12 Rules for Life

A few months earlier, in March of 2012, I had received an email from a literary agent. She had heard me speak on CBC radio during a show entitled Just Say No to Happiness, where I had criticized the idea that happiness was the proper goal for life. Over the previous decades, I had read more than my share of dark books about the 20th century, focusing particularly on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great documenter of the slave labor camp horrors of the latter, once wrote that the pitiful ideology holding that human beings are created for happiness was an ideology done in by the first blow of the work assigners cudgel. In a crisis, the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual. On the radio show, I suggested instead that a deeper meaning was required. I noted that the nature of such meaning was constantly represented in the great stories of the past, and that it had more to do with developing character in the face of suffering than with happiness. This is part of the long history of the present work. From 1985 until 1999, I worked for about three hours a day on the only other book I have ever published, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief. During that time, and in the years since, I also taught a course on the material in that book, first at Harvard and now at the University of Toronto. In 2013, observing the rise of YouTube, and because of the popularity of some work I had done with TVO, a Canadian public TV station, I decided to film my university and public lectures and place them online. They attracted an increasingly large audience, more than a million views by April 2016. The number of views has risen very dramatically since then, up to 18 million as I write this, but that is in part because I became embroiled in a political controversy that drew an inordinate amount of attention. That's another story, maybe even another book. I proposed in Maps of Meaning that the great myths and religious stories of the past, particularly those derived from an earlier oral tradition, were moral in their intent, rather than descriptive. Thus, they did not concern themselves with what the world was, as a scientist might have it, but with how a human being should act. I suggested that our ancestors portrayed the world as a stage, a drama, instead of a place of objects. I described how I had come to believe that the constituent elements of the world as drama were order and chaos, and not material things. 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. The state of order is typically portrayed symbolically, imaginatively, as masculine. It's the wise king and the tyrant, forever bound together as society is simultaneously structure and oppression. 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. As the antithesis of symbolically masculine order, it's presented imaginatively as feminine. It's the new and unpredictable suddenly emerging in the midst of the commonplace familiar. It's creation and destruction, the source of new things and the destination of the dead, as nature, as opposed to culture, is simultaneously birth and demise. Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol, two serpents head to tail. Order is the white masculine serpent. Chaos, its black feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white and the white in the black indicate the possibility of transformation. Just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos. For the Taoists, meaning is to be found on the border between the ever-entwined pair. To walk that border is to stay on the path of life, the divine way. And that's much better than happiness. The literary agent I referred to listened to the CBC radio broadcast where I discussed such issues. It left her asking herself deeper questions.