Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

In 12 Rules for Life, clinical psychologist and celebrated professor at Harvard and the University of Toronto Dr. Jordan B. Peterson helped millions of readers impose order on the chaos of their lives.

Now, in this bold sequel, Peterson delivers twelve more lifesaving principles for resisting the exhausting toll that our desire to order the world inevitably takes.

In a time when the human will increasingly imposes itself over every sphere of life—from our social structures to our emotional states—Peterson warns that too much security is dangerous.

What’s more, he offers strategies for overcoming the cultural, scientific, and psychological forces causing us to tend toward tyranny, and teaches us how to rely instead on our instinct to find meaning and purpose, even—and especially—when we find ourselves powerless.

While chaos, in excess, threatens us with instability and anxiety, unchecked order can petrify us into submission.

Beyond Order provides a call to balance these two fundamental principles of reality itself, and guides us along the straight and narrow path that divides them.

Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. His main areas of study are the psychology of religious and ideological belief, and the assessment and improvement of personality and performance.

From 1993 to 1997, Peterson lived in Arlington, Massachusetts, while teaching and conducting research at Harvard University as an assistant and an associate professor in the psychology department.

During his time at Harvard, he studied aggression arising from drug and alcohol abuse, and supervised a number of unconventional thesis proposals. Afterwards, he returned to Canada and took up a post as a professor at the University of Toronto.

“I don’t think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil.”

“You’re going to pay a price for every bloody thing you do and everything you don’t do. You don’t get to choose to not pay a price. You get to choose which poison you’re going to take. That’s it.”

“You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don’t know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.”