We live in a time when many people feel lost, but our attitudes will find the path
Dr Jordan B Peterson, clinical psychologist and professor at Harvard and the University of Toronto, who grew up in Fairview, Alberta, had already helped millions of readers in his sequel to 12 Rules of Life, impose order on the chaos of their lives, by resisting the exhausting toll that our desire to order the world inevitably takes.
The will of the human are increasingly imposing itself over every sphere of life from our social structures to our emotional states – Peterson warns that too much security is dangerous, and offer strategies for overcoming the cultural, scientific and psychological forces causing ys to tend toward tyranny, and teaches us how to rely instead on our instinct to find meaning and purpose especially when we find ourselves powerless.
While chaos in excess, threaten us with instability, and anxiety. Beyond Order provides a call to balance these two fundamental principles of reality itself, and guide us along the straight and narrow path that divides them.
The zuthor suffered three years of emotional and physical hell, which he catalogues in the book’s introduction.
He’d become addicted to an anti-anxiety drug, had been suicidal and diagnosed as schizophrenia- after which he flew to Moscow against his doctor’s order to a hospital, where they put him in coma for nine days to help him with the detox, after which he had to relearn how to walk. He ended up in a rehab clinic in Serbia and also contracted Covid-19. Over these three years his wife nearly died of cancer and had to deal with the stress of going from being an obscure Canadian psychology professor to global sensation doing a 160-whistle stop world tour watched by 200 m people on YouTube.
Beyond Order will comfort us in these unstable times and connect us to our inner strength, partly showing how much of life’s meaning is to be found by reaching beyond the ordered domain of what we know.
Peterson tell you to imagine who you could be and aim at that, then he’s on about ancient alchemists, then discussing unwelcome letters one might receive from the tax authorities, and back to mystic stuff about Jupiter and Mars leading to an extended account of hw the snitch in Quidditch, the game played at JK Rowling’s Hogwarts.
His laast book 12 Rules of Life sold 5 m copies. He implies the poor had themselves to blame but he knows his Wordsworth and Freud, and likes family values and religious. He does believe in hardwork and discipline. His Rule VIII – “Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible and True beauty and majesty of the being you can no longer see”.
Rule III is have the damn fight so as to get it out in the open.
His father-in-law not telling his wife for 20 years that he did not like lunch time sandwich on a small plate, only one day to explode.
Rule X Plan and work diligently to maintain romance in your relationship.
His account of patients are curious , humsne and forgiving even the squabbling hard boiled married couple who can’t bear the thought of going on a date with each other.The reason it is important to hold a marriage together is not because of the joys of loving another person, but because rough times are always on their way, and you better have something to set against them or despair will visit and will not depart.
His hysterical love of order is because he views the state of the universe as more petrifying than most.
We should be grateful in spite of our suffering, gratitude, something in which
You can discover part of the antidote to the abyss and the darkness.
Beyond Order:12 More Rules for Life by Jordan R Peterson, Allen Lane £25/Portfolio Penguin $29, 432 pages.