Jordan Peterson

Jordan B. Peterson
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
(Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018)

"Chaos and order are two of the most fundamental elements of lived experience--two of the most basic subdivisions of Being itself." 12 Rules for Life, at 38 [Order and chaos are the "primal constituents" of our "world of experience." Id. at 35]

"Everyone understands order and chaos, world and underworld . . . . We all have a palpable sense of the chaos lurking under everything familiar. [We understand the] eternal landscapes of known and unknown, world and underworld. We've all been in both places, many times; sometimes by happenstance, sometimes by choice.

Many things begin to fall into place when you begin to consciously understand the world in this manner. . . . This is the kind of knowing what that helps you know how." Id. at 43.

"Chaos and order are fundamental elements because every lived situation (even every conceivable lived situation) is made up of both. No matter where we are, there are some things we can identify, make use of, and predict, and some things we neither know nor understand. . . . [S]ome things are under our control, and some things are not. . . . Living things are always to be found in places they can master, surrounded by things and situations that make them vulnerable." Id at 44.

"Order is where the people around you act according to well-understood social norms, and remain predictable and cooperative. It's the world of social structure, explored territory, and familiarity. . . .

Chaos, by contrast, is where--or when--something unexpected happens. Chaos emerges, in trivial form, when you tell a joke at a party with people you think you know and a silent and embarrassing chill falls over the gathering. Chaos is what emerges more catastrophically when you suddenly find yourself without employment, or are betrayed by a lover. . . . It's the new and unpredictable suddenly emerging in the midst of the commonplace familiar." Id. at xxvii-xxviii.

"Order--explored territory--is constructed out of chaos and exists, simultaneously, in opposition to that chaos (to the 'new' chaos, more accurately: to the unknown now defined in opposition to explored territory). Everything that is not order--that is, not predictable, not usable--is, by default (by definition) chaos. The foreigner--whose behaviors cannot be predicted, who is not kin, either by blood or by custom, who is not an inhabitant of the 'cosmos, whose existence and domain has not been sacralized--is equivalent to chaos (and not merely metaphorically equated with chaos). As such, his appearance means threat, as his action patterns and beliefs have the capacity to upset society itself, to dissolve and flood the world . . . ." Maps of Meaning, at 148.

"Order . . . is explored territory That's the hundreds-of-millions-of-years-old hierarchy of place, position and authority. That's the structure of society. It's the structure provided by biology, too--particularly insofar as you are adapted, as you are, to the structure of society. Order is tribe, religion, hearth, home and country. It's the warm, secure living-room where the fireplace glows and the children play. It's the flag of the nation. It's the value of currency. Order is the floor beneath your feet, and your plan for the day. It's the greatness of tradition, the rows of desks in a school classroom, the trains that leave on time, the calendar, and the clock. Order is the public facade we're called upon to wear, the politeness of a gathering of civilized strangers, and the thin ice on which we all skate. Order is the place where the behavior of the world matches our expectations and our desires; the place where all things turn out the way we want them to. . . .

Where everything is certain, we're in order. We're there when things are going according to plan and nothing is new and disturbing. . . . Familiar environments are congenial. In order, we're able to think about things in the long term. There, things work, and we're stable, calm and competent. We seldom leave places we understand--geographical or conceptual--for that reason, and we certainly do not like it when we are compelled to or when it happens accidentally." 12 Rules for Life, at 36.

"Order is the place and time where the oft-invisible axioms you live by organize your experience and your actions so that what should happen does happen." Id. at 37.

"Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself. It's unexplored territory. Chaos is what extends, eternally and without limit, beyond the boundaries of all states, all ideas, and all disciplines. It's the foreigner, the stranger, the member of another gang, the rustle in the bushes in the night-time, the monster under the bed, the hidden anger of your mother, and the sickness of your child. Chaos is the despair and horror you feel when you have been profoundly betrayed. It's the place you end up when things fall apart; when your dreams die, your career collapses, or your marriage ends. It's the underworld of fairytale and myth, where the dragon and gold it guards eternally co-exist. Chaos is where we are when we don't know where we are, and what we are doing. It is, in short, all those things, and situations we neither know nor understand." Id. 35-36.

"Chaos is the new place and time that emerges when tragedy strikes suddenly, or malevolence reveals its paralyzing visage . . . . Something unexpected or undesired can always make its appearance, when a plan is being laid out, regardless of how familiar the circumstances." Id. at 37.

"[O]rder is sometimes tyranny and stultification . . . when the demand for certainty and uniformity and purity becomes too one-sided." Id. at 36.

"In its positive guise, chaos is possibility itself, the source of ideas, the mysterious realm of gestation and birth." Id. at 41.

"We eternally inhabit order, surrounded by chaos, We eternally occupy known territory, surrounded by the unknown. We experience meaningful engagement when we mediate appropriately between them. We are adapted, in the deepest Darwinian sense . . . to the meta-realities of order and chaos . . . . Chaos and order make up the eternal, transcendent environment of the living.

To straddle that fundamental duality is . . . to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure. When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you're so engrossed in what you're doing you don't notice--it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos. The subjective meaning that we encounter there is the reaction of our deepest being, our neurologically and evolutionarily grounded instinctive self, indicating that we are ensuring the stability but also the expansion of habitable, productive territory, of space that is personal, social and nature. It's the right place to be, in every sense. You are there when--and where--it matters." Id. at 43-44.

"Order is not enough. You can't just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can't long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, where where you are also alert and engaged. 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." Id. at 44.

"How could the nature of man ever reach its full potential without challenge and danger? How dull and contemptible would we become if there was no longer reason to pay attention?" Id. at 47.

"The known is explored territory, a place of stability and familiarity . . . . It finds metaphorical embodiment in myths and narratives describing the community, the kingdom or the state. Such myths and narratives guide our ability to understand the particular, bounded motivational significance of the present, experienced in relation to some identifiable desire future, and allow us to construct and interpret appropriate patterns of action, from within the confines of that schema. We all produce determinate models of what is, and what should be, and how to transform one into the other. . . .

'Narratives of the known'--patriotic rituals, stories of ancestral heroes, myths and symbols of cultural . . . identity--describe established territory, weaving for us a web of meaning that, shared with others, eliminates the necessity of dispute over meaning. All those who know the rules, and accept them, can play the game--without fighting over the rules of the game. This makes for peace, stability, and potential prosperity--a good game." Maps of Meaning, at 14.

"The unknown is, of course, defined in contradistinction to the known. Everything not understood or not explored is unknown." Maps of Meaning, at 26.

"The known, our current story, protects us from the unknown, from chaos--which is to say, provides our experience with determinate and predictable structure. Chaos has a nature all of its own. . . . If something unknown or unpredictable occurs, while we are carrying out our motivated plans, we are first surprised. That surprise--which is a combination of apprehension and curiosity--comprises our instinctive emotional response to the occurrence of something we did not desire. The appearance of something unexpected is proof that we do not know how to act . . . If we are somewhere we don't know how to act, we are (probably in trouble--we might learn something new, but we are still in trouble. When we are in trouble, we get scared. When we are in the domain of the known, so to speak, there is no reason for fear. Outside that domain, panic reigns. It is for this reason that we . . . cling to what we understand. This conservative strategy does not always work, however, because what we understand about the present is not necessarily sufficient to deal with the future. This means that we have to be able to modify what we understand, even though to do so is to risk our own undoing. The trick, of course, is to modify and yet to remain secure. This is not so simple. Too much modification brings chaos. Too little modification brings stagnation (and then, when the future we are unprepared for appears--chaos)." Id., at 18.

Peterson, drawing on the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, finds that "Paradise" serves as "habitable order" and the serpent plays the "role of chaos." The serpent represents "the possibility of the unknown and revolutionary suddenly manifesting itself where everything appears calm." 12 Rules for Life, at 46.

"It does not appear possible, even for God himself, to make a bounded space completely protected from the outside--not in the real world, with its necessary limitations, surrounded by the transcendent. The outside, chaos, always sneaks into the inside, because nothing can be completely walled off from the rest of reality. So even the ultimate in safe spaces inevitably harbours a snake." Id. at 46.

"The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal. No walls, however tall, will keep that out. Even if the fortress were thick enough, in principle, to keep everything bad whatsoever outside, it would immediately appear again within." Id. at 47.

"There is simply no way to wall off some isolated portion of the greater surrounding reality and make everything permanently predictable and safe within it. Some of what has been no-matter-how-carefully excluded will always sneak back in. A serpent, metaphorically speaking, will inevitable appear." Id.

"The hero is narrative representation of the individual eternally willing to take creative action, endlessly capable of originating new behavioral patterns, eternally specialized to render harmless or positively beneficial something previously threatening or unknown." Maps of Meaning, at 186.

"The constant search for security, rather than the embodiment of freedom, is wish for rule by law's letter, rather than law's spirit. The resultant forcible suppression of deviance is based upon desire to support the pretence that the unknown does not exist. This suppression has as its consequence the elimination of creative transformation from the individual and social spheres. The individual who denies his individual identification with the heroic will come to identify with and serve the tyrannical force of the past--and to suffer the consequences." Id. at 331.

"The great dragon of chaos limits the pursuit of individual interest. The struggle with the dragon--against the forces that devour will and hope--constitutes the heroic battle in the mythological world. Faithful adherence to the reality of personal experience ensures contact with the dragon, and it is during such contact that the great force of the individual spirit makes itself manifest, if it is allowed to. The hero voluntarily places himself in opposition to the dragon. The liar pretends that the great danger does not exist, to his peril and to that of others, or abdicates his relationship with his essential interest, and abandons all chance at further development.

Interest is meaning. Meaning is manifestation of the divine individual adaptive path. The lie is abandonment of individual interest--hence meaning, hence divinity--for safety and security . . . ." Id. at 467.

"[From the psychological perspective, our] inner world is divided into familiar and unknown territory, much as the outer [world]." Maps of Meaning, at 436

"Consciousness . . . must always remain the smaller circle within the greater circle of the unconscious, an island surrounded by the sea; and, like the sea itself, the unconscious yields an endless and self replenishing abundance of living creatures, a wealth beyond our fathoming. We may long have known the meaning, effects and characteristics of unconscious contents without ever having fathomed their depths and potentialities, for they are capable of infinite variation and can never be depotentiated."

"We strive to bring novel occurrences back into the realm of predictability or to exploit them for previously unconsidered potential by altering our behavior or our patterns of representation." Maps of Meaning, at 28-29

"Human beings are prepared, biologically, to respond to anomalous information--to novelty. This instinctive response includes redirection of attention, generation of emotion (fear first, generally speaking, then curiosity), and behavioral compulsion (cessation of ongoing activity first, generally speaking, then active approach and exploration. This pattern of instinctive response drives learning--particularly, but not exclusively, the learning of appropriate behavior. All such learning takes place--or took place originally--as a consequence of contact with novelty, or anomaly.

What is novel is of course dependent on what is known--is necessarily defined in opposition to what is known. Furthermore, what is known is always known conditionally, since human knowledge is necessarily limited. . . .

When our attempts to transform the present work as planned, we remain firmly positioned in the domain of the known (metaphorically speaking). When our behaviors produce results that we did not want, however--that is, when we err--we move into the domain of the unknown, where more primordial emotional forces rule. . . .

The 'domain of the known' and the 'domain of the unknown' can reasonably be regarded as permanent constituent elements of human experience--even of the human environment. . . . " Id., at 19

"When we explore a new domain, we are mapping the motivational or affective significance of the things or situations that are characteristic of our goal-directed interactions within that domain, and we use the sensory information we encounter, to identify what is important. It is the determination of specific meaning, or emotional significance, in previously unexplored territory--not identification of the objective features--that allows us to inhibit the novelty-induced terror and curiosity emergence of that territory otherwise automatically elicits. We feel comfortable somewhere new, once we have discovered that nothing exists there that will threaten or hurt us (more particularly, when we have adjusted our behavior and schemas of representation so that nothing there is likely to or able to threaten or hurt us). The consequence of exploration that allows for emotional regulation (that generates security, essentially) is not objective description--as the scientist might have it--but categorization of the implications of an unexpected occurrence for specification of means and ends." Id., at 53-54.

Class Video 1: Redefining Reality [10:47 mins.] [TED Talk] [presenting, as Peterson puts it, "the most real thing I know" (and that we all, already know), and that is simply this: "the world is made out of chaos and order"]

Class Video 2: Yin-Yang, Order and Chaos [10:33 mins.] [order and chaos related to right and left hemispheres of the brain; the story of the gymnast]

Class Video 3: Chaos and Order [2:38 mins.] [the Taoist symbol; the desire to have those we interact with to walk the borderline of order and chaos; what is familiar and what is yet to be revealed; an earlier telling of the story of the gymnast who follow the routine and the gymnast who performs at the edge of the abyss (and manifests the relation of order to chaos)]

Class Video 4: The Taoist Symbol [5:07 mins.] [the real world and what it is made of ("it is made out of all the things you know . . . and all those things you don't know"); you want a little adventure, you don't want everything to be predictable; you need to know what to do in chaos because you are going to be there; "you can fall into chaos and never get out" ("it happens to people all the time"); you don't know what to do about chaos; when you explore, you find out something new (doing it voluntarily you can tolerate the recalibration); you're trying to live at the border of order and chaos; the mind/brain sees the world in terms of order and chaos] [longer version :: "Personal Evolution, Avoiding the Extremes of Brain Fry & Boredom" :: 12:23 mins.]

Class Video 5: Chaos is Hiding in Things You Ignore [8:00 mins.] ["the chaos is hiding in what is irrelevant"; "you're moving from point A to point B and something you don't expect occurs"; ""you have this structure . . . and now there is a hole in it"; "you don't know what to do with that hole"; you're anxious about the hole; "there are certain things you can confront that can unglue you"; you can fall into a hole--chaos; chaos is the flood (of the undifferentiated); you freeze, you don't want to get out of bed, not a pleasant situation to be in (undifferentiated negative emotion)] A second posting: Chaos Re-Emerging in Your Life [7:27 mins.] [what happens when the constrained chaos that's underneath everything irrelevant suddenly re-emerges]

Class Video 6: Knowing Where You Are [6:18 mins.] [the known world in relation to our social world; hierarchies of competence]

Order & Chaos [1:25 mins.] ["We are wired, in some sense, for the domain of order and the realm of chaos"; "the domain of order is where you are when what you are doing is working"; "then something happens to disrupt stability . . . chaos can come pouring into order at any moment"; you have a circuit that detects [chaos] and that's the same circuit that detects snakes or predators"]

Dao, Chaos, Order, Perception [1:57 mins.] ["having one foot in order and one foot in chaos"--this is the place to be]

Go into the Unknown and Grow Up! [6:56 mins.] [working with the Biblical story of Abraham and God's admonition: "Go somewhere you don't understand"; "go into the unknown," "go to where you don't know"; escaping dependency; misunderstanding, power, competence, and authority; "a call to adventure" (establish yourself in the world); reference to C.G. Jung and his claim that "you are not the master of your own house"; there are things within you that are beyond your control (e.g., your dreams, or for that matter, things you happen to be interested in, or what compels you forward); reference to subpersonalities; "what is it that is gripping you?"; "there is a calling within you . . . you are compelled by your interest . . . that is, something beyond you; reference to being a clinician; the unconscious is, in one sense, the unknown]

How You Inhabit a Story [14:15 mins.] [begin presentation at 5:24 mins., end at 6:42 mins.] [comments on chaos & order] [you are somewhere and you are going somewhere; you are in a state of deficiency and you are moving to remove that deficiency; you look at the world through a value-laden framework]

The Buddha's Renunciation [11:11 mins.] [the Buddha story; "looking beyond the confines" of protected space; curiosity that has you looking for trouble; getting beyond the confines of paradise]

What the Most Precious Resource Really Is [7:02 mins.] [trust is a fundamental natural resource; Ebay presented as an example; trust is a powerful economic force; "a human being is a chimpanzee full of snakes"; when we trust someone we make certain assumptions; what happens with betrayal is that at one moment you are secure, and the next second, you are in a different place (even your sense of the past and the future collapses); a journey to the underworld; we go to the underworld when the stability of our world is shattered, that is, when a snake makes its way into our walled garden (a walled garden is a place where something can pop up and knock you out; "we are in a walled garden but there is always a snake"]

Our Lives are Full of Chaos [4:38 mins.] [dealing with emergent complexity; chaos represents the underlying complexity; we walk on thin ice and beneath lies the inevitable complexity of life, and chaos; one image of chaos is the dragon of chaos]

Encountering Obstacles In Life [7:16 mins.] [what has been deemed irrelevant suddenly becomes front and center in your life]

Can You Withstand Tragedy?
[10:06 mins.] [the story of Adam and Eve is a meta-story; belief systems can collapse (one alternative is to move to another belief structure but this may not be possible); "there are no safe places"; do you really want a safe place ("a paralyzed rabbit in a hole"); the solution to the problem of tragedy is, paradoxically, to face it; expose yourselves to something new, and you face chaos (and malevolence); we don't know the full extent of the human being; the Buddha and the walled garden; child discover limits and they run back, and then, they run out again; you must confront danger, malevolence, and the unknown]

Biblical Stories Lectures: Jacob Wrestling with God
[2:32:08 mins.] [relevant commentary begins at 21:34 mins., ends at 24:40 mins.] [a fire and what surrounds it; an explored center and an unexplored periphery; cosmos and chaos; the master of a field of study (the things that everyone knows well) and movement toward the frontier of the discipline (a competent scholar is on the border of the explored and explored)]

A Behavior Therapist is Just Like a Shaman [8:54 mins.] ["go after the dragon"; 2:44 mins.--Jung relates chaos to the unconscious, the threatening past that you have not dealt with; you emerge, as a person, out of chaos; all we have is an oversimplified slice of ourselves; the real you, God only knows what this is; we get at this "real you" by going into the darkest places]

Foraging for Information [3:07 mins.] [the unknown: things we don't know] [the unknown offers possibility; it offers things we need now and in the long run] ["we are information foragers"] [it can be beneficial to confront the things we don't know; we go out into the unknown and gather things of value; squirrels forage for nuts, we forage for information; information is like food]

The Purpose of Life [3:45 mins.] ["we have the capacity to face things we don't understand"]

Daily Structure Keeps You Sane
[6:00 mins.] ["you need to know what to do everyday"; in praise of routine (the trivial in life); "you need structure just to stay sane"]

Pay Attention
[6:49 mins.] [you need a biological system to tell you what to do with the unknown' we confront predatory experience outside our frame of reference and we make something useful of it; the hero goes out into the unknown to confront the dragon; this is not fiction, it's meta-truth]

The Psychology Behind Getting Cheated On
[4:30 mins.] [example of an intrusion of the unknown, e.g., a cheating spouse; emergence of chaos; moving from point A to point B; times when "you just don't have a plan anymore"]

Home vs the Unknown, Why People Fight for Their Beliefs
[6:40 mins.] [end presentation at 4:31 mins.] [territory that you have mastered and territory that you have not; mastered territory has a dominance hierarchy that you recognize]

Archetypes of Error
[3:35 mins.] [an error is chaos and order at the same time; confronting an error the archetypes come forward] [drawing on a mythological story]

Maps of Meaning 13: The Force Within (TVO)
[41:25 mins.] [comments on the change that takes place when "something unknown happens to you"; the idea that "inside the chaotic mess may be something you need" which means that you must consider "exploring what you don't understand"; what you don't understand provides a "gateway into a domain of possibility"; the relationship of a comfortable life and that we look for the snake in the garden (that is, chaos),]

Misc.

A History of Violence
[53:58 mins.] [audio] [39:21 mins. to 39:44 mins., Peterson notes that "the archetypal human being is the human being confronting the unknown"--the hero]

Strengthen the Individual: A Counterpoint to Post Modern Political Correctness
[1:13:40 mins.] [relevant commentary at 40:02 mins., ends at 49:02 mins.] [video of this lecture is not of the highest quality]

Reference (An Introduction by Jordan Peterson to His Work)

Iceland: 12 Rules for Life Tour: Lecture 1
[2:40:12 mins.]

Psychology for Lawyers

james r. elkins

jordan b. peterson
-------------------------------------------------------
"fundamental elements of lived experience"
a way of knowing the world

known & unknown
explored & unexplored
familiar & unfamiliar
order & chaos

Contact Professor Elkins

Psychology for Lawyers james r. elkins

jordan b. peterson ------------------------------------------------------- "fundamental elements of lived experience" a way of knowing the world

known & unknown explored & unexplored familiar & unfamiliar order & chaos

Contact Professor Elkins

Psychology for Lawyers

james r. elkins

jordan b. peterson
-------------------------------------------------------
"fundamental elements of lived experience"
a way of knowing the world

known & unknown
explored & unexplored
familiar & unfamiliar
order & chaos