all other temptations and desires

Science as an Answer to Suffering

• Jung said that Europeans pursued the development of science (to investigate the material world) after they concluded that Christianity has failed to sufficiently address the problem of suffering in the present day
• first it was alchemy: the alchemists tried to find that which would free humanity from early pain and limitations

Christianity

• Christianity accomplished one major thing that no other before it did: it put all humans, slave and kings alike, on the same moral playing field. Kings no longer were ‘special’ before God, everyone was equal in God’s eyes - p. 186
  • The desire to enslave and dominate is ‘natural’ to humans throughout history. It was Christianity that stopped it - p. 187
• Christianity has its problems but the society it replaced had even greater problems
  • it stopped infanticide, gave women rights, gave enemies rights, etc
• Nietzsche’s biggest issue with Christianity was that it removed personal moral obligation from Christians - p. 189
  • He said that Paul, and later Martin Luther pushed the idea that Jesus died for everyone’s sins and redeemed us. And now there is little to no motivation for personal moral obligation. He said Paul and Luther have watered down the duty of the imitation of Christ, which all Christians should be doing
• Nietzsche further said that Christians were too busy with the hereafter, afterall, salvation was reserved for the hereafter, a common Christian belief
  • this meant that Christians didn’t care about earthly life and earthly suffering. This is why people turned away from religion and adopted scientific approaches to answer these questions.

The Grand Inquisitor

• Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov wrote about the Grand Inquisitor:
  • Jesus returns to the world during the Spanish Inquisition
  • he heals the sick and does what he does.
  • the authorities arrest him for causing a ruckus and say he’s a threat to the Church
  • the grand inquisitor tells Christ that the burden he gave the people, the burden of existence in faith and truth, was simply too much to bear
  • The church instead lifted that burden and gave the people the merciful escape of faith and the afterlife
  • as the inquisitor turns to leave, leaving Christ in the cell to be executed, Christ kisses him. The inquisitor leaves the cell door open so Christ could escape.
• Dostoevsky, himself a devout Christian, knew Christianity had no ground to stand on against the atheist rational faculty. That said, he did not retreat from his views. Instead, he placed action above words
• what did Jesus do after the inquisitor went on a verbal tirade against him? He kissed him. He didn’t blame him for anything. He let his action speak for him. That is what convinced the inquisitor to leave the door open for Jesus.

Dogma and Discipline

• the dogmatic structure of Christianity and the church was necessary, even Nietzsche agreed to that
• “a long period of unfreedom - adherence to a singular interpretive structure - is necessary for the development of a free mind” - p. 192-193
• the same way a father must impose limits on his son, so did the church impose limits on man
• the dogma is now dead though in modern times in the west. God is dead along with it as Nietzsche famously said. What did it leave behind?
  • Nihilism
  • the susceptibility to new, totalizing, ‘utopian’ ideas (communism, fascism, etc)
• both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky predicted the rise of communism and fascism

Meaning as the Higher Good

• it all starts with YOU: it’s not the world that’s at fault, it’s you
• you’ve failed to make the mark or hit the target. You’ve sinned. This is your contribution to the evil in the world. Afterall, we all have the capacity for evil
• so what must we do?
  • Don’t lie. Lying leads to hell. The lies of the 20th century led to Nazi and Communist states that killed millions
  • Fix what you can fix
  • Pay attention
  • Aim up
  • Don’t be arrogant in your knowledge
  • Become aware of your own insufficiency
  • Act in a manner that will alleviate the most pain and suffering
• ‘If the value structure is aimed at the betterment of Being, the meaning revealed will be life-sustaining.’ p.199
  • i.e. if your aiming for the highest good, or at least aiming up, you will be on a path that is meaningful to you and your life and your Being. Life will be worth living.
• meaning is the balance between the chaos of transformation and possibility on the one hand, and the discipline of pristine order on the other, whose purpose is to produce out of the attendant chaos a new order that will be even more immaculate, and capable of bringing forth a still more balanced and productive chaos and order - p. 201

Overall Lessons from this Rule

• always keep the future in mind: delay gratification, perform ‘sacrifices’ for the betterment of the future
• the hero takes responsibility for himself, he doesn’t rely on others or God to save him
• a lot of the main lessons are in the heading above (meaning as the higher good)

Rule 8: Tell the Truth, or at Least, Don’t Lie

Manipulation

• To ‘act politically’ is essentially just a nice way of saying ‘manipulate’.
  • Sales people, marketers, psychopaths, and university students all ‘act politically’ to get what they want, whether that is to make a customer buy their product, or please their professor in order to get a better grade
• this type of speech is what people employ to bring about some intended end or desire, such as:
  • imposing my ideological beliefs
  • to prove that I’m right
  • to appear competent
  • to avoid responsibility
  • to ensure everyone likes me
  • to appear as the sainted one
• these above are all examples of what Adler called “life-lies”
• life-lie = manipulating reality with perception, thought, and action, so that only some narrowly desired and pre-defined outcome is allowed to exist
• what’s the issue with this?
  • a life-lie is based on the presumption that your current knowledge is enough to define what is good in the future, example, what a good goal for your future self is. In reality, you are ever-changing. You develop new goals along the journey.
• a life-lie in action - p. 210:
  • a man says his vision, formulated by his younger self was: “I see myself retired drinking margaritas on the beach”
  • this is not a plan, it’s a travel poster. It’s not a sustainable approach to life
• a particularly bad form of a life-lie is that based on avoidance or hiding

Don’t Hide

• there are some who do the right things, but they hide. This is a life-lie. They hide as a way to avoid some responsibility. They becomes a tool or a slave for others to exploit.
• Just cause you hide doesn’t mean the ills of life don’t come after you
  • you’ll still die, you can still get sick, you must still pay taxes, etc
• ‘If you will not reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself’ p.212
  • Studies show that when you place yourself in a new situation, new genes in the central nervous system turn on which create new proteins. These proteins are used for new structures in the brain.
  • this is why you must NOT hide
• you must stand up for yourself. Say NO when you must say no.
  • why did the gulag guards do what they did? Because they never practiced saying NO when it needed to be said. They only ever said yes because they were fearful and hiding

Lying

• If you say untrue things, and act out a lie, you weaken your character. If you have a weak character, then at the first sight of adversity you will be crushed.
• you’ll try to hide, like you always were, but you’ll find there’s no place to hide
• lying corrupts the soul. Not only is this a teaching in practically all religions, but people like Jung, Freud, and Adler also agreed - p. 215

Inauthenticity

• an inauthentic person continues to perceive and act in ways his own experience has demonstrated false
• An authentic person says: “did what I want happen? No. Then my aim or methods were wrong. I have something to learn.
• An inauthentic person says: “did what I want happen? No. The the world is unfair. People are too jealous and stupid to understand. It’s someone or something else’s fault.”
  • take it one step farther and you might say “they need to be stopped, or hurt, or destroyed”
• “the sins of the inauthentic individual compound and corrupt the state” - p. 214
• both Solzhenitsyn and Viktor Frankl wrote about this. It was the inauthentic individuals - the one who refused to stand up or speak out against the sins around them and the corruption in institutions - they are the problem.
• When your boss introduces a new rule that you are not ok with, what do you do? Do you stand up against it? Or keep silent?
  • If you do the latter, you are only contributing to bureaucratic injustice and tyranny. You are becoming less courageous.
  • But if you stand up against it, then others who are also afraid will stand with you. This is the meaning of authenticity

Reason

• your reason is not a faculty but a personality
• it has its own wants, desires, weaknesses etc
• reason falls in love with itself where it raises itself to the highest degree. It worships it.
• Lucifer is the embodiment of reason taken to the extreme
• your reason becomes totalitarian-like. It says: “you must rely on faith in what you already know”
  • in reality, “what saves is the willingness to learn from what you don’t know” - p. 218
  • that means having faith in the possibility of human transformation
  • that means having faith in the sacrifice of the current self for the betterment of the future self
• totalitarians treat their ambition as the highest truth, the ideal. It becomes God for them - p. 224-225

Becoming Better

• You can turn ‘death’ into a rebirth. If something terrible happens, its ok to feel destroyed, but try to turn that suffering into becoming better
• The better ambitions have to do with improving your character and ability, not your status and power. Status can go away (especially if you’re in a new place). But character tends to stick around, even in a new place

Truth

• Jesus said “I came not to send peace, but a sword”
• the truth is a sword. Sometime the truth can be tough. Sometimes it can cause conflict
• example: your parents want you to be an engineer so you take an engineering degree in University. You hate it. Eventually you must decide whether to continue to leave
  • leaving the degree will cause conflict with your parents. But at least you’d be true to yourself
• the closer to your truth you live, the more you’ll learn about yourself. The clearer your vision will become.
• truth is personal to you - p. 230
  • apprehend your personal truth and articulate it carefully to yourself and others
• if your life isn’t what it should be, try telling the truth
• In paradise everyone tells the truth, that’s what makes it paradise

Goal Setting

• everyone needs specific concrete goals
• all goals must be subordinate to a higher meta-goal
  • something like: live in truth. Live in your truth. Don’t lie to yourself and others

The Big Lie

• Hitler said this himself that society only falls for the ‘big lies’ - p. 227
• Society is more vulnerable to ‘big lies’ rather than small lies. People simply cannot imagine that the government or another entity would conjure up such a large lie
• Big lies are composed of smaller lies.

Why Not Lie?

• if lying lets us get our way, why not do it?
• things fall apart. We all know this all too well
• to keep the ‘machine’ running smoothly, we must keep our open and be attentive. This means not lying
  • the opposite is to pretend everything is all right and fall to make the necessary repairs. Then we’d curse fate when the machine breaks
• it’s a dangerous line of thinking to say that people can fall for lies, therefore I can tell lies and get away with it. At this point you believe that “Being itself is susceptible to my manipulations and therefore deserves no respect” - p. 229
  • reminds me of Ibn Sabbah’s ideology in Alamut. He said I can trick others, so why not! Morality doesn’t exist. So why respect Being?

Overall Lessons from this Rule

• Ask yourself, did what you want happen? If no, then you have to reflect and analyze your methods and procedures and fix them.
  • Unfortunately, when some people ask themselves that question, they blame the world for it not happening. They say ‘the world is unfair’.
• don’t lie and don’t contribute to the ‘big lies’ of society
• don’t hide, instead face problems as they come. Stand up for yourself. This is the best way to learn more about yourself

Rule 9: Assume that the Person you are Listening to Might Know Something you Don’t

• Listening to other people’s problems might help you fix yours

Memory

• you cannot objectively recall past events. You are simply NOT an objective observer.
• The purpose of memory is not to remember the past (because it sucks at this), but rather to prevent the same past mistakes from happening again

Thinking

• True thinking is listening to yourself.
• To think, you have to be at least 2 people at the same time, then you have to let those people disagree.
• Thinking is an internal dialogue between 2 or more different views of the world. True thinking requires being a good speaker and a good listener
• true thinking involves conflict so you must be able to tolerate that
  • conflict involves negotiation and compromise

Listening

• listening requires courage because it can be a transformative process
  • you step into the speaker’s shoes. You see life the way they see life. You might be influenced by their talking/ideas.
• A good way to have a dispute/debate:
  • Listen to your interlocutor. Once he’s done, summarize what he said and let him give you corrections if any. Then proceed to make your points
• Why do most people have trouble listening?
  • Cause it requires courage. Listening to someone else’s ideas/struggles/story can potentially alter your own life or influence it in some way.
  • Being changed is one of the fears most people have

Talking

• talking aloud to a listening audience can help organize your thoughts and brain
• “it takes a village to organize a mind” - p. 250
• if someone doesn’t have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds
  • just like a hoarder, they cannot unclutter themselves
• “we outsource the problem of our sanity” - p. 250
• imagine you have a major problem but no one to talk about it with. This often will not be healthy for you. You’ll spiral. Your thoughts will be jumbled up in your mind

Public Speaking / Lectures

• a lecture is also a conversation. You are observing your audience’s facial expressions, their nods, etc
• you should view public speaking as speaking directly to individuals rather than a crowd
  • no one likes talking to crowd where they are many judgmental eyes on you
  • instead, look to individuals, talk to them, observe their reactions. Then move on to the next person in the audience

The Best Conversation

• the best type of conversation is where you are both listening to each other, actively learning from each other, destroying past presuppositions and forming new knowledge and wisdom
• this conversation can only happen when you assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
• On Socrates, the Delphic Oracle described him as “the wisest living man because he knew that what he knew was nothing” - p. 256

Overall Lessons from this Rule

• listen to others. Don’t be afraid of having your own opinions and ideas changed or transformed. This is fundamentally what helps us grow in life. We NEED this.

Rule 10: Be Precise in Your Speech

Perception

• We don’t see objects and things, rather we see tools and obstacles
  • Ex: we see apples because we can eat them. We don’t see them as is
• when we look at the world, we perceive only what is enough for our plans and actions to work for us to get by
  • this helps us reduce the complexity of the world around us
• We must be precise in our aim, otherwise we will drown in the complexity of the world

Extensions of Ourselves

• when we pick up a screwdriver, it becomes an extension of our body
  • we use it to perform various actions, to ‘explore the world’.
  • it adds reach to our arm length
• when we drive a car, it becomes an extension of our body
  • when someone slaps our car we take it personally
• sports fans take the victories and defeats of their team very personally. The sport teams basically becomes themselves
  • study it’s been shown that the wins and loses of sports teams raises and lowers the testosterone of their fans watching the game
• Patriotism, more specifically willingness to die for your country, does not come from our innate aggression, rather it comes from our sociability and willingness to cooperate.
  • If we can become our country/nation, cooperation comes easily to us, by drawing from the biological mechanisms that we innately have to protect our own bodies
  • I.e. a nation is one body, so you want to protect it like you protect yourself

The World “Misbehaves”

• the world is quite chaotic and our perceptions only appear sufficient when everything goes to plan
• when the plan is disrupted or the world “misbehaves”, that is when all hell breaks loose
• a car is a thing but we perceive it simply as “a thing that takes me from A to B”
  • we don’t bother looking into the intricate complexities of a car, how it works, the engine, etc
  • when the car breaks down, we are forced to perceive it differently, it is now a complex series of parts that combined take us from A to B
  • the breaking down of the car has psychological consequences. It puts us into the realm of chaos. It destroys our peace of mind. We must take it to the mechanic to fix. In one sense the mechanic acts as our psychologist
• when the car breaks down, or any plan is disrupted, or the world misbehaves, we are forced to face the limitations of perceptions
  • Am I too old to drive now?
  • Are the roads too dangerous?
  • Am I just too incompetent? Have I always been incompetent?
  • in other words, the complex world that was ALWAYS there hiding, now reveals itself to us. The walled garden that we inhabit reveals its hidden but ever-present serpents

Chaos Creeps in When the World Misbehaves

• when things break down, that which you ignored previously rush in. This is chaos.
• When your spouse cheats on you, its a lot worse than people think. Not only do you realize that your spouse is a ‘stranger’ (i.e. who you thought they were is not who they actually are), but YOU yourself are also a stranger. You previously thought you were loved, respected, cared for, valued, etc, but not anymore. And then you also realize, how long was I not loved, respected, valued, etc? Was it weeks? months? years? This realization destroys you
  • Simultaneously, your past, present, and future all fall into chaos.
    • Past, because you don’t know how long this infidelity was going on for.
    • Present, because your life is crumbling before your eyes at the moment.
    • Future, because where the hell do you go from here? Any plans you had are now void.
  • Doesn’t just apply to cheating, but even divorce or near divorce

Chaos Grows in the Dark

• Do not let things get too big. Chaos emerges bit by bit.
• Most people will just sweep the chaos under the rug to avoid addressing it, because addressing it may require you to talk about terrible emotions like resentment, terror, despair, jealousy, etc, and most people just want to keep the peace.
  • Eventually, all the skeletons from the closet burst out like Noah’s flood, and there is no ark because no one built one
• Sins of Omission = you “missed the mark” because you did NOT do something
  • when you ignore chaos, you are committing sins of omission
• [[Effective Communication#Communication Between Couples[ 2]]

Livings Things Require Attention

• living things due without the proper care and attention
• a relationship is a living thing. Both of you are responsible for keeping it alive.

Things Articulated Become Visible

• people don’t like to face their problems, whether personal, relationship, or otherwise, because once they face it, they have to address it.
  • Addressing it means clarifying and articulating it.
  • Articulating it means the problem becomes visible
• a visible problem is no longer in the fog. It’s not hiding. It’s no longer a serpent lurking in Eden but rather a serpent that is out and ready to cause chaos.
  • a visible problem IS chaos
• as we know very well by now, no one likes to confront chaos. This is fundamentally why people don’t address problems in their life, including relationship problems

Ignoring the Problem

• so why not ignore the problem and face it later?
• as mentioned earlier, chaos and problems grow, bit by bit
• it’s better to address the problem while it is still manageable
• if you wait too long, the problem becomes too big, too big to handle, and you’ll get hurt, sometimes severely
• also when you wait for the problem to become large, the problem will come to you on its own terms, meaning you will not be adequately prepared. Instead, you should address the problem on your own terms so you can be prepared.

Creating Order out of Chaos

• when things fall out of place, i.e. chaos emerges, using your precise word you can create order out of the chaos
  • this is how God created the universe (Genesis story)
• we can use our speech to negotiate to create order or solve problems
• speaking carelessly or imprecisely leads to more confusion and things won’t improve that way

Fearing our Issues

• Many times, we refuse to address our issues/tragedies because of fear of what they may truly be.
• example: we may be in a dark forest and hear a sound, but refuse to look back due to fear. So in our imagination we think it’s a lion, and continue to live in fear. If we just take the step of looking behind us, we might find out it was only a raccoon. Now, it could still be a lion but at least now you know. It is NOT unknown anymore so you can better prepare for it
• This applies to relationships too. You need to address issues openly because in your head you may be thinking a certain issue is a lot bigger than it actually is. When you address it, you may find out that it wasn’t a big issue to begin with. Even if it was a big issue, well at least now you know so you and your partner can work on fixing it

Overall Lessons from this Rule

• If you’re not specific, you are lost. You are all over the place. If you want to go from point A to B you must be at A. But if you’re not specific/precise you cannot even get to point A.
  • To aim higher, to build a better life, you must be precise with your speech, desires, relationships, etc.
• “say what you mean, so that you can find out what you mean. Act out what you say, so you can find out what happens. Then pay attention. Note your errors. Articulate them. Strive to correct them. That is how you discover the meaning of your life.” - p. 282
  • i.e. live life. Reflect on your actions. That is how you can find out the meaning of your life.
• a major topic of this rule is about effective communication in a relationship. Notes added here:
  • [[Effective Communication#Communication Between Couples[ 2]]
• be sure to confront the problem BEFORE it becomes too large to handle
  • one thing JP did not mention was that small problems can sometimes go away on their own and trying to actively fix it yourself might make it worse
  • this is discussed here: Law 36 Disdain Things You Cannot Have Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge

Rule 11: Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding

Safety, Risk, and Challenges

• Competence makes people safe. Simply wearing protective equipment won’t make you safe in the long run as it won’t make you competent

• People, including kids, need a good amount of risk/danger. If you remove the playgrounds (which they did in Toronto one year), the kids started playing on the roof of the school. It’s either that or play in the dirt which has no risk at all, so most kids opt for the roof (which is obvi more dangerous than a playground)

• People of all ages need challenge so they can continue to develop

• people prefer to Live on the Edge (i.e. in between chaos and order)

  • comfortable enough where they can draw from previous experience, but also confronting new challenges and risks

• Some Socialists say we stand up for the poor. But deep down inside, they simply hate the rich. They are claiming a noble cause, but really it is just resentment and jealousy

• “if you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences - and infer the motivation.” - Jung, pg 289-290

  • This may not always be accurate, but something to keep in mind

The Judges of the Human Race

• Some people think they are the ‘judge of the human race’. These are the people who say humans are bad, not worth to live, etc.
  • Some intellectuals even hold this idea (like the professor at the Ted X talk). And some crazies like the columbine shooters also hold this opinion
  • a lot of mass murderers shoot themselves right after their shooting spree. It’s because they genuinely believe Being is bad. They cannot even justify their own existence
• a lot of left wing people, the same people who fight against prejudice, are the same people who are first to denounce humanity and claim we need less people on earth

Gender

• Gender is not a social construct. In countries where gender equality is very present, like the Scandinavian countries, gender differences appear a lot more than in other countries
• girls can win by winning in their own hierarchy or in the boys’ hierarchy. For boys, they can only win by winning in their own hierarchy
  • imagine if a boy faces a girl in some sport. If he wins, he’s pathetic. If he loses, he’s even more pathetic
  • for a girl, it’s okay if she loses to a boy. If she wins, that’s even better and is a remarkable achievement
• Universities are becoming a girls game. Women make up more than 50% of the student population in over 2/3 of the disciplines/faculties
  • if you remove the STEM fields, the data are more in favour to women (STEM is still dominated by men)
  • 80% of students majoring in healthcare, public admin, psychology, and education, which comprise 1/4 of all degrees, are female
  • each year the metrics become increasingly in the female favour
  • this is not good news for men, but it’s not bad news for women too

Marriage

• over the last few decades, we can see from polls and research that men have wanted marriage less and less
• at the same time, women are becoming increasingly more educated while for men it’s decreasing
• we have a marriage crisis. If women are more successful (because they get degrees and get better careers), and only only marry up the hierarchy, there isn’t enough men to marry them
  • at the same time, men often don’t marry up the hierarchy.
• because of these problems, it seems marriage is reserved for the rich
  • only rich men can afford to get married
• why would the “rich elite” impose on themselves an apparently “oppressively” patriarchal system/practice such as marriage?

Culture and Hierarchies

• Culture is tyrannical, that is inherent. But that doesn’t mean culture should be rejected. On the one hand culture takes, but on the other it gives.
• Any hierarchy creates winners and losers. So the losers would feel oppressed obviously. There’s simply no doing away with oppression
• Hierarchies are formed in pursuit of any valued goal. There are those who are good at attaining it, and those who are bad
  • the pursuit of such goals are also what gives life meaning
  • absolute equality (so there’s no winners and losers) is impossible. To do this we must sacrifice value itself (i.e. to remove hierarchies). Then there would be nothing worth living for
• a well structured culture/hierarchy allows for many players to win in many different fashions

Communism

• for many communist thinkers, hierarchies are oppressive
• hierarchical structures include only those who benefit from it while it excludes everyone else
• even language is oppressive.
  • ex: there are “women” only because men gain from excluding them - p. 310
  • “gender is a social construct” is a common Marxist belief
• they say that power is the end-all be-all. Power is the primary motivation for human action
• while it’s true that primary is a motivation for human action, it is not THE primary motivation
  • what the communists do is considered a single cause interpretation, which is quite dangerous.
• communists also believe “everything is interpretation” and we can never know everything
  • the problem here is that not every interpretation is equally valid
  • some interpretations hurt you or others, or are bad for society
• the communist belief can be summed up as: “all hierarchies are based on power and aimed at exclusion” - p. 313

Power or Competence

• the communists like to believe power is the main root of hierarchies, but is that really the case?
• in reality, in most functioning societies, it is competence that is the prime determiner of status
• we know this because the most valid predictor of long-term success in western countries is intelligence measured by IQ tests or cognitive ability and conscientiousness

Group Identity

• another communist/Marxist belief is that everything is based on groups
• examples:
  • black women should make as much as white woman
  • “equal pay for equal work” type of arguments
• the problem is, who determines these groups?
  • example, the US National Institute of Health recognizes American Indian, Asian, Black, White, Hawaiian, etc, as groups
  • who is part of “American Indian”? There are hundreds of tribes. Some make a lot more money than others.
• the underlying problem is that people are simply too unique. Group membership cannot capture that variability
  • “group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual” - p. 316

Impact of Culture

• study show that identical twins who are raised in different cultures, where one is a lot richer than the other, have a 15 point difference in IQ (that is the difference between the average high schooler and college student)
• this means that with enough pressure we could minimize the innate differences between girls and boys. At least that’s what the Marxists would claim.
• it doesn’t matter if boys CHOOSE xyz and girls CHOOSE xyz, if such choices produce gender-unequal outcomes it must be a consequence of cultural bias/cultural upbringing
• therefore retraining is required to get rid of such differences.
  • what are the limits to such retraining? Should we go as far as Mao’s murderous revolution? This is fundamentally the problem with communism and Marxism. How far are you really willing to go to radically alter culture?

Aggression is Needed

• another common Marxist belief is that boys need to be socialized in a similar way as girls have been, and this will encourage socially positive qualities such as tenderness, sensitivity to feelings, etc, which would achieve the objective of reducing aggression
• this is wrong for many reasons. The main reason: aggressions is not merely learned
  • The Marxists are under the impression that aggression is learned behaviour. This isn’t true
• Aggression is as fundamental to humans as hunger, thirst, and sexual desire
  • hunger & thirst = without it we’d die
  • sexual desire = without it our species would cease to exist
• Aggression is triggered in the same brain areas as hunger, thirst, and sexual desire - p. 318
• obviously too much aggression is not good, so most children, especially boys, are socialized in childhood.
  • this doesn’t mean they are trained to act like girls, rather they are taught how to turn their aggression into a more socially acceptable outlet, like determination and ambition
• socialization is important to control aggression because aggressive boys are more likely to grow up to be criminals, they will be socially ostracized, rejected but their peers, become outcasts, etc
• that said, aggression is still very important to humans. It’s necessary for self-protection. Aggressive drive is very valuable. This is why when Marxists say they want to get rid of it they are committing a grave mistake
• too little aggression is a big issue. Psychologists, when helping those with too little aggression, use something called “assertiveness training”
  • these people typically exhibit more feminine traits of agreeableness (politeness, compassion) and neuroticism (anxiety, emotional pain)
• those with too little aggression typically have trouble at their work or with their families
  • ex: they don’t stand up for themselves at work, they don’t confront issues with their partner

Causes of Resentment

• the people who have too little aggression are typically the ones who become resentful
  • they let others walk on them, use them, abuse them
• 2 major reasons for resentment
  1. Being taken advantage of (or allowing yourself to be taken advantage of)
  2. Whiny refusal to adopt responsibility and grow up
• When you feel resentment starting to creep in, you must confront it. This means speaking up for yourself if your being taken advantage of or confronting the problem bothering you

Dealing with Resentment

• come to the conflict with a solution, not just a problem
• assume ignorance, not malevolence
• a bad attitude to have is “if they loved me, they would know what to do or what I want”
  • NO ONE knows what you want, not even you!
• first: you must understand what you want from the other person
• second: make it as small and as reasonable as possible, but also something that fulfills your request and gets rid of your resentment

The Oedipal and Terrible Mother

Transclude of Archetypes#the-oedipal-mother--the-terrible-mother

Consciousness is that Which Rescues

Transclude of Archetypes#consciousness-saves

Dependent Men

• Wicked women produce dependent sons (the Terrible Mother archetype)
  • for men to be dependent is the worse thing. Women do not want to marry dependent men. Women already need to take care of their own kids. They don’t want to have to take care of a grown man too
• “awake and conscious women want an awake and conscious partner” - p. 330
  • that’s why Eve made Adam eat from the tree. She couldn’t leave him to be unconscious
• Women want men, not boys, because they want someone to contend with and to grapple with. If women are smart, they want someone smarter. If they are tough, they want someone tougher
• ‘If you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of’ p. 332

Overall Lessons from this Rule

• all people including kids need a good amount of danger and challenge in order to grow
  • we all must strive to Live on the Edge
• don’t attempt to rid yourself of your innate aggression, nor should you try eliminating this aggression in your children, especially male
  • instead, put that aggression into socially acceptable things like determination and ambition
• when you feel resentful, ask yourself:
  • Am I being taken advantage of? If so, CONFRONT that which is bothering you or taking advantage of you
  • Am I just being a whiny childish person? If so, GROW UP

Rule 12: Pet a Cat When you Encounter One on the Street

• study showed when a group of people were placed in 2 arbitrary groups and asked to distribute money, they tended to distribute the money to fellow group members
  • no matter how the groups were divided, the same results were produced
  • Why? People stick to their own group because they want to be protected and organized. And of course they will favor it if they want it to thrive. No one wants to be part of the losing group.

The Value of Limitation

• What can be truly loved about a person is inseparable from their limitations
  • Meaning, if you have a child, and you wish to turn him into a 20 foot steel robot (this would make him invincible of all harms), it would seize being your child.
• existence and limitation are linked. Imagine a being that is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. What is the one thing they lack? Limitation.
  • Without limitation, there is no story, there is no Being (a limitless being is ‘nothing’).
  • Maybe this is why God created man? To create Being in the world.
• People require limitations, even in their pop culture.
  • For example, when superman came out people were hooked, but as time went by he become even more powerful without any weaknesses. People got bored (the franchise almost died). So the creators introduced kryptonite as his weakness, made the sun his power source (weak without it), and a few other weaknesses and limitations. Then he started getting popular again.
  • A superhero who can do anything and has no limitations is nothing (as stated above). This hero would have no Being, thus being nothing. Why no Being? Because he has nothing to strive against (he can demolish anything that comes near), so he can’t be admirable.
• Why does Being require limitations? Because Being requires ‘becoming’, i.e. to become something more or something different. And you need limitation to evolve. If you are already at the top, you can’t get any higher.

Dealing with Difficulty

• How to manage difficult times or a difficult event?
  • set aside some time every day to think about them. Don’t think about them outside this time because you must conserve your energy. You’re in a war, not a battle.
  • Don’t think about them in the evening cause then you won’t be able to sleep
  • Make use of the good times. When times are good, plan your life for the next month, the next year, and next decade.
  • Put the things you control in order. Repair what is in disorder
  • Think good/highly of Being. If you lose hope in Being, you will be destroyed completely

Dogs and Cats

• dogs are like people: “mans best friend”
  • they are social, hierarchical and domesticated fully
  • they enjoy attention and reward it with loyalty and love
• Cats are a wonder of Being. They are the opposite of dogs
  • they are semi-domesticated.
  • they may not like you. Maybe they will.
  • they don’t do tricks for you
• if you see a cat and try to call it over, it may run away, ignore you, or come to you
  • it’s arbitrary because that’s just how cats are
  • it’s a little win when it does come to you and allows you to pet it
• these types of small opportunities can present themselves many days a day as long as you’re paying attention
  • maybe you’ll see a smiling little girl dancing on the street out of happiness
  • maybe you’ll receive an exceptionally good cup of coffee at a local café
  • maybe you can take a few minutes to do some little ridiculous thing that takes your mind off stressful things or suffering
  • or maybe you’ll be on a walk with your head spinning from suffering and stress and a cat will walk up to you and in that moment you’ll be reminded “that the wonder of Being might make up for the ineradicable suffering that accompanies it” - p. 352
  • pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

Overall Lessons from this Rule

• life is suffering, that is undeniable. But “Being” makes up for it. Suffering is REQUIRED for Being to begin with.
• you must make a mentality shift:
  • we suffer, we have limitations, we make mistakes. This is part of what makes us HUMAN. This is what makes us BEINGS.

Coda

• “aim for paradise, and concentrate on today” - p. 359
  • aim as high as you can, but don’t live in the future. Don’t dwell on the past either. Instead, only focus on your present, but don’t loose sight of your aim
• “Orient yourself properly. Then - and only then - concentrate on the day” - p. 359
  • deciding your aim comes first
  • that doesn’t mean you need to know specifically what your goal or destination is. You only need a general idea, a “macro-aim”. Then along the journey you can figure out the rest
• “there is no enlightened one. Proper Being is process, not a state; a journey, not a destination”

Main Idea of the Book

These 12 rules provide practical and theoretical guidance on how to live the best life possible.

Footnotes

1. : the desire to be judged is inherent in human nature. Why is religion so popular? Judgement is a key part of religion. Judgement by failing to achieve the ideal, and therefore feeling shame is so badly desired by us because it is what helps us to improve our lives. I wrote about this: Part One Simplicity ↩