After struggling with health problems for more than a year, Dr. Jordan Peterson is back with the follow-up to his international bestseller, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. The new book is called Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. Although he started writing the book before COVID-19, it covers topics on everyone’s mind today because of excessive governmental intrusions designed to combat the China coronavirus.
Prelude
Jordan Peterson
The Canadian professor rose to fame in 2017 when he challenged a new proposed law, which forced him to use his students’ preferred pronouns. He regarded the law as an infringement of freedom of speech and expressed his rejection of it on YouTube. When the video went viral, he was branded a transphobic neo-Nazi by leftists.
Unlike many others, Peterson was able to stave off the accusations and instead was propelled to stardom. His book 12 Rules for Life became an international bestseller. In it, he detailed how people who had an excess of chaos in their lives could “clean up their room” and “carry their cross.”
He toured cities across the world and drew a greater audience than that of many pop stars, filled with grateful people he had helped.
Beyond Order
His second book deals with excess order in one’s life. The theme is a continuation of his first book, and although it appears opposite, Peterson seamlessly connects order and chaos. Although begun long before the outbreak of COVID-19, the book is relevant to the pandemic.
Many people today are concerned about incursions against liberty in the wake of the virus. Although it can be dangerous to those above a certain age and those who have co-morbidities, the disease is nowhere near as scary as previous pandemics, such as the Spanish flu. To many people, lockdowns seem unjustified.
Although Peterson does not refer to the virus directly in his book, he addresses the psychology of people who get addicted to order. A potentially lethal virus is certainly one example of chaos in an otherwise orderly life.
Unable to deal with such unpredictability, many people turn to what they know best: trying to control the chaos. It may explain the rise of so-called “Karens” in the wake of the coronavirus. Peterson writes:
“The order we strive to impose on the world can rigidify as a consequence of ill-advised attempts to eradicate from consideration all that is unknown. When such attempts go too far, totalitarianism threatens, driven by the desire to exercise full control even when such control is not possible, even in principle.”
An example of such appetite for control would be California’s mandate to keep on a mask between bites in a restaurant. Another would be banning a mother from flying because she is unable to keep a mask on her two-year-old child on an airplane.
The Dangers of Order
The West has not experienced any existential dangers since the fall of the Soviet Union, and few people alive today have experienced the chaos of war. That has created an environment of enhanced threat sensitivity, much like children not exposed to dirt in their childhood are more susceptible to allergies.
Therefore, even the tiniest hurdle, such as a lukewarm epidemic, may be sufficient to render a significant portion of the population hysterical and authoritarian. It demonstrates that too much order and security may lay the foundation for a truly totalitarian society. Peterson’s book could not come at a better time to teach people how to deal with this emerging problem.
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