12 Rules for Life

This post is a very detailed summary and reflection of Jordan Peterson’s book: 12 Rules for Life. Each short summary always refers back to the relevant page number in the book. The post ends with my personal reflection. Some may ask why the summary should be so long, while you could just go and read the book again. Well, the book itself quite lengthy and contains lots of atomic logics, and the summary is still short compared to the book. The point of making a summary for myself personally is to quickly get back anytime to here and find the part in the book that was or became meaningful to me. Oh, and sorry about the typos ahead that even I don’t know they exist due to the length of this post. Please let me know if you find one.

Please feel very free to skip the table of contents.

Table of contents

Foreword (vii-xxvii)

• Question: Why even expect more rules in our lives anyways, while it seems pretty clear that people don’t like rules? (vii)

• Answer:

  But the story of the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions - and there’s nothing freeing about that. (viii)

Most people don’t like rules. But they live in a chaos, and they don’t like themselves being in a chaos too. That’s the reason they would need a set of rules to live against.

Short introduction to Jordan as an ‘erudite’, ‘practical’, renowned, and knowledgeable person. (~xiv)

Jordan’s first book Maps of Meaning explains why and how we do things that we do today, to deal with uncertainty and the unavoidable unknown. It contains somewhat more complex concepts, which 12 Rules of Life actually based upon. (~xv)

Young people actually have an hunger for rules. They’ve been taught two contradicting ideas at schools, which left them just confused on what’s right or wrong (xx). One major school of thought is that “morality is relative, at best a personal ‘value judgement’.” There is no absolute right or wrong in anything. Even more extreme: postmodernist left’s argument that a group’s morality is nothing but its attempt to exercise power over another group (xxii). Therefore, the best way to live, is to simply tolerate and respect different ways of living a life. But it turns out that people in moral relativism can’t live without a moral compass (~xxiii).

While modern response to different rules of different societies was relativism, nihilism or ideology, the ancient Greeks endevoured to search for the reasons and ideas intertwined with those rules. Aristotle found one striking similarity across these societies too: while the rules differed, human beings have a tendency to make rules, laws and customs. (~xxv)

It seems that all human beings are, by some kind of biological endowment, so ineradicably concenred with morality that we create a structure of laws and rules wherever we are. The idea that human life can be free of moral concerns is a fantasy. (xxv)

We are rule generators. And given that we are moral animals, what must be the effectt of our simplistic modern relativism upon us? It means that we are hobbling ourselves by pretending to be something we are not. (xxv)

Overture (xxviii-)

Jordan first started to answer some questions about ilfe on Quora, and started to get some popularity there. In 2013, he started to upload videos of his lectures at university, which got popular too. (~xxx)

Later he was suggested to write a guide on ‘how to live well’, and the proposal was acceptede by Penguin Random House. (~xxxviii)

The title was picked as so because it’s clear that we need rules. We need order. But chaos exists too, which hinder us from being in an order.

If we each live properly, we will collectively flourish. (xxxix)

Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back (1)

Lobsters - and territory

Lobsters have a simple nervous systems which could be thoroughly studied by scientists (1). This helps us understand how our brain and behavior function too.

Lobsters want a secure, reliable and sustainable home where prey is abundant. What happens when multiple lobsters want the same space? The same happens for songbirds. (2)

Birds - and territory

Wrens would warn and fight you when you get into their territory. Both wrens and lobsters are obsessed with status and position.

Also important for chickens too: the location (proximity to prey) of chicken determines its priority in getting the food, thus the survival.

The wiliest, strongest, healthiest and most fortunate birds occupy prime territory, and defend it. Because of this, they are more likely to attract high-quality mates, and to hatch chcisk who survive and thrive. (4)

A pandemic across birds would kill the least dominant and the most vulnerable birds first. Same for human societies.

Territorial conflict imposes a problem: how to win or lose without the disagreeing parties incurring too great a cost (because the winner might be hurt even after winning, which means the 3rd bird can come in and take the space). (4)

Conflict - and territory

A defated wolf shows its subordination to a victor by a specific gesture. Dolphins make certain sounds to reduce conflict between dominant and subordinate group members. Many other animals behave like so. (5)

Lobsters too. They want a safe place to hide. The place may be scarce. When two lobsters competing for the same spot encounter each other, they spout chemicals containing information of size, sex, health, and mood out to each other. (6) If a lobster finds that the opponent is too big, it will just retreat.

Otherwise, lobsters will try to flip the other on its back. Once they do it, the flipped one will generally give up and leave.

Otherwise, they will physically fight. Typically, they will have a winner here. The once dominant brain will phyiscally replace itself with a subordinate brain. (8)

Victors will have high serotonin and low octopamine, and losers the reverse. (8-9)

(Winner lobster) … is a coky, strutting sort of shellfish, much less liekly to back down when challenged. … (the loser lobster is) … a defeated-looking, scrunched-up, inhibited, drooping, skulking sort of lobster, very likely to hang around street corners … (8-9)

The principle of unequal distribution (9)

The defeated lobster is more likely to lose in the next fight. The winning lobster, the reverse. Similarly:

• majority of scientific papers are published by a small % of scientists
• majority of commercial music is composed by a small % of musicians
• 500 books sell more than 100,000 books in the US.
• Four classical composers wrote almost all the music played by modern ochestras.

This is known as Price’s law. Anyways, nature has produced a very simple and efficient mechanism for a hierarchy of lobsters. The winner takes it all, the loser can’t get anything. (10-11)

All the girls (11)

Female lobsters naturally get attracted to dominant (winning) lobsters (the most efficient, correct way to identify the best man)

The dominant lobster gets all the girls too.

The dominance hierarchy of lobsters exhibit the same features as the environment to which all complex life has adapted. Lobsters have existed from a really long time ago only with a very simple nervous system, but they still had a mechanism to think about status and society (13).

The nature of nature (13)

Nature is not a simple thing.

• It is dynamic: as the environment changes, the faetures that make a given individual successful in surviving and reproducing also transform and change. So natural selection is not “creatures matching themselves ever more precisely to a template specified by the world”, but a very interactive process between the nature and the world.
• It is static: some things change less quickly. “Leaves change more quickly than trees, and trees more quickly than forests.” (15)

There exists an ancient and fundamental part in our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy: the reason we act like lobsters when we are defeated. Weak people exhibit low levels of serotoin, thus much of stress and vulnerability to illness, death and depression. (18)

Top and Bottom (18)

If you are at the top, you get all of the best parts: good counterpart, health, opportunities, … If you are at the botttom, you don’t get anything. Terrible food, nowhere to live, poor mental and physical conditions, etc. We are not talking about possessing money here; it’s just about a general human life (18-19)

‘The ancient part of the brain’ will watch how other people treat you. If they treat you badly, it will incur low serotonin level. This process burns up a lot of energy. It’s called stress. (19)

This response is really what everyone calls stress, and it is by no means only or even primarily psychological. It ‘s a reflection of the genuine constraints of unfortunate circumstances. (19)

If you are already stressed, even the smallest external stimuli will cause chains of negative reactions in your mental and physical state, making you de-energized, impulsive, etc.

If you are at the top (not stressed), you already know you are safe and all good, so chances of you being damanged from a threat is substantially low. The result is that you still stay clam, tall, straight, and confident. (20)

Malfunction (20)

Sleeping and eating

Inconsistent patterns of sleeping and eating can cause a stress too. The body needs to “function like a well-rehearsed orchestra”

Your sleeping and eating schedule need to be consistent in order to keep you out of chaos!

It is for such reasons that I always ask my clinical clients first about sleep. … If the answer is no, fixing thatt is the first thing I recommend.

The next thing I ask about is breakfast. … eat a fat and protein-heavy breakfastt as soon as possible after they are awaken.

Having a fat, protein-heavy breakfast ASAP will prevent you from having a high insulin level that will make you psychologically unstable. (20-21)

Complex positive feedback loop

1. You feel vulnerable
2. You do something bad in order to fix that
3. You feel better
4. Some time later, you feel vulnerable because of something bad you did in order to fix it
5. Then you do something bad again
6. And so on.

Example: alcohol addiction. A person drinks an alcohol. Makes him happy. When he stops drinking, he will feed bad due to metabolization and secretion of toxins. To remove that bad feeling, he will just resume drinking. After that, the hungover goes on again, and then it can be temporarily handled with a few more drinks. It will go on and on.

Another example: agoraphobia or experience of being bullied. Just functions in the same mechanism as alcohol addiction.

Continuation of these bad habits or psychological state will only lead to itself again! (-26)

Rising Up

Stop being in a defeated posture (30)

Maybe you are a loser. And maybe you are not - but if you are, you don’t have to continue in that mode. Maybe you just have a bad habit. Maybe you’re even just a collection of bnad habits. Nonetheless, even if you came by your poor posture honestly - even if you were unpopular or bullied at home or in grade school - it’s not necessarily appropriate now. Circumstances change. If you slump around, with the same bearing that characterizes a defeated lobster, people will assign you are lower status, and the old counter that you share with crustaceans, sitting at the very base of your brain, will assign you a low dominance number. (30)

Standing up straight with shoulders back has not only physical but also psychological implications.

Circumstances change, and so can you. … if you present yourself as defeated, then people will react to you as if you are losing. If you start to straighten up, then people will look at and treat you differently. … But standing up straight with your shoulders back is not something that is only phyiscal, because you;re not only a body. You’re a spirit, so to speak - a psyche - as well. (31)

Life is terrible, but standing up straight with shoulders back means confidently accepting that and trying to improve it.

To stand up … is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, … means deciding to boluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. … means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, …

So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. (32)

Then, people will start to perceive you as a dominant being. Why not try it first and see how it goes before even going into defeated mode? (33)

Rule 2: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping (35)

Why won’t you just take your damn pills? (35)

• people tend to miss out on taking the pills for various reasons, both unintendedly and intendedly. (35)

• even some people going on a kidney transplantation surgery - they won’t be able to go on with the best surgery if they just don’t take their pills. But why? (36)

• when it comes to giving pills to the pets, people tend to do it much better. You will actually do your best to get them pills.

  In fact, on average, you care more. People are better at filling and properly administering prescription medication to their pets than to themselves. (37)

• But why?

The Oldest Story and the Nature of the World (38)

• Two stories of creation are introduced in Genesis (38):

  • The ‘Priestly’ version:

    • God created the world with his speech.

  • The ‘Jawhist’ version

• In the modern world, we base our thoughts on scientific truths quite naturally, but that is absolutely not the case in the past (38)

  Being was understood as a place of action, not a place of things. It was understood as something more akin to story or drama (39)

  • subjective experience can be related more to a novel or a movie than to a science. (39)

The Domain, Not of Matter, but of What Matters (40)

• The scientific world of matter can be reduced to some fundamental concepts (40)

• The world of experience can be too, to chaos, order, and consciousness. (40)

  • chaos and order cause us to doubt the validity of existence, but consciousness leads to “the real way out”.

Chaos (40)

• is..

  The foreginer, the tranger, the member of another gang, … the monster under the bed, the hidden anger of your mother, and the sickness of your child. … the despair and horror you feel .. where we are when we don’t know where we are, and what we are doing when we don’t know what we are doing.

• is all those things and situations we neither know nor understand.

Order (41)

• is:

  explored territory. position and authority. structure of society. tribe, religion, hearth, home and country. the value of the currency. plan for the day. politeness. …

• where everything is certain.

• Where there is an order, there is chaos. (43)

• Our brains are wired to repond instantly to chaos. (43)

Chaos and Order: Persnoality, Female and Male

• So far, it’s been explained why chaos and order are two most fundamental elements of lived experience (Being). Chaos and order are perceived as personalities as well. (43-44)

• Perception of things as entities with personality occurs before perception of things as things. This works the same for order and chaos. They are personified first, and then perceived as things and objects. (44)

• Therefore, the most significant elements of our environment of origin were peronsalities, not things, objects or situations. (44)

• The personalities majorly have been split into male and female for a billion years, since when there has been separate sexes (44).

• Naturally, the category of parent and child has existed for a long time too, unavoidably deeply embedded into our psychology (44)

• We are social and we care about other creatures, which can be translated as environment. (45)

• Our brain also has a capacity to have knowledge about the nature of the world, or the objective world. We grew to deal with what’s outside of what we currently understand. (45)

• When we first started doing this, we used categories representing pre-human animal social world, which is even older than our species. It can be said that the most basic category is the sex: male and female.

  We appear to hhave taken that primordial knowledge of structured, creative opposition (male and female) and begun to interpret everything through its lens (46)

Order (46)

• is: masculinity, yang of the Taoist yin-yang symbol, men throughout history have been the builders of towns and cities, engineers, stonemasons, bricklayers …, God the Father, ledgerkeeper, policemen and soldiders, …

Chaos (46)

• is: feminine. possibility, the source of ideas, mysterious realm of gestation and birth. the darkness of a cave and the accident by the side of the road. it’s the mother grizzly that tears you to pieces. crushing force of sexual selection.

Duality of masculinity and feminity (47-)

• Many religious symbols share masculinity and feminity at the same time:

  • The Star of David

  • the yoni and lingam of Hinduism

  • Fuxi and Nuwa in China

  • the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child

  • androgyny of Christ

• The structure of the brain also reflects this duality (48):

  the hemispheric structure of the cortex reflects the fundamental division between novelty (the unknown, or chaos) and routinization (the known, order)

• We all know this, but we don’t know we know it. We eternally inhabit order, surroundded by chaos. (49) (This sentence is what really sums up the last few pages)

• Chaos and order is anywhere in our lives, and the balance between chaos and order is crucial. Being inclined on either side too much may cause a problem. Neither shouldn’t exist too. The same applies for other living things (50-51)

The Garden of Edens (51)

• As previously mentioned, Genesis was combined from multiple sources:

  • Chapter 1: ‘Priestly’ story (refer back to 38)

    • Naturally connects to Chapter 2, suggesting someone or some people carefully attached these two stories together

  • Chapter 2: ‘Jahwist’ story (52)

    • Uses the name YHWH (Jahweh) to describe God

    • Contains the story of Adam and Eve

    • Adam was instructed not to touch or eat the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but he did

    • Adam and Eve were not self-conscious: they were naked but not ashamed.

• Chapter 3 has a serpent appearing. While God only knows why it’s inside the garden,the serpent appears to play the role of chaos, and the paradise that of order. (53)

• Where there is an order, there has to be a chaos, because nothing can be completely walled off from the rest of reality. (54)

• The absence of chaos would also be problematic: how could the nature of man ever reach its full potential without challenge and danger? (54)

• Anyway, Eve eats the forbidden fruit, and becomes self-conscious. (55-56)

The Naked Ape

What does it mean to know yourself (and your partner) naked?

• Naked means: vulnerable, easily damanged, subject to judgement for beauty and health, unprotected, unarmed. (57)

• But that doesn’t mean we can justly resent or hate the Ideal: knowledgeable, accomplished mathematicians should not disappear just because of my poor math skills. (58)

• God spots Adam and Eve being self-conscious, and punishes them with ‘having to work’ and pregnancy respectively, and they are expelled from Paradise, out into the unknown, chaotic world. (59-61)

• Back to the original query (at 35): why would someone buy prescription medication for his dog, and carefully administer it, and not do the same for himself?

• Answer: why should take care of anything as naked, ugly, ashamed, … as a descendant of Adam, even if that being is himself? Actually, you are the one who knows the most about yourself, your transgressions, insufficiencies and inadequacies. No one else has more reason to regard you as a pathetic man. And by witholding something that might do you good (the medication), you can punish yourself for all your failings. A harmless, innocent, unselfconscious dog is more deserving. (61)

Good and Evil (62)

• Dogs and cats are predetors: they kill things and eat them. But we still own them as pets and give them meds when they’re sick. (62)

• Why?: because they are predators by nature, without self-conscious. No comprehension of their weakness, vulnerability, pain, and death.

• Humans?: they know. we know exactly how and where we can be hurt, and why. This is as good a definition as any of self-consciousness.

• We can do a lot with that: feel pain, disgust, shame, horror, terrify, humiliate, torture, … only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the best definition of evil I have been able to formulate. (63)

• Man can make things worse voluntarily. This validates the idea of Original Sin: who could deny it with the sense of inbuilt corruption and capacity for wrongdoing? (63)

• No one understands the darkness of the individual better than the individual himself. Who, then, when ill, is going to be fully commited to his own care? (64)

A Spark of the Divine

• It might not simply be the self-consciousness that makes us doubt our own worth. Perhaps it is [instead] our unwillingness - reflected in Adam’s shamed hiding - to walk with God, despite our fragility and propensity for evil. (66)

• We don’t take care of ourselves because we know we are fallen creatures. (67)

• 2000 years ago, people were much more barbaric than any peoples in the world right now: arena sports, human (child) sacrifice, … And right now, aggressive people will just go to jail. Unacceptable. (67-68)

• Widespread belief: people are arrogant and selfish.

• But at the same time, they have exceeding amounts of self-disgust, self-contempt, shame and self-consciousness. This is the reason they don’t value themselves at all instead of caring of their own importance. Really, they are aware of their own faults and inadequacies, ashamed and doubtful of their own value.

  They believe that other people shouldn’t suffer, and they will work diligently and altruistically to help them alleviate it. They extend the same courtesy even to the animals they are acquainted with - but not so easily to themselves. (68)

• Self-sacrifice is well presented by the Christ. But it does not mean to suffer more than what is offered in return. If so, it’s just a slave and a tyrant in a relationship.

• Standing up and speaking for yourself and someone else have almost no difference, because anyone is stumbling, sinful and imperfect anyways. (69)

• you don’t have a right to torture and mistreat yourself, because:

  • God claims you don’t belong to yourself

  • Your Being affects others (i.e. suicide)

  • We have a spark of the divine in us which belongs to God

• People in fact have overwhelming, unexpected and miraculous ability to overcome difficulties (i.e. those with severely sick conditions or close ones with the equivalent). It’s just amazing how all people go through troubles and make a way out of that all by themselves despite mortal vulnerability, tyranny of the state, and depredations of nature. (70-71)

• Therefore, humanity deserves some serious respect. Everyone deserves respect, and you also. (71)

  You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself. … to treat yourself as if you were someone you are reponsible for helping is, instead, to consider what would be truly good for you. (72)

• good vs happy: what makes you happy isn’t what’s good in most cases and we all know that (72)

• always think about what would be good for me and the ways to achieve that. (72-73)

• set a vision and direction for nobody but yourself (73)

Rule 3: Make friends with people who want the best for you (77)

The old hometown (77)

• JP lived in Fairview, Alberta and it was super cold especially in the winter, and the cats (home-grown ones too) faced the risk of death often due to their behavior to seek heat under coldness. (77-79)

My Friend Chris and His Cousin (79)

• His friends Chris and Ed were young delinquent people doing stupid things that teenagers do, including marijuana. (79-81)

Teenage Wasteland (81)

• JP and his friends often went to creepy parties, and no one knew what they were doing there (81)
• Not so many families in Alberta decided to send their kids to universities and that wasn’t because of financial concerns (82 )

Some different friends - and some more of the same (83)

• JP made a road trip with his friends, Carl and Chris, pretty far away from Alberta, and did the same stupid thing there, just drinking and wasting time. (84)
• When they all grew up, JP expected Chris and Ed to be actually grown up, but that wasn’t the case. (85)
• Their lives were going really creepy, with nothing being achieved. Just the same people JP saw when he was a teenager. (85)
• Chris, Carl and Ed had every chance to improve their lives, but they didn’t do so. (86)
• Chris ended up committing suicide. (86)

Such people just refuse the responsibility of their lives and choose to get acquainted with the men of similar kind. (86)

• Freud calls this ‘repetition compulsion’, an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past. (87)

Rescuing the damned (87)

• Trying to help people in such difficulties is not an easy job at all (87)
• Often, the motivation to help is vanity, narcissism, a desire to draw attention to one’s own compassion and good-will (91)
• The person that you are trying to help maybe had thousands of chances to improve but didn’t, making his life worse every second (91-92)

You’re associating with people whoare bad for you not because it’s better for everyone, but because it’s easier.

• Before helping someone, identify that he is really in trouble (92)
• Failure is easy to understand, but it shouldn’t be a valid excuse. (92)
• It’s very likely that a person intentionally chose to reject the path upward. They use their misery as a proof for the world’s injustice (92-93)
• You don’t have to and probably shouldn’t befriend them. (93)

A Reciprocal Arrangement (95)

• If you have a friend you wouldn’t recommend to your sister or others, why would you befriend him yourself (95)
• Good friends will let you know you’re doing good when you are, and bad when you are doing bad. (95)

Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today

• No matter how good you are at something, there must be someone better than you (99)

• Some few people in the world win and take the most, and our internal, contemtuous view of ourselves hurts our mind. (100-101)

• Just stop listening. There will always be people better than you and you can’t change that. (101)

Many good names (101)

• The good and the bad (outcomes) certainly exist when you work on something. So how can we still ignore this critical self consciousness on the outcome or abilities? (101)

• We shouldn’t have a binary view on success and failure (102)

• There are multiple ‘games’ in life, some of which you are good at, some not. You can select the ones that you match. (102-103)

• It’s not that there is a single game. Consider judging success across all games you are playing (103)

• Games are usually quite specific to you, so comparison is simply inappropriate. Some people value something more than you do and less too. (103)

• The way that the internal critic, when investigated, is not objective and credible. (103-104)

• As we grow up, we become increasingly unique from others, which gives a valid reason we can’t be compared with others. (104)

• Maybe you don’t know yourself very well. Do you ask what you want, negotiate fairly with yourself, or are you a tyrant, with yourself as a slave? (104-105)

• You should take up a responsibility for yourself. (105)

• You should be truthful and honest to yourself. Know what you are doing. (105-106)

• You know what you need, what you need to do, when you lie about to yourself, how much time you need to spend on that and that, … when you pause for a second and think about it. It’s all on you. Therefore, comparing yourself to others can’t make sense there because everything is very unique to you (106-107)

The Point of Our Eyes (or, Take Stock) (107)

• We are always aiming at something, and trying to move towards the goal, the better future. (107-108)

• The present can’t be changed, but the future can. Take stock (of yourself). Take stock of your psychological house and inspect which parts are flawed. You must start from there because you need to learn to embrace your own flaws. (108-109)

• The future could be better. The present is an eternal failure. Therefore, try to make the future better. (109)

• When you use the internal critic properly, you will be able to fix things. Negotiate with yourself and use yourself. (110)

• Do a real deal with yourself, just like you do with others, if you can’t easily fix your own flaws, like compensating yourself with a cup of coffee when you get things fixed or done (110-111)

A little careful kindness goes a long way, and judicious reward is a powerful motivator. Then you could take that small bit of yourself by the hand and do the damn dishes. (111)

• How can you know that you are improving, with what standard? First, aim small. If you are just beginning on this whole thing, just set a small goal for the day, and reward you if you do it. Then.. repeat that. (111)

What You Want and What You See (112)

• People wouldn’t be able to see interferences when focusing on something they are paying attention to. That’s how we deal with the overwhelming complexity of the world: by ignoring it. (112-114)

• It’s the same thing when you work towards a goal. You ignore most things except your goal and obstacles. Therefore, you must choose what you must (consciously) see because there are many things out there (114)

• You have a system built into yourself to faciliate the screening process of things to recognize, which is quite hard to amend. But sometimes you should because you are not seeing the things that you should be seeing. (115-116)

• Stop for a second and think what you really need: it may be in your subconsciousness. Find it, and aim for it. (116-117)

• You will start to learn to see what’s better, if you genuinely want your life to improve (117-118)

• Begin from articulating, priortizing and arranging your desires because they tell you a lot (118-119)

• Religion is about proper behavior (good and evil). An acolyte will first try to be a good person instead of thinking too hard because that’s what he has to do anyways. It’s the same for us: that drive to behave for the better needs to be present. (119-120)

• What we see is dependent upon our religious beliefs, even for those who think themselves as atheists (120-121)

• Careful observation can show your beliefs. These come from incredibly complex chains of thoughts and processes, all the way from the antiquity. Some beliefs come from fundamental teachings from the cultures, including the Bible (121)

Old Testament God and New Testament God (122)

• People seem to think of the Old Testament God as a harsh and dangerous God, and the New Testament God as a forgiving and loving God. (122)

• But the benevolent God is much less believable, in the world of post-Auushwitz, where terrible things happen (123-124)

• It’s the same for our lives. We are so helpless in our lives, often lost and can’t control ourselves. It might as well be better for our lives if we decide to serve Old Testament God. (125)

• Keep trying to do better. To do that, you need to pay attention (126)

Pay attention (126)

• Just stop and think about what’s bothering you, what might give you motivation, and so on (126-127)

• Set the tasks for a day in the morning, and reward yourself once you achieve them (127-128)

Realization is dawning. Instead of playing the tyrant, therefore, you are paying attention. You are telling the truth, instead of manipulating the world. You are negotiating, instead of playing the martyr or the tyrant … You are discovering who you are, and what you want, and what you are willing to do. … Attend to the day, but aim at the highest good. … Now, your trajectory is heavenward. (129)

Rule 5: Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them (133)

Actually, it’s not OK (133)

• Some parents leave their children behave carelessly in public (133-134)

• There may be cultural and biological (evolutionary) reasons of favouring male over female children (135-136)

• Preferential treatment to an adolescent son may bring about an attractive, well-rounded, confident man. (136)

• However, sometimes, unconscious (or conscious) hatred can prevent parents from giving enough concern to a child (137-138)

Everybody hates arithmetic (138)

• Small quotidian concerns are insidious, and it certainly takes up a lot of your time. JP had a client who had to spent hours per month to get his son to sleep after fighting (138)

• Is it the fault of the child or the parent? Despite it being easy for children to attribute it to the parents, it might as well be children’s fault (139)

• There has been a growing social view from 1960 that parents should only be benevolent, and not be pursuing discipline, order and conventionality, leaving immaturity of the children behind. (139-140)

• A philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that children have an intrinsically unsullied spirit, damaged only by culture and society (141)

• There are dozens of evidences that that claim is not true. Even chimpanzees murder each other very often. Look at Japanese invation over China and its brutal covert human experiments. Many cities, both uncivilized and civilized, exhibit substantial homicide rate too. (142-143)

• Even if children are deemed to be good, they can’t be left alone and expected to suddenly bloom into perfection. Even dogs must be trained to be in the pack. Then how much should children be given their overwhelming complexity compared to dogs. (143-144)

Children must be shaped and informed, or they cannot thrive (144)

• Children are damaged when they are just left with full freedom, without any discipline or care, and they are often ignored by their peers because they are poorly socialized (144-145)

Parent or Friend (145)

• Parents neglect discplinary approaches for the fear of themselves not being liked or loved anymore, or for deliberate reasons. This is not good.(145)

• If parents act like this, that means they want friendship with their children. Friends are very easy to ignore and have a limited authority for discipline (145)

It is an act of responsibility to discpline a child. (146)

• It’s true that it’s difficult to discipline a child. But disregarding such a duty will produce irresponsible, helpless adults. Discipline also does not harm creativity. Children will keep trying to draw attentions by doing useless things from adults if not controlled (146-147)

• Provocative, immature children will cause problems and even try to dominate their parents (147-148)

• Children are just trying to scout the boundary of permissible behaviors in taking their provoking actions. It’s important to let them know the boundary once they do (148)

• You really need to take practical actions to discipline your child. This does not make them dislike you either. Crying is often just a sign of their anger, which is fine to not be concerned about. (149-151)

Discipline and punish (152)

• Discipline and punish must be handled carefully but are definitely needed (153)

• Emprical evidences from experiments on pigeons show that it’s possible to discipline with reward (153-154)

• It’s also possible to discpline with negativity. We learn from bad emotions and pains, and will not repeat the action that caused them. (154-155)

• The question is not how to protect children from failures, but to help them learn in a useful, supervised way. Overprotected children won’t just know how to deal with failures. (156-157)

• A child with insufficient learning on sharing will fail to socialize with his peers. Lonely. Rejected. Anxiety, depression and resentment. (157)

• Parents not disciplining their children will leave their children vulnerable to fear and pain when they grow up (157)

• Reward and punishment should adequately be used to bring a child success and prevent failure in the world outside the family. The result otherwise is just a semi-grown adult (158-159)

Poorly socialized children have terrible lives. Thus, it is better to socialize them optimally. (160)

• All children are so different. So how should we discipline children? (160)

Minimum necessary force (160)

• Two general ”rules about rules’:

  • Don’t lay out too many rules for children (160-161)

  • Use the least force to enforce the rules (161)

• For the second rule: start from the weakest force and determine the appropriate degree of force. (162)

• Children with wonderful politeness and discipline makes everyone smile and attracts compliments (162-163)

• There are a variety of valid reasons for physical punishment:

  • to stop worse things from happening because the alternative could be fatal. (163-164)

  • the word no must be effectively understood to another person without the threat of punishment, and that’s not the case for children. If you think about it, adults say no to a child because they are larger, stronger and more capable. (164-165)

• The idea of hitting a child (165):

  • The definition of ”hitting” is too broad.

  • Magnitude and context matter.

  • Even children know the difference between being bitten by a mean dog and being nipped by his own pet when he plays with it. (165)

  • If a child smacks her sister in head and gets flicked by her parents, she will build a connection between these two and remember that it is not a good behavior. Otherwise, a child grows up to be an irresponsible, impolite adult. (165-166)

• It all boils down to discipline effectively or ineffectively (166)

• A time out alone until a child calms down can be a good punishment (166)

• Otherwise, test gradually with more force, and see which degree of force suits the child, even up to swatting over the backside (167)

If you are not thinking such things through, then you’re not acting responsibly as a parent. You’re leaving the dirty work to someone else, who will be much dirtier doing it. (167)

A summary of principles (167)

1. Limit the rules

2. Use minimum necessary force

3. Parents should come in pairs (one more here)

   • Life of an adult is usually hectic and may leave him at the danger of being unreasonable with children. This is the reason some other adult should be together (167)

4. Parents should understand their own capacity to be harsh, vengeful, arrogant, resentful, angry and deceitful. (168)

   • Adults are humans too, so they may rage over their children for insufficient reasons (168)

5. Parents have a duty to act as proxies for the real world (169)

The good child - and the responsible parent (169)

• This secion just sums up the previous claims and recommendations in the current chapter

You love your kids, after all. If their actions make you dislike them, think what an effect they will have on other people, who care much less about them than you. (170)

Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world (173)

A Religious problem (173)

• You won’t call criminals involed in serious massacres as religious, even if they have belief in total destruction of humanity. (173-174)

• Looking at these massacres leads us to rethink Being and curse the criminals (175)

• Life is full of troubles and hardships that aren’t necessarily self-inflicted. Despair, disease, aging, and death are unavoidable (175)

• Given these conditions, Leo Tolstoy knew that just comitting a suicide might as well be one of the best options out there (175-176)

• This line of thought also motivates mass murder followed by suicide (176-177)

Vengeance or transformation (177)

• A man might blame God, and if an atheist, the fate. (177-178)

• Evil deeds like murder may rise from terrible things experienced by one (178-179)

• The converse case exists too: evil doesn’t necessarily nurture another evil. It is also possible to learn good and do good by experiencing evil. (179-181)

• Solzhenitsyn, prisoner of the brutal Soviet camp, is a prime example of not cursing God (or fate) and instead (sort of) change the mainstream of thoughts in the world by debunking the communist tyranny. (181-183)

Things fall apart (183)

• Whole peoples refused to judge reality, to criticize Being, and to blame God (183)

• People build social structures and systems. But we become complacent after that, becoming corrupt and blind to the problems, as well illustrated by the Bible (183-184)

• Is it really because of God (or fate) when things fall apart? Maybe not. (184-185)

• Failure to prepare when the necessity for preparation is wel known is just nothing but sin. (185)

Clean up your life (185)

Have you clean up your life? If the answer is no, here’s something to try: Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today. (185)

• You know what’s wrong. You just need to stop doing it (186)

Don’t blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city? (186)

• 186-187 is just full of useful sentences, so just read it on your own

Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient) (189)

Get while the getting’s good (189)

• Life is suffering. The simplest solution to that may be pursuing pleasure. Is there an alternative? (189-191)

• Our ancestors gave good answers to this but we can’t still understand them due to their complexity. But we started to notice what we are doing. (192)

The delay of gratification (192)

Something better might be attained in the future by giving up something of value in the present (193)

• The theme of delay of gratification is marked by sacrifice in the Bible (193)

• We learned that regulation of impulses could bring rewards in the future (193)

• It’s still very easy to forgo the benefits in the future and spend them right away now (194)

• First question: what must be sacrified? Small ones, but larger ones bring greater impact in the future. (195)

• Second question: what would be the largest, most effective - most pleasing - of all possible sacrifices? and how good might the best possible future be, if the most effective sacrifice could be made?(195)

• Sacrifice doesn’t necessarily guarantee reward, and no one knows why (196)

• Only under stabilized civilization, a stable social contract can be expected (196)

• People learned to share with others, to receive from them in the future (197-198)

• Another question surfaces: what is the greatest possible sacrifice? (199)

• Why did God have to demand Issac’s life from Abraham despite the happy ending? (200)

• Let’s begin thinking with this: sometimes things do not go well, and that maybe because of what we value the most (200)

• How to catch a monkey: a monkey won’t take its hand out of a tiny jar without letting what he grabbed go. (200)

Something valuable, given up, ensures future prosperity. (201)

• Mary believes it’s right to bring a baby into this terrible world, who turned out to offer his life for the better of Being (201)

• The Christian sacrificial drama of Son and Self is archetypal, and can’t get more sacrificial than that, because it’s already at its maximum. (202)

• Even God had to make his Son a sacrifice for the betterment of the entire humanity. (202)

• But it was the Christ, the Son of God, who did it. Is there some practical example?: Socrates. (202)

• Socrates didn’t seek expediency under conspiracy against him, and chose death instead (202-204)

Death, toil and evil (204)

• The (natural) tragedy is not the primary source of suffering. Evil is. (204-205)

• The tale of Adam and Eve: having to work was another terrible thing, but the knowledge of Good and Evil turned out to be much more terrible (205)

• Once you experience pain, you know how to reproduce it, especially upon others (205)

• Abel’s sacrifice is accepted by God, and Cain’s isn’t. (206)

• With the knowledge of Good and Evil, Cain knows how to hurt, and so he murders Abel. The murder is even more replicated and multiplied in his descendents. (206-207)

Earthquakes, floods, poverty, cancer - we’re tough enough to take on all of that. But human evil adds a whole new dimension of misery to the world. (207)

• What motivates such evil? The hard lot of life, magnified by the consequence of continually rejected sacrifices. (208)

• The problem of life = how to sacrifice to diminish suffering + evil (209)

Evil, contronted (209)

• Cain is not happy, but Abel is. Cain envies him. That envy and hope for Abel’s misfortune brings about Cain’s conscious murder of Abel (209-210)

• Christ takes an opposite action to Cain (210)

• Christ’s taking on the sins of mankind may solve the problem of destructiveness of man and tragedy (211)

• No one can improve the situation without knowing the most wicked thoughts and the source of them. That is the reason Christ encounters Satan in the desert (211-212)

[This means that] Christ is forever He who determines to take personal responsibility for the full depth of human depravity … to contront and deeply consider and risk the temptations posed by the most malevolent elements of human nature. (212)

• Satan must be the one who confronts and offers tempts Christ because he is the very archetype of Evil and Christ is that of Good. (213)

• Christ is not tempted by Satan to transform desert rocks into bread. This means that there is more important thing than food (perhaps means expediency) even under extreme difficulties: to dine on the Word of God (the pursuit of higher meaning as the mode of living) (213-214)

• Christ overcomes the next two temptations. Second temptation: Satan tempts Christ by telling him to throw himself off a cliff, and let God save him. Christ rejects because he knows salvation does not depend on God showing his superiority asked by His Son (215)

• Third temptation: Satan asks Christ to take the kingdoms of the world, which is basically everything - power, control, submission, vengeance, … and this is a great immediate expediency. But the urge for the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth leads to the rejection of the temptation (216-217)

• But why has Christianity failed to have the desired effect? (217)

Christianity and its problems (218)

• Carl Jung hypotheized that Christianity failed to address suffering (218)

• Then people started to wonder if the material world held solutions not yet known instead, which contributed to rapid development of science (218)

• However Christianity accompanied some great achievements. Slavery was an admirable nobility before Christianity. Then it brought all people regardless of their social positions (slave, master, nobleman, commoner) on the same ground, level and rights. (218-220)

• Christianity had problems. They only arose after solving entirely different set of problems. But it’s clear that post-Christianity world was less barbaric than before. (220)

• The fact that Christianity solved such problems disappeared as time went by. Then the only problems that it couldn’t solve remained and got manifest (220-221)

Rule 8: Tell the truth - or at least, don’t lie

Truth in no no-man’s-land (241)

• JP gives two examples in his real life where he just told the truth to his patients (clients) without circumvention and that did make the situation even better. (241-245)

My landlord (246)

• JP had a neighbor who suffered alcohol addiction and couldn’t really control his life. He would wake up to JP’s house at two in the morning and try to sell his stuff to get some money to buy more alcohol. (246-247)

• JP thought a lot before speaking, and spoe the truth, that he needs to stop doing that. The relationship did not deteriorate. (247-248)

Manipulate the world (248)

• We often “act politically”, or do “life-lies” by crafting our speech (248-249)

• A person who lives by “life-lies” lives on two premises (both are unjustifiable):

  1. current knowledge is sufficient to define what is good
  2. reality would be unbearable if left to its own devices

The faculty of rationality inclines dangerously to pride: all I know is all that needs to be known (249)

• Some people define their utopia and try to make it reality. This may lead to naively formulated goal, which is not really a goal (249-250)

• If you don’t reveal yourself, that means others can’t notice you. And if you do, the opposite happens, and you can gather information and renew yourself (251-252)

• Think about the camp guards. Nobody said no when they really needed to do so. Become the one who can say that by saying it when appropriate (252)

If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character. … only the most cynical, hopeless philosophy insists that reality could be improved through falsification. (252)

• life-lie is just ignoring a very palpable stuff (252-253)

• ignoring error is also “inauthentic”: “Did what I want happen?” No. Then the world is unfair. (254)

• A liar knows he’s lying, but often soon forgets that he is lying (254)

• Not speaking up for the truth when necessary is almost the same thing too, given the example of Soilzhenitsyn debunking the true side of communism (254-255)

deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism. (256)

• not facing the truth doesn’t help at all in any situations, especially in familial or cultural contexts (256-257)

• honesty may fail to bring Paradise, but manage to reduce suffering (also demonstrated by JP’s real life examples) (257)

• totalitarianism (= everything that needs tobe discovered has been discovered) vs ‘courageous individual confrontation with being’: [totalitarian] is not what saves. What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don’t know. (259)

• one compelling failure of totalitarianism is communism (259-261)

• deceit causes misery (262)

The truth, instead (262)

• We need to make decisions, and more importantly: aim (262)

Thus, we have to think, and plan, and limit, and posit, in order to live at all (262)

• reliance on tradition (culture) could help: doing what other people always do, like making friends. (263)

• The moral from the ancient Egyption mytha bout Osiris and his son: the attentive son can restore the vision (eye) of his father (263-264)

• It’s crucial to learn from what we see (264-265)

• Every learning may cause death or a great positive change, as demonstrated by the lesson from Christian tradition (265)

• Set your ambitions, even if you are uncertain about what they could be (265)

• When you are working for the ambition, watch, observe, and improve. And do not lie to yourself (266)

• Truthfully paying attention to matters will allow your goal to transform itself (266)

• A totalitarian thinks his goal is already perfect and absolute (266)

• Do what your reality shows you, not what others’ show you. You become your own person. (267)

• But facing the truth will generate conflicts, which you will need to accep and deal with (268)

You have to take a terrible risk to find out. Live in truth, or live in deceit, face the consequences, and draw your conclusions. (268)

• You need the “act of faith” despite the risk of uncertainty. (268-269)

• The meta-goal (the goal of goals) could be “live in truth”: act diligently towards some well-articulated, defined, and temporary end. (269)

• Life is suffering, but it is insufficient to turn the world into Hell. Lies can. (269)

• Big lies, accumulated from little lies, spoil the whole world (269-272)

• Lies also often fail to produce the expected results (272)

• Hell comes when lies have destroyed the relationship between individual or state and reality itself (272)

See the truth. Tell the truth (273)

• When in trouble, try telling the truth (274)

Rule 9: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t (277)

Not advice (277)

• Psychotherapy is not advice. It’s a genuine conversation (= mostly listening) (277)

• JP listens a lot to his clients in his clinical practice. His clients have otherwise no one else to talk to. They say so many unexpected things but it’s not boring to listen. (278-280)

• JP had one client who thinks she was raped multiple times when she was drunken, making her memory about that unsure. JP could have inclined to either side: to tell her 1) that she is an innocent victim, or 2) that she’s a walking disaster. Either choice would have been accepted and understood by the client anyway, which would have been advice, but JP decided to listen instead (280-285)

Figure it out for yourself (285)

• JP let her talk, and she talked a lot, but they still didn’t figure out if she was raped, because that was such a complex question. She left the therapy less vague, though (285)

• People, when you let them talk, think. Then, they can figure out stupid things that they shoudln’t do (286)

• True thinking doesn’t mean you thinking alone. It requires disagreement, conflict, adjustment, … with other listeners (286-287)

A listening person is your collaborator and your opponent (287)

A listening person (288)

• Your reaction may affect the person talking to you (288-290)

You can be pretty smart if you can just shut up (290)

• Deciding when to talk back while listening requires great deal of considerations (290-291)

That’s key to the psychotherapeutic process: two people tell each other the truth - and both listen. (291)

How should you listen? (292)

• Carl Rogers (psychotherapist), knowing the power of listening, suggested this way of discussion: each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately. (292)

• Several advantages to this approach:

  1. You genuinely understand what the person is saying (292)
  2. It aids the person in consolidation and utility of memory (293)
  3. It poses difficulty to the careless construction of straw-man arguments (293)

• Even the speakers themselves have a hard time articulating their ideas because it’s the first time they say them (294)

Primate dominance - hierarchy manoeuvres - and wit (295)

• There are some forms of bad conversations where individuals just fight for their own stories (295-296)

• Sympathetic responses offered during a genuine (good) conversation indicate the teller is valued. Counterexample: men trying to “fix things” too early in the conversation with women (297-298)

• Lecture is also a conversation. A good lecturer would attend to the response of single, identifiable group of people: nodding, shaking head, frowning, … (299)

• Wit, fun, jokes included conversation sometimes help where appropriate (300-301)

Conversation on the way (301)

• The final form of conversation akin to listening is a form of mutual exploration: where everyone actively engages in sharing and formulating ideas (301)

• Mutal exploration is the most difficult but useful form of conversation (302)

• You must know you don’t know everything and be ready to accept conclusions drawn by others. More knowledge will make you suffer less (302)

• Converstaion desiring the truth is made up of listening and speaking. It’s engaging, vital, interesting and meaningful that way (303)

Rule 10: Be precise in your speech (307)

Why is my laptop obsolete? (307)

• Why does a laptop become obsolete just in a few years? It’s due to our perceptions and interaction between the complexity of the world and them (307-308)

• A laptop is just a tiny fraction of the entire system of the technologies, and it only takes a short time for it to fade away (308-309)

Tools, obstacles and extension into the world (309)

• We only perceive necessary ones out of many things in the complex world, but this is not the case for perceiving objects. (309)

• Objects are not directly perceived. They exist in a complex relationship to one another, not as independent objects. Instead, we make them sufficiently simple for sufficient understanding. This is the why we must be precise in our aim. (310-311)

• We also have an ability to extend ourselves into a subject. Examples: a machine, a team, a country, … (311-313)

The world is simple only when it behaves (313)

• We don’t necessarily think about how exactly a car works (bolts, joints and engines…) when we drive. But we do when a car quits (313-315)

• Our vision is usually low-resolution unless there is a need for a higher one (314)

The limitations of all our perceptions of things and selves manifest themselves when something we can usually depend on in our simplified world breaks down (315)

You and I are simple only when the world behaves (315)

• When things break down, things that were ignored strike us with a detail. Then we need to protect ourselves with precise intent and aim (315-317)

What do we see when we don’t know what we’re looking at? (317)

What we perceive, when things fall apart (like financial crisis, war, etc), is no longer the stage and settings of habitable order (317)

• That is because the chaos is usually hidden from our vision when things are in order (317)

• When things fall apart, our perception no longer works, and our reflexive, bodily response takes charge, and tries to figure our the situation (318-319)

• Example: a wife deceived by her husband who had an affair (319-323)

• Chaos continues until order comes back (319-320)

• Why is a crisis unexpected? Because it’s easier to keep the peace and not talk about the problems (321)

• The traditional division of labour has left three choices:

  1. slavery (not good enough)
  2. tyranny (not good enough)
  3. negotiation: best option, but difficult to face, because this requires uncovering all problems (322)

• If a husband or a wife decides to put up with a problem between them, the white elephant will only get bigger, and plague them all (323-325)

Why avoid, when avoidance necessarily and inevitably poisons the future? (326)

Why remain vague, when it renders life stagnant and murky? … not thinking about something you don’t want to know about doesn’t make it go away. (326)

Isn’t it better to prepare, to sharpen your sword, to peer into the darkness … ? (327)

• If you keep ignoring the problems, the outcome will not be favorable anyways (327)

Why refuse to specify, when specifying the problem, would enable its solution? (327)

• Earlier care, courage and honesty help (329)

• We can give a structure to a chaos when it appears, and re-establish order, through careful and precise speech. Vague speech will only cause things to remain vague (330)

The construction of soul and world (330)

• Problems give a rise to chaos, but this also gives a chance for new and benevolent order, if one decides to face and fix the problems (331)

• “I’m unhappy” is a good start (331)

This is difficult, but the difficulty is not relevant, because the alternative is worse (331)

Wheat from chaff (332)

• Precision separates unique terrible thing from others that didn’t happen (332)

• Maybe terrible things turn out to be not that terrible (332-333)

• Shirking the responsibility of confronting terrible things will only contribute to chaos (333)

With careful thought and language, the singular, stellar destiny that justifies existence can be extracted from the multitude of murky and unpleasant futures that are far more likely to manifest themselves of their own accord. (333)

Rule 11: Do not bother children when they are skateboarding (337)

Danger and mastery (337)

• Skateboarding is dangerous, but that’s the point for the kids (338-339)

• Canadian legislation governing the safety of children playing became stricter (notably installations of skatestoppers), but JP thinks it’s sufficiently safe and already supervised by their parents (338-339)

• If playgrounds are too safe, kids will find a way to make it dangerous again, because they want challenges. That’s what most people do to develop themselves in actual lives too (339)

We can still be both confident in our experience and confronting the chaos that helps us develop (339)

Success and resentment (340)

• There is a plentiful evidence that evil intent always exists under the hood in most human actions (340-342)

• The motivation for lawmakers may not be genuine. JP only can find the operation of anti-human spirit from the legislation (343)

More about Chris (343)

• Chris was first mentioned in page 79.

• Chris is a prime example of that anti-human spirit. Absent of a job, girlfriend, money, he grew skeptical about the society and started to hate people. He was a great disturbance to JP and his family’s lives when they were living together. Chris ended up committing a suicide later, despite his few attempts for a better life (343-348)

Self-appointed judges of the human race (349)

• We do what we can to make the best of things, in our vulnerability and fragility (350)

• The criminals of mass massacres mentioned earlier in the book appointed themselves as the judges of the human race that is supposedly failed and corrupt, allegedly assuming the role of heros (351)

• University students in humanities suffer mental health problems, berated by such criminals. And it’s worse for young men (351)

  • The natural personalities of boys and the social structure and thoughts about boys put them at an unfavorable position (this part is hard to summarize. Just read the full section) (351-354)

Career and marriage (354)

• Statistics generally show that marriage is becoming less important to people (354-355)

• Men increasingly don’t go to universities, while women preferably want to marry employed university graduates, for protection against social and economic vulnerabilities. This is not good for both women and men (356-357)

The patriarchy: help or hindrance? (357)

• Culture is oppressive, but thinking only that way is ignorant, ungrateful and dangerous (357-358)

• It is perverse to consider the culture symbolically, archetypally, mythically male, which is the reason ‘the patriarchy’ can easily be swallowed (358)

• Numerous historical evidences show that women were often put at a inferior position, when it comes to discussion of men’s tyranny (359)

• But the opression of the patriarchy was an collective attempt by men and women together to free each other from privation, disease and drudgery (359)

  • Arunachalam Muruganantham: male inventor of low-cost sanitary pad-making machine for women with menstrual period (360)
  • James Young Simpson: first started anaesthesia to ease childbirth pain, male. (360)
  • Dr. Earle Cleveland Haas: creator of first practical tampoon (361)
  • Gregory Goodwin Pincus: inventor of birth control pill (361)

• But the law and education are arguing for male oppression, and there are institutions for promoting radical political actions related to it (361)

Postmodernism and the long arm of Marx (362)

• The disciplines are heavily influenced by Marxist humanists, who believed that Western principles of individual freedom or the free market only guised inequality, domination and exploitation under the hood. Instead, a practical social change was required (362)

• Marxism put into practice in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and North Korea brought about miserable lives of the citizens (362-363)

Lest we forget: ideas have consequences (363)

• The World War I degraded the lives of most people in the West (363)

• The democratic Republicans fought against fascist Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 (364)

  • democratic Republicans had George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway. Americans, Canadians and Brits (International Brigade, set up by Communist International)

• While the attention was drawn to the Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union oppressed kulaks. A kulak is a peasant in Russia wealthy enough to own a farm and hire labor. Emerging after the emancipation of serfs in the 19th century the kulaks resisted Stalin’s forced collectivization, but millions were arrested, exiled, or killed (364)

• Despite all this, the Western attitude towards communism stayed positive (365)

• World War II broke out, the Soviet Union allied with the West, against Germany, Italy, and Japan (365)

• Several figures including Malcom Muggeridge, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Solzhenitsyn debunked communism’s moral credibility that was demolished (365-366)

• Despite such debunkers, Marxist ideas transformed instead of being removed, letting the powerful oppress everyone (367)

• Derrida argues hierarchical structures emerged to include the beneficiaries and to exclude the rest, which is built right in to the language, which is quite radical (367)

  • example: “women” because men gain by excluding women

• Derrida’s philosophy denies the idea that hierarchical structure can be made by something other than power (i.e. biological distinction between men and women, which is science, not power). Hierarchical position and reputation can’t be the consequence of skill and competence (people just dominate the field that they are good at) (368)

• The fact that power plays a role in human motivation does not mean that it plays the only role, or even the primary role (368)

• Not all interpretations (problems) are equally valid, but there are only a few viable solutions to problems (369)

  • example 1: inequal distribution of valuable goods being a threat to the stability of society doesn’t mean that forced redistribution is the solution (369-370)
  • example 2: incremental remake of university administrations into private corps is a mistake? (= the government can interfere) (370)

There is not a shred of hard evidence to support … that Western society is pathologically patriarchal; that the prime lesson of history is that men, rather than nature, were the primary source of the oppression of women (rather than, as in most cases, their partners and supporters); that all hierarchies are based on power and aimed at exclusion. Hierarchies exist for many reasons - some arguably valid, some not - and are incredibly ancient, evolutionarily speaking. Do male crustaceans oppress female crustaceans? Should their hierachies be upended? (370)

• In a well-functioning, practical society, the prime determiner of status is nothing but competence, which is well-backed by empirical and academic evidences in social sciences. (371)

• A state arguing for the hierarchy based on power is not only supporting one-sided radicalism, but also indoctrination (about ideologically-predicated theories about the nature of men and women) (371)

• Social constructionism: society must be altered, or bias eliminated, until all outcomes are equitable. This means gender differences must be regarded as socially constructed, which is not in line with the argument for transgender surgery (372)

• All outcomes obviously cannot be equalized (373)

  • Women should make as much as men; black women should make as much as white women; then should salary be adjusted for all parameters of race, or even any dimension, like IQ, attractiveness, body weight, …? (373-374)
  • Group identity isn’t a thing. It can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual: every person is so much unique (374)

• None of this complexity is never discussed by postmodernists and Marxists. (374)

• While it is empirically possible to minize the innate differences between boys and girls with pressure, that would not be freeing people of either gender to make their own choices (375)

  • Why not then force equity-minded males to be trained more on nursing, and the females on engineering? (375)

Boys into girls (375)

• Social constructionist theory also claims the world would be much improved (less aggression from boys) if boys were socialized like girls: tenderness, sensitivity to feelings, nurturance, … (375)
  • But, 1) Aggression is innate is not learned as social constructionist theory argues and 2) disappears at around age 4 as a kid grows up and 3) can bear some utility or value (376-367)

Compassion as a vice (377)

• Many of JP’s clients have problem in their jobs due to lack of aggressiveness (= overly agreeable): they go through so-called “assertiveness training” (377)

• Insufficient aggressiveness has clear disadvantages while some advantages obviously exist: one can’t speakup for oneself when one has to (377)

• Learning to feel the resentment at such a situation is important. One cause may be being taken advantage of (378)

It’s a good idea to tell the person you are confronting exactly what you would like them to do instead of what they have done or currently are doing … the person oppressing you is likely no wiser than you, especially about you (378-379)

• The opposite of a criminal is not a saint but an Oedipal mother: being too protective about a child (379)

• The moral in the story of Hansel and Gretel: too much protection devastates the developing soul (witch = Oedipal mother) (381)

• Bachofen proposed Das Mutterrecht: society was once dominated by women first, but then now men, despite no evidence to support that. Marija Gimbutas and Merlin Stone argued the same thing (381-382)

• Carl Jung, encountering Bachofen’s insistence, found that it is a psychological reality, rather than a historical one. Consciousness, a symbolically masculine trait, also helps women struggle upwards towards the light (382)

• The Terrible Mother: a too-caring mom (383)

• Various tales showing that the symbolic masculinity helps solve problems (383-386)

• Example of JP’s mother who is agreeable, but has been successful in fostering the independence of her children (386)

Toughen up, you weasel (387)

• JP once joined railway workers to work. Railway workers worked in a rude, harassing manner with one another, but that was how they got things done for hard jobs (387-388)

• Another guy (“lunchbucket”) joined, and couldn’t stand it, so he quit (388)

The harassment that is part of acceptance on a working crew is a test: are you touch, entertaining, competent and reliable? If not, go away. (389)

• The example of the famous advertisement “The insult that Made a Man out of Mac” summarizing human sexual psychology: a weak, embarrassed and self-conscious man identifies parts to improve his body to win over a bully and get a girlfriend (389-390)

• Men do not want to be dependent. That’s women’s clear advantage (390)

• Absence of Nelson (the bully) in the Simpsons would make the school full of resentful, narcissistic, touchy, soft children (390-391)

Men have to toughen up. Men demand it, and women want it, even though they may not approve of the harsh and contemptuous attitude … (391)

• Men need to toughen up by pushing themselves and one another (392)

• Enough adventure and aggressiveness among boys should help them make themselves useful (392)

If they’re healthy, women don’t want boys. They want men. They want someone to content with; someone to grapple with. If they are tough, they want someone tougher … they desire someone who brings to the table something they can’t … (392)

• If you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of (393)

Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street (395)

Dogs are OK too (395)

• JP has a dog, Sikko. Old but smart (395)

• Tajfel’s studies show 1) people are social (to the co-members); and 2) people are antisocial (to members outside a group) (397)

• This can be a solution to a complex problem of optimization between cooperation and competition (397)

• But anyway, the reason JP mentions his dog first is to have dog people sided with him too, based on the minimal group paradigm suggested by Tajfel (398)

• JP was trying to talk through an issue with a client who had a husband fighting cancer for five years who just received a death sentence (399)

• JP has two children, the daugter being Mikhaila. JP and Tammy found she had a juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) at the age of 6. (400-401)

• Thinking about Julian, his son, JP notices that what can be truly loved about a person is inseparable from their limitations (402)

• Tammy accidentally administered ten times the recommended does the first few injections of a drug that was only used for adults in Canada, Mikhaila being the first adolescent to use it. And she was fixed by then (403)

• Mikhaila was alright until she continuously took medications and reached grade eleven. Her joints were deteriorating and needed her hip replaced by then immediately (404)

• What a perfect being lacks is limitation (404)

If you are already everything, everywhere, always, there is nowhere to go and nothing to be … that idea has helped me deal with the terrible fragility of Being. (404)

• Superman, as well as other fictional heroes, got boring because he became invulnerable. So the writer had to reboot Superman with introduction of its limitations (405-407)

• But the suffering caused by such limits makes us question the existence of Being itself (407)

• But it’s also a dead end if you confront the idea of Being: suicide or genocide, or worse (408)

• One sure thing is that actions taken against the idea of Being and the world will only make life worse (408-409)

• Is there any good alternative? Can Being truly be justified, given all sorts of suffering? This can’t be answered by thinking (409)

• It should be noticing, instead of thinkning. You may notice that when you love someone, it’s not despite their limitations. It’s because of their limitations (409-410)

Disintegration and pain (410)

• Some of Mikhaila’s joints started to disintegrated again, and she had to take stronger medicine to alleviate the pain. She went through multiple surgeries, and grew quite tolerant to the medication. She ditched it soon. It wasn’t good overall anyway (410-413)

• How can you manage this? Spend some time to talk and think about how you could manage the situation. If you think about it whenever you’d like to, you’re soon going to be lost. As long as you are careful, you can manage it (413-415)

Dogs, again - but finally, cats (415)

• Dogs are like people. Very friendly. Cats are not. (415)

• But cats are almost a manifestation of nature, of Being. (415)

• Cats will sometimes let you pet, sometimes not (415)

• Apart from petting cats, perhaps there is something that would make you laugh or be relieved for some weird reasons. Do it. (i.e. watching Simpsons episode, for JP) (416)

Then you will get a reminder for just fifteen seconds that the wonder of Being might make up for the ineradicable suffering that accompanies it (416)

Coda (419)

What shall I do with my newfound pen of light? (419)

• JP was handed over a pen that would beam light out its tip so that writing would be easier in dark (419)

• Maybe, talking and reconciling with your partner and finding the truth (not the answer you want) in that process is similar to discussion with God (420-422).

• In such a spirit, what shall I do with my newfound pen of light? (422)

• JP decided to ask himself the hardest questions of life he could think of, and await the answers (using the rules mentioned). That’s what we need to do too! (423-435)

Reflections (in progress…)

Freedom

But the story of the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions - and there’s nothing freeing about that. (viii)

This is the exact same thing the book Atomic Habits suggests. If you make a habit (or in the context of this book, a rule in your life), it is rather going to free you. For example, if you make a habit to save money, it will going to give you more freedom in buying stuffs later when you need them, while on the surface it might seem like that habit is restricting you from buying anything.

Isn’t it so ironic? Mere freedom doesn’t grant you freedom. It curbs you instead.

The connection lies in Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient). Almost all expediency comes at a cost and is not necessary. You can free yourself from any rules at all, but after all, that is not meaningful and is going to limit the boundaries of what you can do, since this world is not the paradise.

Happy vs Good

In Chapter 2, JP says happy and good don’t have a single common thing together. Never thought that way, but sounds so true when I read it.

I pursue a bunch of things daily that makes me happy. I would not recommend that my dog or my child (if I had one) do the same. But why am I doing that myself!? This is the moment I realized that I just need to stop all of this. I shouldn’t be pursuing things that make me only happy.

Good things tend to last long. Happy things don’t. I think that’s one big difference. Watching a fun short clip on Youtube, for example, surely makes you happy, but it does not deserve to be said ‘good’ for you (or ‘bad’, it’s just rather nothing but something that makes you happy)

Order and chaos

Everyone, if not consciously, at least should have an underlying sense of order and chaos in the corner of their minds. We know when things go ‘unlike the plan’. We know when things go ”as planned’.

As JP mentioned, such a phenomenon is unavoidable and already everywhere.

So what becomes important is what I do then. How much am I confident in surviving the world of order and chaos? How much am I ready and prepared in my mind to challenge myself with this?

Perhaps I will first need to start the day with the daily plans. Not needlessly long, but just concise enough to specify what it is that I need to do for the day.

Treating myself like someone I am responsible for helping

This is absurdly hard. Even with the innately selfish human nature. Even after reading the chapter 2, I still keep asking myself: what the heck is going on? Why can’t I care myself enough? Why did I miss breakfast so many times knowing that it wouldn’t be good for my health? Why did I sleep late and wake up late knowingly?

After reading Atomic Habits, I decided to get rid of the bad habits, but it wasn’t still easy. But after reading about the second rule, I now have enough motivation to try again.

There is almost not a single day, or just a single day so far in 2022 that I have missed having breakfast. I’m also making a record of the time I go to sleep and wake up since the beginning of 2022. Persistence is the key. Despite the absence of record for the late 2021, I know it must have been so dreadful. Here’s the record so far for 2022:

January:

February:

Not so bad, but not satisfying, I would say. My target bedtime is 11AM and wake-up time 7AM or earlier. But overall, it’s much more positive than the last year’s me. I got this and I can do this.

Growing the hell up: what it means to be a responsible adult

I personally think being a responsible adult is one of the palpable themes in the book. Specifically, Rule 5 entails the reason to be one. Although the title reads Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them, JP’s point is right on the fact that all children will become adults some day. Therefore, if children are not disciplined and not trained to be social and responsible to live along with others, they are not going to be a good adult when they grow up. That’s JP’s insistence with which I agree.

If you search ‘grow the hell up’ on Google, one of the first things you will probably see is Jordan Peterson’s lecture, or his tweet, or something from him anyway.

I like this wording very much: grow the hell up. Yes, everyone needs to grow the hell up.

Just thinking about how I behave throughout the day, if someone were monitoring me 24/7 and I didn’t know that (like God), then I would feel 200% embarrassed for what I have been doing.

Too many parts of my life are still so childish. Can’t control myself. No disciplines, no rules. Sometimes just doing what I want for fun, for expediency. For immediate happiness.

So that line really touched me because I really need to grow the hell up. Otherwise, what’s so different between myself and a child apart from the uselessly gigantic magnitude of my body.

An adult is an adult. An adult who doesn’t want to take responsibilties - not wanting to do the dishes, do exercises, pay the bill, take a shower, brush teeth, empty the trash can, do laundry, make a living, give presents to friends, visit parents once in a while - is just a child. It’s just doing what others always do. Easy.

In the times of Covid, especially when I am just stuck at home, no one’s watching me other than myself, so I am quite programmed to sit in front of my laptop and do useless stuffs like surfing on the web, which is obviously not quite the definition of a grown-up adult. This isn’t what I should do and I’ve got a clear aim for the year (undisclosed).

Confidence

Being stooped doesn’t help. This is what JP mentioned in the first chapter: Stand up straight with your shoulders back.

I still remember my stooped, or crooked posture during my high school years. Now that I think back, there were reasons for it:

1. My backpack was way too heavy, which my made my shoulders rounded, and overall posture stooped. Due to the stupid fear that I would leave something behind in my school locker when I would need it home, I just decided to carry everything in my bag. And that was the time iPad didn’t exist yet, and still lots of academic materials were in an actual materialistic form. Anyway, due to some naive decision I decided to carry everything in my bag, and so I even got myself a very hard and strong bag: a Swissgear one. That allowed me to carry even heavier things with me, which then contributed to stooping my neck and shoulders even more.
2. The high school was a time of difficulties. I could barely sleep and almost always could not have breakfast due to overwhelming amount of assignments and homework. I think I wanted to be compensated somehow by being recognized of my difficulty, and represented that desire by having that stupid posture, implying something like: “hey man, I’m out of my energy. Guess what made me like this”.

Overall, stupid reasons. But I fixed that right after graduating, or in the middle of my high school years - I don’t quite remember clearly. But now I’m standing up straight with my shoulders back. The only problem is that my occupation is somewhat prone to rounded shoulders (haha).

This also leads to the topic of confidence (sometimes blatancy, too). Why not get confident instead of denouncing or disbeliving yourself. Even if you fail later, there’s a bad reason not to get confident about yourself.

Everyone enters the world of chaos every moment. That often leads the way down to being unconfident. You’re doing some project at work and someone quits his job and you’re lost. You’ve filed an application for higher education and unsure about the upcoming result. You’ve launched a business and unconfident if things will work out. All of these things. But when you think about it, there’s really no reason to be unconfident. Of course, being critical and being unconfident are differnt and you already know why. Being critical is OK and will help. But unconfident? why? Even confidence with no reason may be better than unconfidence sometimes.

Good friends

I feel grateful for having my present friends. They’re all motivated, successful individuals. They know how to enjoy, challenge, endeavor, and sometimes chill. We sometimes help each other, talk through some problem, or hang out together. They are certainly not of the type that I wouldn’t want my family members or another friend to be friends with, which is coherent with Rule 3: Make friends with people who want the best for you.

Comparison and self-esteem

From some of the casual chats with my friends, I noticed that some of them are comparatively more subject to comparing themselves with others. And this is an evident problem for me too, but under my unconsciousness, I kind of try to become oblivious to this because of the fear that merely noticing it might hurt my self-esteem.

There are millions of developers who are more skillful and able than me. I’m also now ‘stuck’ between employment and education because I now need to go back to school and finish my degree, which will take at least 1.5 years for which I am not sure if I will be able to work. My friends and other successful individuals I get to look at on Linkedin are all off schools and at work, seemingly commencing a good career path. That actually makes me not want to go onto Linkedin too often. Many job offers are knocking on the door weekly but I can’t simply accept them for now, unless they are part time or full time promised for some distant future. I feel like I’m late compared to others. But Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. To iterate the core of JP’s argument just once more: there is no point comparing others with you. What’s even being late? There’s no late. Already, late can be justified when there’s someone else to be compared with.

Anyway, I decided not to slip into the swamp of dismal comparisons anymore. My goal is mine, and my life is mine. Can’t be compared with others’.

Written by Joel Mun. Joel likes Rust, GoLang, Typescript, Wasm and more. He also loves to enlarge the boundaries of his knowledge, mainly by reading books and watching lectures on Youtube. Guitar and piano are necessities at his home.