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Democrats today may see themselves as heirs to a progressive tradition that traces its lineage back to Franklin Roosevelt, or even to Williams Jennings Bryan. But that does not describe the Democratic Party that elevated Hillary Clinton to the position of standard bearer. Mrs. Clinton bears no more resemblance to Bryan, the Great Commoner, than does Donald Trump to Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator.  

“My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.”

But in the party that chose Hillary Clinton as its nominee, radicalism qualifies as no more than a fringe phenomenon. While paying lip service to the idea of “toppling” the 1 percent, Clinton herself identifies with and assiduously courted members of the moneyed elite.

YET APART FROM an affinity for wealth, status, and celebrity, what is the essence of Clinton-style liberalism? As during her husband’s presidency, it centers on a theory of political economy

The version of progressivism represented by Clinton and her allies accommodates present-day malefactors. Rather than confronting class enemies, it glosses over competing class interests.  

It is, instead, a concise summary of the worldview to which leading Democrats subscribe, albeit with this caveat: The scope of that dream is not hemispheric, but global. The Democratic establishment’s commitment to openness encompasses not only trade and borders, but also capital and ideas, all flowing without disruption.

On such matters, she merely parrots conventional wisdom. That removing barriers to technology-charged corporate capitalism will generate wealth on an unprecedented scale has long since become an article of faith everywhere from Washington to Wall Street to Silicon Valley

Since the end of the Cold War, the American political establishment has committed itself to validating such expectations. This has become the overarching theme of national politics, successive administrations, occasionally differing on specifics, all adhering to the so-called Washington Consensus

Each administration in turn has ignored or downplayed evidence that openness is not a win-win proposition. Along with riches for some have come market crashes, painful recessions, joblessness for citizens hard-pressed to adapt to the rigors of a changing market, and resistance from those opposed to the cultural amalgamation that trails in globalization’s wake.

Lost along the way were expectations that furthering the common good or promoting human virtue, not simply expanding the economic pie, might figure among the immediate aims of political economy.

the technocratic and secular liberalism embodied by Hillary Clinton has actually exacerbated the fragmentation and the atomization of society, even if elites (until now) were slow to take notice.

In fact, however, a Hillary Clinton victory, assumed as all but automatic, would have drained the election of significance.  

installing a second Clinton in the White House would have constituted a postponement of sorts, Americans kicking four years further down the road any recognition of just how bland and soulless their politics had become.  

Now that Trump has won, however, the pre-election hyperbole might actually prove justified. The United States finds itself suddenly adrift in uncharted waters. As of January of next year, the captain on the bridge will be unlicensed and unqualified

We may hope that he masters his responsibilities before running the ship aground.  In the meantime, the rough seas ahead might provide an incentive for liberals and conservatives alike to give a fresh look to some of those ideological alternatives that we just might have discarded prematurely.

But periodic protests are not enough. Resistance movements need the support of permanent infrastructure. And they must be willing to engage in the time-intensive and expensive organizing that actually changes minds and behavior.

They elected executive committees to run their affairs, dispatched speakers to spread the word and held annual conventions. They also had women’s auxiliaries; the gender divide sounds awful today, but the women were the heart of the movement. They held fairs to raise money and sell goods made without slave labor. Then they started going door to door with petitions. The pro-slavery Congress forbade them from delivering those petitions, but that didn’t matter. Each time a woman approached a neighbor about signing, she got a chance to publicize slavery’s cruelty.

They should engage people in person, with concrete actions such as old-fashioned petition drives. Social media can help energize supporters, but beware of activism that never translates beyond Facebook or Twitter. The Freedom to Marry activists developed a smart approach to same-sex marriage rights: They trained supporters to each have conversations with five of their friends or relatives — and to ask people who responded positively to seek out five more.

“This is about community organizing rather than electoral campaigning.”

Anti-Trump forces should also embrace the potential for states and cities to become bastions of resistance.

If a Trump-tipped Supreme Court overturns abortion rights or same-sex marriage, these states could offer themselves as havens. If the GOP repeals Obamacare, they could imitate Massachusetts and pass state-based health-care systems. If the Trump administration demands any records they may have of illegal immigrants, states and cities could refuse.

“There are currents in history and you have to figure out how to move them in one direction or another,” Rhodes said. “You can’t necessarily determine the final destination. . . . The President subscribes less to a great-man theory of history and more to a great-movement theory of history—that change happens when people force it or circumstances do.” (Later, Obama told me, “I’m not sure Ben is right about that. I believe in both.”)

“I have strengths and I have weaknesses, like every President, like every person,” Obama said. “I do think one of my strengths is temperament. I am comfortable with complexity, and I think I’m pretty good at keeping my moral compass while recognizing that I am a product of original sin. And every morning and every night I’m taking measure of my actions against the options and possibilities available to me, understanding that there are going to be mistakes that I make and my team makes and that America makes; understanding that there are going to be limits to the good we can do and the bad that we can prevent, and that there’s going to be tragedy out there and, by occupying this office, I am part of that tragedy occasionally, but that if I am doing my very best and basing my decisions on the core values and ideals that I was brought up with and that I think are pretty consistent with those of most Americans, that at the end of the day things will be better rather than worse.”

we’re on this planet a pretty short time, so that we cannot remake the world entirely during this little stretch that we have.” The long view again. “But I think our decisions matter,” he went on. “And I think America was very lucky that Abraham Lincoln was President when he was President. If he hadn’t been, the course of history would be very different. But I also think that, despite being the greatest President, in my mind, in our history, it took another hundred and fifty years before African-Americans had anything approaching formal equality, much less real equality. I think that doesn’t diminish Lincoln’s achievements, but it acknowledges that at the end of the day we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.”

Obama said, “I just wanted to add one thing to that business about the great-man theory of history. The President of the United States cannot remake our society, and that’s probably a good thing.” He paused yet again, always self-editing. “Not ‘probably,’ ” he said. “It’s definitely a good thing.” 

The kind of conservatism that Irving Kristol embodied was cheerful and at peace with modern America. The political heroes for this kind of conservatism, Kristol wrote, “tend to be T.R., F.D.R. and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked.”

These conservatives, Kristol continued, reject the idea that the United States is on the road to serfdom. They “do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable. ... People have always preferred strong government to weak government, though they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of intrusive government.”

The crucial issue for the health of the nation, in this view, is not the size of government; it is the character of the people. Neocons opposed government programs that undermined personal responsibility and community cohesion, but they supported those programs that reinforced them or which had no effect.

nearly every problem with the Republican Party today could be cured by a neocon revival.

Kristol and others argued that the G.O.P. floundered because it never accepted the welfare state. “The idea of a welfare state is in itself perfectly consistent with conservative political philosophy,”

In a capitalist society, people need government aid. “They need such assistance; they demand it; they will get it. The only interesting political question is: How will they get it.”

neoconservatism was primarily a domestic policy movement. Conservatism was at its peak when the neocons were dominant

their social policy was neither morally laissez-faire like the libertarians nor explicitly religious like some social conservatives. Neocons mostly sought policies that would encourage self-discipline

How would they know if programs induced virtue? Empirically.

The Republican Party is drifting back to a place where it appears hostile to the basic pillars of the welfare state: to food stamps, for example. This will make the party what it was before the neocon infusion, a 43 percent party in national elections, rejected by minorities and the economically insecure.

The war effort itself went badly during 1917. Wilson tapped General John J. Pershing to command the American Expeditionary Force, but he gave him complete autonomy — unlike war leaders such as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who supervised their generals closely and played an active role in formulating strategy

Wilson, after declaring that the war should “make the world safe for democracy,” became complicit in one of the worst governmental assaults upon freedom of speech in American history, via the Espionage Act of 1917, and the Sedition Act of 1918.

In the autumn of 1917, as German victory approached on the eastern front, Wilson sent Col. House to discuss war aims with the British and the French. The timing could not have been worse: American troops had not taken part in any fighting and Gen. Pershing was completely noncommittal as to when they would be ready for battle.

He said that “the return of a Republican majority to either House of the Congress would . . . certainly be interpreted on the other side of the water as a repudiation of my leadership.” And so, by his very own proclamation, he stood repudiated, for the Republicans captured both houses of Congress. As usual, he had not taken time to engage in any worst-case contingency planning

in January 1918, with American influence at low ebb, he and House created his soon-to-be famous “Fourteen Points.” These principles for a peace settlement were composed by these two men in total secrecy. No members of Wilson’s cabinet were consulted, no members of Congress were consulted, no foreign heads of state or foreign ministers were consulted.

a League of Nations, the Fourteenth Point of Wilson’s manifesto, was supported by a great many influential people on both sides of the Atlantic. Again and again, such people reached out to Wilson in 1918 to offer their assistance. Wilson spurned them.

The British leaders, David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau, were beside themselves with frustration and fury as Pershing committed only minimal numbers of American troops to battle and Wilson refused to order his commander to increase the American effort.

The British and the French knew that within a few months the Germans would be able to shift massive numbers of troops to the western front for the knock-out blow in France. They needed troops from the United States right away. Wilson refused to order Pershing to speed up his timetable. Not surprisingly, the British and the French refused to agree to the principle of a non-vindictive peace.

What was wrong? There is reason to believe that the medical theorists may well be correct — that for more than a year (and perhaps for several years) before the stroke of October 2, 1919, Wilson suffered from cerebro-vascular degeneration that led to episodic dementia.

As the German position fell apart in the fall of 1918, Wilson botched the negotiations for the armistice. As usual, he sent Col. House as his representative and he gave him no written instructions at all except to emphasize his own commitment to freedom of the seas and the other principles set forth within the Fourteen Points. And so as House obsessed about freedom of the seas, harsh armistice terms were imposed upon the Germans

This begs the question: How much longer will this be thought of as a strictly Christian nation (if it ever really was one) with an overwhelming Christian government?

Furthermore, in the House and Senate at the beginning of this session of Congress, 92 percent of members were Christian, 5 percent were Jewish, 0.4 percent each were Buddhist and Muslim and just 0.2 percent were unaffiliated. For those doing the math, that leaves only one member unaffiliated: Representative Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat from Arizona.

In March, Kevin M. Kruse, a professor of history at Princeton University, argued in The New York Times Sunday Review that “the founding fathers didn’t create the ceremonies and slogans that come to mind when we consider whether this is a Christian nation. Our grandfathers did.” This, according to Kruse, began with anti-New Deal business leaders in the 1930s who linked capitalism to Christianity as a public relations move.

We already see a rising sentiment in America that Christianity is under attack and losing the culture wars. Some even try to link Christian persecution abroad to the plight of Christians in this country.

If the unaffiliated are to make their presence felt in terms of more representation, it will most likely come on the Democratic side. As PRRI points out, in 1980 unaffiliated support for Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan was by a margin in the single digits by percentage; in 2012, they supported Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by 51 percentage points.

In the ritual, crowds of pilgrims throw stones at three pillars in a re-enactment of when the Prophet Abraham stoned the devil and rejected his temptations, according to Muslim traditions.

"Regardless of the investigation results, the improvement of the methods and mechanisms of the Hajj season will not stop. We have instructed the concerned entities to re-evaluate the current policy and the distribution of responsibilities," he said.

On September 11, just days before this year's Hajj started, a construction crane crashed through the roof of another Hajj destination, the Grand Mosque in Mecca, killing 107 people. At least 238 others suffered injuries when a powerful storm toppled the crane.Losing one's life during the Hajj season is considered by many devout Muslims as an entry to heaven.

Americans like being “first” with ideas. But as Abraham Lincoln reminded us, more than four-score years later, the nation founded in a revolution against monarchy had to fight a second revolution against itself in order to determine whether the “proposition” of “equality” had a future in any republic

In the wake of this war, Americans faced a profound and all but impossible challenge of achieving two deeply contradictory goals—healing and justice. Healing took generations in many families, if it ever came at all. Justice was fiercely contested.

the defeated in this civil war eventually came to control large elements of the event’s meaning, legacies, and policy implications, a reality wracked with irony and driven by the nation’s persistence racism.

A shooting war between huge formal armies did indeed end in the spring of 1865 after four years of physical, environmental, social, and human devastation.

The “Union,” and all that it meant to northerners as a kind of shield for liberal democracy against oligarchy and aristocracy, survived. It was transformed through blood and reimagined for later generations. The first American republic, created out of revolution in the late 18th century, was in effect destroyed. A new, second republic took its place, given a violent birth in the emancipation of four million slaves and the re-crafting of the U. S. Constitution in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Those Amendments—ending legal slavery forever, sanctifying birthright citizenship and establishing “equal protection of the law,” and creating black male suffrage—in effect re-made the United States Constitution. This comprised a second American revolution.  

as many as 750,000 American soldiers and sailors may have died in the conflict, the majority from disease. Approximately 1.2 million were wounded

There is no reasonable count of civilian deaths, nor of the numbers of freed slaves who perished in the struggle for their own emancipation. Research now suggests that a quarter of all freedmen who made it to contraband camps operated by the Union forces died in the process

The Reconstruction era, stretching from 1865 to 1877, was one long referendum on the meaning and memory of the verdicts reached at Appomattox. Differing visions of America’s future were at stake.

Perhaps above all, America is a society riven by conflict over federalism, the never-ending debate over the proper relation of federal to state powe

In a new book, historian Gregory Downs persuasively argues that a long and persistent “occupation” occurred for at least three years, and perhaps as long as six years, after the end of actual hostilities in spring, 1865

As the federal troops receded from view over time, large swaths of the former Confederate states descended into chaos, anarchy and violence, requiring a sustained use of Constitutional “war powers” to maintain any order. Indeed, as Downs shows, a genuine, if inadequate “occupation” was engineered by the U. S. government, almost without precedent, in order to try to bring control to a region that fell into “statelessness,” as it also revolted against defeat and all that it meant. Downs wants his work to speak to the present, and indeed it should. He urges libertarians of today to take notice because this history, as he says, demonstrates that “freedom is only possible within the state.”

violence left Reconstruction’s most vexing, twisted legacy. In 1866, bloody massacres of blacks and the destruction of freedmen’s communities wracked the cities of Memphis and New Orleans. In the political violence of Reconstruction, especially in the periods 1868-71 and again in 1875-77, a counter-revolution unfolded

Their violence reveals the implications of an unending struggle over race, power, land, and hugely different visions of the ideas of liberty and federalism

For a very long time, white Southerners experienced a lethal case of alienation and an explosive sense of grievance, however mythical the origins of those grievances or horrible their outcomes. Since most of the rural South was unpoliced by Union troops, despite the accusations of colonial “occupation” and “bayonet rule,” white Southerners unleashed a bloody fury against blacks and white Republicans born of lost battles, lost mastery, alleged political repression, and the need for “scapegoats” in their scorn for a racial order turned upside down.

too much of the political process of Reconstruction became war by other means. By whippings, rapes, the burning of houses, schools and churches, the violent disruption or intimidation of local Republican party meetings, and hundreds of murders and lynchings over a period of less than a decade the Klan and its minions (called variously “Red Shirts” or “white leaguers” and many other names) sought to win back as much of a status quo antebellum as they could achieve. Their victims were teachers, black students, white and black politicians, and uncounted numbers of freedmen and their families who participated in politics or gained some economic autonomy. The record of Reconstruction violence has been clinically detailed, but it is a piece of history that most Americans still prefer to avoid

This litany of horror and blood can become almost endless, and it represents the one time in American history when sustained uses of terror successfully worked to transform political regimes. In a process Southerners called “Southern Redemption,” eight of the 11 ex-Confederate states came back under white supremacist, Democratic party control by 1875

Much has changed in the fifty years since the crises of 1963—in law, in schooling, in scholarship, in race relations. But whatever the engines of history actually are, what seems apparent is that the legacies of the American Civil War have tended to subside and reemerge in a never-ending succession of revolutions and counter-revolution

the presidency of Barack Obama might be seen as a robust new chapter in this story. A significant segment of American society hates the President and cannot seem to abide a black family living in the White House.

equality is process of historical change. It forever tacks against the trade winds of individualism, self-interest, material accumulation, and widely varying notions of the idea of “liberty” from which it draws momentum.

Yes, the Civil War was rooted in states’ rights, but like any other constitutional doctrine, it significance rests with the issue in whose service it is employed. States’ rights for or to do what? For whom or against whom

In 1860 and 1861, some Southerners exercised “state sovereignty” as an act of revolution in the interest, as they said over and over themselves, of preserving a racial order founded on slavery

far-right federalists, who dominate the movement called the Tea Party, and who have found a vigorous leadership position at the heart of the Republican Party and on the federal judiciary, have much in common with the secessionists of 1861. Both groups are distinct minorities who have suddenly seized an inordinate degree of power due to congressional districting practices and effective use of conspiracy theories about centralization and the “leviathan” state

One acted in revolution to create and save a slaveholders’ republic; the other seems determined to render the modern federal government all but obsolete for any purpose beyond national defense and the protection of private citizens from having to participate in a social contract with their fellow citizens in tax-supported programs such as Social Security, Medicare, public education, environmental protection, or disaster relief

Both groups claim their mantle of righteousness in the name of “liberty,” privatization, hyper-individualism and racial supremacy (one openly, the other covertly

Both vehemently claim the authority of the “Founders” as though the American Revolution and the creation of the Constitution have no history. Modern-day states’ rightists and sometimes nullifiers embrace versions of federalism that might once have been thought all but buried in the mass slaughter of the Civil War, or in the imperatives of the New Deal’s response to the Great Depression, or in the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts, or in the battle over the Environmental Protection Agency.

The radical wing of the conservative movement in America, still ascendant in Congress and dominant in most of the South, seems determined to repeal much of the twentieth-century social legislation, and even tear up its constitutional and social roots in the transformations of the 1860s.

History may seem to have its lulls when it slows down and impinges less on our lives; then we are hit with massive crises, often to our utter surprise, and history speeds up beyond human comprehension.

It is impossible to grasp a turning point in history until it has happened, and understanding it may take a generation or more

“Misunderstanding of the present,” wrote Bloch, “is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present.”

Making “men equal on earth in the sight of other men,” to borrow again from Baldwin, is a long-term proposition, and for that matter, a definition of the meaning of America.

there’s no guarantee that such a majority will be established in time to walk the country backward from the fiscal cliff. And in the meantime, our leaders have a responsibility that transcends their ideological differences: the responsibility to work with one another to keep the country solvent.

She created two sets of rules for her game: an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents. Her dualistic approach was a teaching tool meant to demonstrate that the first set of rules was morally superior.

Elizabeth Magie was born in Macomb, Ill., in 1866, the year after the Civil War ended and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Her father, James Magie, was a newspaper publisher and an abolitionist who accompanied Lincoln as he traveled around Illinois in the late 1850s debating politics with Stephen Douglas.

On some level, Lizzie understood that the game provided a context — it was just a game, after all — in which players could lash out at friends and family in a way that they often couldn’t in daily life. She understood the power of drama and the potency of assuming roles outside of one’s everyday identity. Her game spread, becoming a folk favorite among left-wing intellectuals, particularly in the Northeast.

As an anti-monopolist, James Magie drew from the theories of George, a charismatic politician and economist who believed that individuals should own 100 percent of what they made or created, but that everything found in nature, particularly land, should belong to everyone. George was a proponent of the “land value tax,” also known as the “single tax.” The general idea was to tax land, and only land, shifting the tax burden to wealthy landlords. His message resonated with many Americans in the late 1800s, when poverty and squalor were on full display in the country’s urban centers.

Several years after she obtained the patent for her game, and finding it difficult to support herself on the $10 a week she was earning as a stenographer, Magie staged an audacious stunt mocking marriage as the only option for women; it made national headlines. Purchasing an advertisement, she offered herself for sale as a “young woman American slave” to the highest bidder. Her ad said that she was “not beautiful, but very attractive,” and that she had “features full of character and strength, yet truly feminine.”Continue reading the main story The ad quickly became the subject of news stories and gossip columns in newspapers around the country. The goal of the stunt, Magie told reporters, was to make a statement about the dismal position of women. “We are not machines,” Magie said. “Girls have minds, desires, hopes and ambition.”

“It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences,” Magie said of her game in a 1902 issue of The Single Tax Review. “It might well have been called the ‘Game of Life,’ as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seem to have, i.e., the accumulation of wealth.”

When she applied for a patent for her game in 1903, Magie was in her 30s. She represented the less than 1 percent of all patent applicants at the time who were women. (Magie also dabbled in engineering; in her 20s, she invented a gadget that allowed paper to pass through typewriter rollers with more ease.)

In its efforts to seize total control of Monopoly and other related games, the company struck a deal with Magie to purchase her Landlord’s Game patent and two more of her game ideas not long after it made its deal with Darrow.

Magie’s identity as Monopoly’s inventor was uncovered by accident. In 1973, Ralph Anspach, an economics professor, began a decade-long legal battle against Parker Brothers over the creation of his Anti-Monopoly game. In researching his case, he uncovered Magie’s patents and Monopoly’s folk-game roots. He became consumed with telling the truth of what he calls “the Monopoly lie.”

Roughly 40 years have passed since the truth about Monopoly began to appear publicly, yet the Darrow myth persists as an inspirational parable of American innovation. It’s hard not to wonder how many other buried histories are still out there — stories belonging to lost Lizzie Magies who quietly chip away at creating pieces of the world, their contributions so seamless that few of us ever stop to think about the person or people behind the idea.

Foreign volunteers eager to help the Republic began arriving in late 1936. In January 1937 an American battalion was formed and hastily thrown into combat the next month. Americans fought in most of the major battles that followed. About 750 of them died and a majority of the remainder were wounded, including Delmer Berg, who carried shrapnel in his liver for the rest of his life.

One of the last, killed a year and a half later, was James Lardner, a 24-year-old from a famous literary family, who traveled to Spain as a New York Herald Tribune correspondent and then decided to fight.

Roughly three-quarters of the American volunteers were members of the Communist Party or its affiliated groups. In their illusions about the Soviet Union they were of course profoundly naive. But they were not fighting for the Soviet Union, they were fighting for Spain

And almost all of these men and women (about 75 American women went to Spain, mostly as nurses) felt that the conflict might be the opening battle of another world war.

The Spanish Civil War was bewilderingly complicated. Within the republic were tensions between the Communists and the mainstream parties on one hand and, on the other, the Spanish anarchists and their allies

If we did, we would know that this speech so deeply connected to the notion of a dream of a different America begins with a history lesson, tying modern America to President Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation.

But there is more in the "I Have a Dream" speech that is often ignored or forgotten. King used the term "police brutality" twice in this historic address, and here we are many seasons later wondering why police-community relations are so tainted.

"'When will you be satisfied?'

Yet they, too, will pause on the King national holiday and say they loved the man and his ideals, when we know that is not the truth.

But they heard about the March on Washington, they heard about these people, mostly black but also white sisters and brothers, too, who were making their way to America's capital to fight for freedom, equality and jobs for all people.

And as he instructed folks to go back to their home states to keep marching and fighting for what was righ

learn that King had been killed because he was fighting for the rights of black people, of all people. Doubly confused me that his words spoke of love and peace, yet he was gunned down in cold blood on the balcony of a motel.

I lost respect for King, when I was in college, because I did not think he was as fearless as other black leaders of his time, like Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party.

For it takes great courage to love any people who do not love you. It takes great courage to push for peace with every fiber of your being when violence is the language of those who believe in hate, division and fear.

And it takes great courage to see an America full of unity and togetherness even when fellow Americans cannot imagine it for themselves.

The killings of the prayer group in Charleston, South Carolina, echoes the four little girls killed in a Birmingham church the same year King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. That kind of trauma and shock makes you question America, makes you question humanity, and makes you question King's dream itself.

To paraphrase the words Bobby Kennedy said to an Indianapolis crowd on the night King was assassinated, we've got to make an effort to be compassionate and show love, toward ourselves, toward each other, for the sake of ourselves and for the sake of America.

If we did, we would know that King declared, matter-of-factly, that America had not made good on its promise of full citizenship rights to black people. We would acknowledge, 50 years later, how sad and unfortunate it is that we are still having the same conversations about equality for people of color, women, the LGBTQ community

a lesson some of us need to learn or relearn as we engage in civil disobedience in this new millennium. But those who say movements of today are disrupting their lives also fail to connect that the civil rights movement was completely about making the comfortable uncomfortable until real justice was served.

g's "I Have a Dream" speech. My mother and her family were so poor she interrupted her education for the first of many times when she was only 8 years old, to pick cotton on land owned by local whites that had been forcibly taken from her grandfather upon his death at their hands. The family was so poor there was no telephone, no television, no radio, and no indoor plumbing.

Nor do they love people like my mother, a woman born and bred in the backwoods of South Carolina, whose 20th birthday was the same day as Ki

"I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of 'interposition' and 'nullification' — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers."

I sensed his sorrow when he talked about the need for a relevant ministry among the faith community, and how so many have moved so far away from being relevant in these times. I think of how King asked us to practice a dangerous kind of selflessness, to not put ourselves, our lives, our material things, before people. The dream cannot be only about individual success, individual progress, while ignoring the plight of others. Even if we have some form of privilege, as King himself had, we must never forget that the basics of life must be for all people.

Almost all adult males in Massachusetts, black and white alike, could vote, and almost all did. Almost all were literate. And they stood equal before the law. The previous Friday, the state had ratified a new constitutional amendment stripping out the last significant property qualifications for running for state Senate.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln’s election led the South to conclude that it had lost the argument. The seceding states left Congress with a Republican majority, able to translate the principles of equality, rights, and opportunity into practical action: homesteads for all who sought them; land-grant colleges to spread the fruits of education; tariffs to protect fledgling industries; and a transcontinental railroad to promote commerce and communication. Here was the American idea made manifest.

the Civil War tested whether a nation built around that idea could “long endure,” as Lincoln told his audience at Gettysburg in 1863. His address aimed to rally support for the war by framing it as a struggle for equality, rights, and opportunity. He echoed Parker’s speech defining the American idea in order to make clear to his listeners that it fell to them to determine whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

When the Union prevailed, it enshrined this vision in the Constitution with a series of amendments banning slavery, extending equal protection of the law, and safeguarding the right to vote for Americans of all races.

The United States and its allies triumphed in two world wars and in a third that was undeclared—the first, Woodrow Wilson said, waged so that the world might “be made safe for democracy”; the second, Franklin D. Roosevelt explained, “to meet the threat to our democratic faith”; and the third, Ronald Reagan declared, to settle “the question of freedom for all mankind.”

Each victory brought with it a fresh surge of democratization around the world. And each surge ebbed, in part because the pursuit of equality, rights, and opportunity guarantees ongoing contention

Both of these visions are corrosive, although not equally

where does the American idea stand today? To some extent, it is a victim of its own success: Its spread to other nations has left America less distinctive than it once was

On opportunity, too, the United States now falls short. In its rate of new-business formation and in the percentage of jobs new businesses account for, it ranks in the lower half of nations tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Today, Americans describe China as Europeans once described the United States—as an uncouth land of opportunity and rising economic might.

It is no surprise that younger Americans have lost faith in a system that no longer seems to deliver on its promise—and yet, the degree of their disillusionment is stunning. Nearly three-quarters of Americans born before the Second World War assign the highest value—10 out of 10—to living in a democracy; less than a third of those born since 1980 do the same

A quarter of the latter group say it’s unimportant to choose leaders in free elections; just shy of a third think civil rights are needed to protect people’s liberties.

Americans are not alone; much of western Europe is similarly disillusioned.

All of this has left many Americans feeling disoriented, their faith that their nation has something distinctive to offer the world shaken. On the left, many have gravitated toward a strange sort of universalism, focusing on America’s flaws while admiring other nations’ virtues. They decry nationalism and covet open borders, imagining a world in which ideas can prevail without nations to champion them.

many on the right now doubt that America is a land defined by a distinctive idea at all. President Donald Trump’s rhetoric is curiously devoid of references to a common civic creed. He promotes instead a more generic nationalism—one defined, like any nation’s, by culture and borders and narrow interests and enemies.

But the country has also failed to live up to its own ideals. In 1857, the United States was remarkable for its high levels of democratic participation and social equality. Recent reports rank the U.S. 28th out of 35 developed countries in the percentage of adults who vote in national elections, and 32nd in income equality. Its rates of intergenerational economic mobility are among the lowest in the developed world.

nationalism, the greatest force for social cohesion the world has yet discovered, can be wielded to varied ends. Trump embraces an arid nationalism defined by blood and soil, by culture and tradition. It accounts for his moral blindness after the protests in Charlottesville, Virginia—his inability to condemn the “very fine people” who rallied with the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis against “changing culture.” That sort of cultural nationalism can easily shade into something uglier, and glues together only a fraction of Americans.

The universalism of the left and cultural nationalism of the right are battering America’s sense of common national purpose. Under attack on both flanks, and weakened by its failure to deliver exceptional results, the nation’s shared identity is crumbling.

The greatest danger facing American democracy is complacence. The democratic experiment is fragile, and its continued survival improbable. Salvaging it will require enlarging opportunity, restoring rights, and pursuing equality, and thereby renewing faith in the system that delivers them. This, really, is the American idea: that prosperity and justice do not exist in tension, but flow from each other. Achieving that ideal will require fighting as if the fate of democracy itself rests upon the struggle—because it does.

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.

And the story suggests something more: unchaperoned, and left to our own untutored judgment, we are quick to aim low and worship qualities that are beneath us—in this case, an artificial animal that brings out our own animal instincts in a completely unregulated way.

Similarly, in this book Professor Peterson doesn’t just propose his twelve rules, he tells stories, too, bringing to bear his knowledge of many fields as he illustrates and explains why the best rules do not ultimately restrict us but instead facilitate our goals and make for fuller, freer lives.

Peterson wasn’t really an “eccentric”; he had sufficient conventional chops, had been a Harvard professor, was a gentleman (as cowboys can be) though he did say damn and bloody a lot, in a rural 1950s sort of way. But everyone listened, with fascination on their faces, because he was in fact addressing questions of concern to everyone at the table.

unlike many academics who take the floor and hold it, if someone challenged or corrected him he really seemed to like it. He didn’t rear up and neigh. He’d say, in a kind of folksy way, “Yeah,” and bow his head involuntarily, wag it if he had overlooked something, laughing at himself for overgeneralizing. He appreciated being shown another side of an issue, and it became clear that thinking through a problem was, for him, a dialogic process.

for an egghead Peterson was extremely practical. His examples were filled with applications to everyday life: business management, how to make furniture (he made much of his own), designing a simple house, making a room beautiful (now an internet meme) or in another, specific case related to education, creating an online writing project that kept minority students from dropping out of school by getting them to do a kind of psychoanalytic exercise on themselves,

These Westerners were different: self-made, unentitled, hands on, neighbourly and less precious than many of their big-city peers, who increasingly spend their lives indoors, manipulating symbols on computers. This cowboy psychologist seemed to care about a thought only if it might, in some way, be helpful to someone.

I was drawn to him because here was a clinician who also had given himself a great books education, and who not only loved soulful Russian novels, philosophy and ancient mythology, but who also seemed to treat them as his most treasured inheritance. But he also did illuminating statistical research on personality and temperament, and had studied neuroscience. Though trained as a behaviourist, he was powerfully drawn to psychoanalysis with its focus on dreams, archetypes, the persistence of childhood conflicts in the adult, and the role of defences and rationalization in everyday life. He was also an outlier in being the only member of the research-oriented Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto who also kept a clinical practice.

Maps of Meaning, published nearly two decades ago, shows Jordan’s wide-ranging approach to understanding how human beings and the human brain deal with the archetypal situation that arises whenever we, in our daily lives, must face something we do not understand.

The brilliance of the book is in his demonstration of how rooted this situation is in evolution, our DNA, our brains and our most ancient stories. And he shows that these stories have survived because they still provide guidance in dealing with uncertainty, and the unavoidable unknown.

this is why many of the rules in this book, being based on Maps of Meaning, have an element of universality to them.

We are ambivalent about rules, even when we know they are good for us. If we are spirited souls, if we have character, rules seem restrictive, an affront to our sense of agency and our pride in working out our own lives. Why should we be judged according to another’s rule?

And he felt he had to understand the ideologies that drove totalitarian regimes to a variant of that same behaviour: killing their own citizens.

Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it.

Ideologues are people who pretend they know how to “make the world a better place” before they’ve taken care of their own chaos within.

Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.

To understand ideology, Jordan read extensively about not only the Soviet gulag, but also the Holocaust and the rise of Nazism. I had never before met a person, born Christian and of my generation, who was so utterly tormented by what happened in Europe to the Jews, and who had worked so hard to understand how it could have occurred.

I saw what now millions have seen online: a brilliant, often dazzling public speaker who was at his best riffing like a jazz artist; at times he resembled an ardent Prairie preacher (not in evangelizing, but in his passion, in his ability to tell stories that convey the life-stakes that go with believing or disbelieving various ideas). Then he’d just as easily switch to do a breathtakingly systematic summary of a series of scientific studies. He was a master at helping students become more reflective, and take themselves and their futures seriously. He taught them to respect many of the greatest books ever written. He gave vivid examples from clinical practice, was (appropriately) self-revealing, even of his own vulnerabilities, and made fascinating links between evolution, the brain and religious stories.

Above all, he alerted his students to topics rarely discussed in university, such as the simple fact that all the ancients, from Buddha to the biblical authors, knew what every slightly worn-out adult knows, that life is suffering.

chances are, if you or someone you love is not suffering now, they will be within five years, unless you are freakishly lucky. Rearing kids is hard, work is hard, aging, sickness and death are hard, and Jordan emphasized that doing all that totally on your own, without the benefit of a loving relationship, or wisdom, or the psychological insights of the greatest psychologists, only makes it harder.

focused on triumphant heroes. In all these triumph stories, the hero has to go into the unknown, into an unexplored territory, and deal with a new great challenge and take great risks. In the process, something of himself has to die, or be given up, so he can be reborn and meet the challenge. This requires courage, something rarely discussed in a psychology class or textbook.

Jordan

views of his first YouTube statements quickly numbered in the hundreds of thousands. But people have kept listening because what he is saying meets a deep and unarticulated need. And that is because alongside our wish to be free of rules, we all search for structure.

the first generation to have been so thoroughly taught two seemingly contradictory ideas about morality, simultaneously—at their schools, colleges and universities, by many in my own generation. This contradiction has left them at times disoriented and uncertain, without guidance and, more tragically, deprived of riches they don’t even know exist.

morality and the rules associated with it are just a matter of personal opinion or happenstance, “relative to” or “related to” a particular framework, such as one’s ethnicity, one’s upbringing, or the culture or historical…

The first idea or teaching is that morality is relative, at best a…

So, the decent thing to do—once it becomes apparent how arbitrary your, and your society’s, “moral values” are—is to show tolerance for people who think differently, and…

for many people one of the worst character flaws a person can have is to be “judgmental.”* And, since we don’t know right from wrong, or what is good, just about the most inappropriate thing an adult can…

That emphasis on tolerance is so paramount that for many people one of the worst character flaws a person can have is to be “judgmental.”* And, since we don’t know right from wrong, or what is good, just about the most inappropriate thing an…

And so a generation has been raised untutored in what was once called, aptly, “practical wisdom,” which guided previous generations. Millennials, often told they have received the finest education available anywhere, have actually…

professors, chose to devalue thousands of years of human knowledge about how to acquire virtue, dismissing it as passé, “…

They were so successful at it that the very word “virtue” sounds out of date, and someone using it appears…

The study of virtue is not quite the same as the study of morals (right and wrong, good and evil). Aristotle defined the virtues simply as the ways of behaving that are most conducive to happiness in life. Vice was…

Cultivating judgment about the difference between virtue and vice is the beginning of wisdom, something…

By contrast, our modern relativism begins by asserting that making judgments about how to live is impossible, because there is no real good, and no…

Thus relativism’s closest approximation to “virtue” is “tolerance.” Only tolerance will provide social cohesion between different groups, and save us from harming each other. On Facebook and other forms of social media, therefore, you signal your so-called…

Intolerance of others’ views (no matter how ignorant or incoherent they may be) is not simply wrong; in a world where there is no right or wrong, it is worse: it is a sign you are…

But it turns out that many people cannot tolerate the vacuum—the chaos—which is inherent in life, but made worse by this moral relativism; they cannot live without a moral compass,…

So, right alongside relativism, we find the spread of nihilism and despair, and also the opposite of moral relativism: the blind certainty offered by ideologies…

Dr. Norman Doidge, MD, is the author of The Brain That Changes Itself

so we arrive at the second teaching that millennials have been bombarded with. They sign up for a humanities course, to study the greatest books ever written. But they’re not assigned the books; instead they are given…

(But the idea that we can easily separate facts and values was and remains naive; to some extent, one’s values determine what one will pay…

For the ancients, the discovery that different people have different ideas about how, practically, to live, did not paralyze them; it deepened their understanding of humanity and led to some of the most satisfying conversations human beings have ever had, about how life might be lived.

Modern moral relativism has many sources. As we in the West learned more history, we understood that different epochs had different moral codes. As we travelled the seas and explored the globe, we learned of far-flung tribes on different continents whose different moral codes made sense relative to, or within the framework of, their societies. Science played a role, too, by attacking the religious view of the world, and thus undermining the religious grounds for ethics and rules. Materialist social science implied that we could divide the world into facts (which all could observe, and were objective and “real”) and values (…

it seems that all human beings are, by some kind of biological endowment, so ineradicably concerned 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.

given that we are moral animals, what must be the effect of our simplistic modern relativism upon us? It means we are hobbling ourselves by pretending to be something we are not. It is a mask, but a strange one, for it mostly deceives the one who wears it.

Far better to integrate the best of what we are now learning with the books human beings saw fit to preserve over millennia, and with the stories that have survived, against all odds, time’s tendency to obliterate.

these really are rules. And the foremost rule is that you must take responsibility for your own life. Period.

Jordan’s message that each individual has ultimate responsibility to bear; that if one wants to live a full life, one first sets one’s own house in order; and only then can one sensibly aim to take on bigger responsibilities.

if it’s uncertain that our ideals are attainable, why do we bother reaching in the first place? Because if you don’t reach for them, it is certain you will never feel that your life has meaning.

And perhaps because, as unfamiliar and strange as it sounds, in the deepest part of our psyche, we all want to be judged.

Instead of despairing about these differences in moral codes, Aristotle argued that though specific rules, laws and customs differed from place to place, what does not differ is that in all places human beings, by their nature, have a proclivity to make rules, laws and customs.

Freud never argued (as do some who want all culture to become one huge group therapy session) that one can live one’s entire life without ever making judgments, or without morality. In fact, his point in Civilization and Its Discontents is that civilization only arises when some restraining rules and morality are in place.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great documenter of the slave-labour-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 assigner’s cudgel.”1 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 re-presented 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.

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.

Chaos, by contrast, is where—or when—something unexpected happens.

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,

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.

trying to address a perplexing problem: the reason or reasons for the nuclear standoff of the Cold War. I couldn’t understand how belief systems could be so important to people that they were willing to risk the destruction of the world to protect them. I came to realize that shared belief systems made people intelligible to one another—and that the systems weren’t just about belief.

People who live by the same code are rendered mutually predictable to one another. They act in keeping with each other’s expectations and desires. They can cooperate. They can even compete peacefully, because everyone knows what to expect from everyone else.

Shared beliefs simplify the world, as well, because people who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world. There is perhaps nothing more important than the maintenance of this organization—this simplification. If it’s threatened, the great ship of state rocks.

It isn’t precisely that people will fight for what they believe. They will fight, instead, to maintain the match between what they believe, what they expect, and what they desire. They will fight to maintain the match between what they expect and how everyone is acting. It is precisely the maintenance of that match that enables everyone

There’s more to it, too. A shared cultural system stabilizes human interaction, but is also a system of value—a hierarchy of value, where some things are given priority and importance and others are not. In the absence of such a system of value, people simply cannot act. In fact, they can’t even perceive, because both action and perception require a goal, and a valid goal is, by necessity, something valued.

We experience much of our positive emotion in relation to goals. We are not happy, technically speaking, unless we see ourselves progressing—and the very idea of progression implies value.

Worse yet is the fact that the meaning of life without positive value is not simply neutral. Because we are vulnerable and mortal, pain and anxiety are an integral part of human existence. We must have something to set against the suffering that is intrinsic to Being.*2 We must have the meaning inherent in a profound system of value or the horror of existence rapidly becomes paramount. Then, nihilism beckons, with its hopelessness and despair.

So: no value, no meaning. Between value systems, however, there is the possibility of conflict. We are thus eternally caught between the most diamantine rock and the hardest of places:

loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable.

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.

While writing Maps of Meaning, I was (also) driven by the realization that we can no longer afford conflict—certainly not on the scale of the world conflagrations of the twentieth century.

I came to a more complete, personal realization of what the great stories of the past continually insist upon: the centre is occupied by the individual.

It is possible to transcend slavish adherence to the group and its doctrines and, simultaneously, to avoid the pitfalls of its opposite extreme, nihilism. It is possible, instead, to find sufficient meaning in individual consciousness and experience.

How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other? The answer was this: through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path. We must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society and the world.

We must each tell the truth and repair what is in disrepair and break down and recreate what is old and outdated. It is in this manner that we can and must reduce the suffering that poisons the world. It’s asking a lot. It’s asking for everything.

the alternative—the horror of authoritarian belief, the chaos of the collapsed state, the tragic catastrophe of the unbridled natural world, the existential angst and weakness of the purposeless

individual—is clearly worse.

a title: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Why did that one rise up above all others? First and foremost, because of its simplicity. It indicates clearly that people need ordering principles, and that chaos otherwise beckons.

We require rules, standards, values—alone and together. We’re pack animals, beasts of burden. We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence. We require routine and tradition. That’s order. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown—and that is also not good. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path.

I hope that these rules and their accompanying essays will help people understand what they already know: that the soul of the individual eternally hungers for the heroism of genuine Being, and that the willingness to take on that responsibility is identical to the decision to live a meaningful life.

RULE 1   STAND UP STRAIGHT WITH YOUR SHOULDERS BACK

Because territory matters, and because the best locales are always in short supply, territory-seeking among animals produces conflict. Conflict, in turn, produces another problem: how to win or lose without the disagreeing parties incurring too great a cost.

It’s winner-take-all in the lobster world, just as it is in human societies, where the top 1 percent have as much loot as the bottom 50 percent11—and where the richest eighty-five people have as much as the bottom three and a half billion.

This principle is sometimes known as Price’s law, after Derek J. de Solla Price,13 the researcher who discovered its application in science in 1963. It can be modelled using an approximately L-shaped graph, with number of people on the vertical axis, and productivity or resources on the horizontal.

Instead of undertaking the computationally difficult task of identifying the best man, the females outsource the problem to the machine-like calculations of the dominance hierarchy. They let the males fight it out and peel their paramours from the top.

The dominant male, with his upright and confident posture, not only gets the prime real estate and easiest access to the best hunting grounds. He also gets all the girls. It is exponentially more worthwhile to be successful, if you are a lobster, and male.

dominance hierarchies have been an essentially permanent feature of the environment to which all complex life has adapted. A third of a billion years ago, brains and nervous systems were comparatively simple. Nonetheless, they already had the structure and neurochemistry necessary to process information about status and society. The importance of this fact can hardly be overstated.

evolution works, in large part, through variation and natural selection. Variation exists for many reasons, including gene-shuffling (to put it simply) and random mutation. Individuals vary within a species for such reasons. Nature chooses from among them, across time. That theory, as stated, appears to account for the continual alteration of life-forms over the eons.

But there’s an additional question lurking under the surface: what exactly is the “nature” in “natural selection”? What exactly is “the environment” to which animals adapt?

Nature “selects.” The idea of selects contains implicitly nested within it the idea of fitness. It is “fitness” that is “selected.” Fitness, roughly speaking, is the probability that a given organism will leave offspring (will propagate its genes through time). The “fit” in “fitness” is therefore the matching of organismal attribute to environmental demand.

But nature, the selecting agent, is not a static selector—not in any simple sense.

As the environment supporting a species transforms and changes, the features that make a given individual successful in surviving and reproducing also transform and change. Thus, the theory of natural selection does not posit creatures matching themselves ever more precisely to a template specified by the world. It is more that creatures are in a dance with nature, albeit one that is deadly.

Nature is not simply dynamic, either. Some things change quickly, but they are nested within other things that change less quickly (music

It’s chaos, within order, within chaos, within higher order. The order that is most real is the order that is most unchanging—and that is not necessarily the order that is most easily seen. The leaf, when perceived, might blind the observer to the tree. The tree can blind him to the forest.

It is also a mistake to conceptualize nature romantically.

Unfortunately, “the environment” is also elephantiasis and guinea worms (don’t ask), anopheles mosquitoes and malaria, starvation-level droughts, AIDS and the Black Plague.

It is because of the existence of such things, of course, that we attempt to modify our surroundings, protecting our children, building cities and transportation systems and growing food and generating power.

this brings us to a third erroneous concept: that nature is something strictly segregated from the cultural constructs that have emerged within it.

It does not matter whether that feature is physical and biological, or social and cultural. All that matters, from a Darwinian perspective, is permanence—and the dominance hierarchy, however social or cultural it might appear, has been around for some half a billion years.

The dominance hierarchy is not capitalism. It’s not communism, either, for that matter. It’s not the military-industrial complex. It’s not the patriarchy—that disposable, malleable, arbitrary cultural artefact. It’s not even a human creation; not in the most profound sense. It is instead a near-eternal aspect of the environment, and much of what is blamed on these more ephemeral manifestations is a consequence of its unchanging existence.

We were struggling for position before we had skin, or hands, or lungs, or bones. There is little more natural than culture. Dominance hierarchies are older than trees.

The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy is therefore exceptionally ancient and fundamental.17 It is a master control system, modulating our perceptions, values, emotions, thoughts and actions. It powerfully affects every aspect of our Being, conscious and unconscious alike.

The ancient part of your brain specialized for assessing dominance watches how you are treated by other people. On that evidence, it renders a determination of your value and assigns you a status. If you are judged by your peers as of little worth, the counter restricts serotonin availability. That makes you much more physically and psychologically reactive to any circumstance or event that might produce emotion, particularly if it is negative. You need that reactivity. Emergencies are common at the bottom, and you must be ready to survive. Unfortunately, that physical hyper-response, that constant alertness, burns up a lot of precious energy and physical resources.

It will leave you far more likely to live, or die, carelessly, for a rare opportunity at pleasure, when it manifests itself. The physical demands of emergency preparedness will wear you down in every way.21

If you have a high status, on the other hand, the counter’s cold, pre-reptilian mechanics assume that your niche is secure, productive

You can delay gratification, without forgoing it forever. You can afford to be a reliable and thoughtful citizen.

Sometimes, however, the counter mechanism can go wrong. Erratic habits of sleeping and eating can interfere with its function. Uncertainty can throw it for a loop. The body, with its various parts,

needs

to function like a well-rehearsed orchestra. Every system must play its role properly, and at exactly the right time, or noise and chaos ensue. It is for this reason that routine is so necessary. The acts of life we repeat every day need to be automatized. They must be turned into stable and reliable habits, so they lose their complexity and gain predictability and simplicity.

It is for such reasons that I always ask my clinical clients first about sleep. Do they wake up in the morning at approximately the time the typical person wakes up, and at the same time every day?

The next thing I ask about is breakfast. I counsel my clients to eat a fat and protein-heavy breakfast as soon as possible after they awaken (no simple carbohydrates, no sugars,

I have had many clients whose anxiety was reduced to subclinical levels merely because they started to sleep on a predictable schedule and eat breakfast.

Other bad habits can also interfere with the counter’s accuracy.

There are many systems of interaction between brain, body and social world that can get caught in positive feedback loops. Depressed people, for example, can start feeling useless and burdensome, as well as grief-stricken and pained. This makes them withdraw from contact with friends and family. Then the withdrawal makes them more lonesome and isolated, and more likely to feel useless and burdensome. Then they withdraw more. In this manner, depression spirals and amplifies.

If someone is badly hurt at some point in life—traumatized—the dominance counter can transform in a manner that makes additional hurt more rather than less likely. This often happens in the case of people, now adults, who were viciously bullied during childhood or adolescence. They become anxious and easily upset. They shield themselves with a defensive crouch, and avoid the direct eye contact interpretable as a dominance challenge.

With their capacity for aggression strait-jacketed within a too-narrow morality, those who are only or merely compassionate and self-sacrificing (and naïve and exploitable) cannot call forth the genuinely righteous and appropriately self-protective anger necessary to defend themselves. If you can bite, you generally don’t have to. When skillfully integrated, the ability to respond with aggression and violence decreases rather than increases the probability that actual aggression will become necessary.

Naive, harmless people usually guide their perceptions and actions with a few simple axioms: people are basically good; no one really wants to hurt anyone else; the threat (and, certainly, the use) of force, physical or otherwise, is wrong. These axioms collapse, or worse, in the presence of

individuals who are genuinely malevolent.27

I have had clients who were terrified into literally years of daily hysterical convulsions by the sheer look of malevolence on their attackers’ faces. Such individuals typically come from hyper-sheltered families, where nothing

terrible is allowed to exist, and everything is fairyland wonderful (or else).

When the wakening occurs—when once-naïve people recognize in themselves the seeds of evil and monstrosity, and see themselves as dangerous (at least potentially)— their fear decreases. They develop more self-respect. Then, perhaps, they begin to resist oppression. They see that they have the ability to withstand, because they are terrible too. They see they can and must stand up, because they begin to understand how genuinely monstrous they will become, otherwise,

There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character. This is one of the most difficult lessons of life.

even if you came by your poor posture honestly—even if you were unpopular or bullied at home or in grade school28—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 a 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.

the other, far more optimistic lesson of Price’s law and the Pareto distribution: those who start to have will probably get more.

Some of these upwardly moving loops can occur in your own private, subjective space.

If you are asked to move the muscles one by one into a position that looks happy, you will report feeling happier. Emotion is partly bodily expression, and can be amplified (or dampened) by that expression.29

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open.

It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).

So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.

Thus emboldened, you will embark on the voyage of your life, let your light shine, so to speak, on the heavenly hill, and pursue your rightful destiny. Then the meaning of your life may be sufficient to keep the corrupting influence of mortal despair at bay. Then you may be able to accept the terrible burden of the World, and find joy.

RULE 2   TREAT YOURSELF LIKE SOMEONE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR HELPING

People are better at filling and properly administering prescription medication to their pets than to themselves. That

It is difficult to conclude anything from this set of facts except that people appear to love their dogs, cats, ferrets and birds (and maybe even their lizards) more than themselves. How horrible is that? How much shame must exist, for something like that to be true? What could it be about people that makes them prefer their pets to themselves?

To understand Genesis 1, the Priestly story, with its insistence on speech as the fundamental creative force, it is first necessary to review a few fundamental, ancient assumptions (these are markedly different in type and intent from the assumptions of science, which are, historically speaking, quite novel).

those who existed during the distant time in which the foundational epics of our culture emerged were much more concerned with the actions that dictated survival (and with interpreting the world in a manner commensurate with that goal) than with anything approximating what we now understand as objective truth.

Before the dawn of the scientific worldview, reality was construed differently. Being was understood as a place of action, not a place of things.31 It was understood as something more akin to story or drama. That story or drama was lived, subjective experience, as it manifested itself moment to moment in the consciousness of every living person.

subjective pain. That’s something so real no argument can stand against it. Everyone acts as if their pain is real—ultimately, finally real. Pain matters, more than matter matters. It is for this reason, I believe, that so many of the world’s traditions regard the suffering attendant upon existence as the irreducible truth of Being.

In any case, that which we subjectively experience can be likened much more to a novel or a movie than to a scientific description of physical reality.

The Domain, Not of Matter, but of What Matters

the world of experience has primal constituents, as well. These are the necessary elements whose interactions define drama and fiction. One of these is chaos. Another is order. The third (as there are three) is the process that mediates between the two, which appears identical to what modern people call consciousness.

Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself. It’s unexplored territory. Chaos is what extends, eternally and without limit, beyond the boundaries of all states, all ideas, and all disciplines. It’s the foreigner, the stranger, the member of another gang, the rustle in the bushes in the night-time,

It is, in short, all those things and situations we neither know nor understand.

Chaos is also the formless potential from which the God of Genesis 1 called forth order using language at the beginning of time. It’s the same potential from which we, made in that Image, call forth the novel and ever-changing moments of our lives. And Chaos is freedom, dreadful freedom, too.

Order, by contrast, is explored territory. That’s the hundreds-of-millions-of-years-old hierarchy of place, position and authority. That’s the structure of society. It’s the structure provided by biology, too—particularly insofar as you are adapted, as you are, to the structure of society. Order is tribe, religion, hearth, home and country.

Order is the public façade we’re called upon to wear, the politeness of a gathering of civilized strangers, and the thin ice on which we all skate. Order is the place where the behavior of the world matches our expectations and our desires; the place where all things turn out the way we want them to.

But order is sometimes tyranny and stultification, as well, when the demand for certainty and uniformity and purity becomes too one-sided.

In order, we’re able to think about things in the long term. There, things work, and we’re stable, calm and competent. We seldom leave places we

understand—geographical or conceptual—for that reason, and we certainly do not like it when we are compelled to or when it happens accidentally.

When the same person betrays you, sells you out, you move from the daytime world of clarity and light to the dark underworld of chaos, confusion and despair. That’s the same move you make, and the same place you visit, when the company you work for starts to fail and your job is placed in doubt.

Before the Twin Towers fell—that was order. Chaos manifested itself afterward. Everyone felt it. The very air became uncertain. What exactly was it that fell? Wrong question. What exactly remained standing? That was the issue at hand.

Chaos is the deep ocean bottom to which Pinocchio voyaged to rescue his father from Monstro, whale and fire-breathing dragon. That journey into darkness and rescue is the most difficult thing a puppet must do, if he wants to be real; if he wants to extract himself from the temptations of deceit and acting and victimization and impulsive pleasure and totalitarian subjugation; if he wants to take his place as a genuine Being in the world.

Chaos is the new place and time that emerges when tragedy strikes suddenly, or malevolence reveals its paralyzing visage, even in the confines of your own home. Something unexpected or undesired can always make its appearance, when a plan is being laid out, regardless of how familiar the circumstances.

Our brains respond instantly when chaos appears, with simple, hyper-fast circuits maintained from the ancient days, when our ancestors dwelled in trees, and snakes struck in a flash.32 After that nigh-instantaneous, deeply reflexive bodily response comes the later-evolving, more complex but slower responses of emotions—and, after that, comes thinking, of the higher order, which can extend over seconds, minutes or years. All that response is instinctive, in some sense—but the faster the response, the more instinctive.

Things or objects are part of the objective world. They’re inanimate; spiritless. They’re dead. This is not true of chaos and order. Those are perceived, experienced and understood (to the degree that they are understood at all) as personalities—and that is just as true of the perceptions, experiences and understanding of modern people as their ancient forebears. It’s just that moderners don’t notice.

Perception of things as entities with personality also occurs before perception of things as things. This is particularly true of the action of others,34 living others, but we also see the non-living “objective world” as animated, with purpose and intent.

This is because of the operation of what psychologists have called “the hyperactive agency detector” within us.35 We evolved, over millennia, within intensely social circumstances. This means that the most significant elements of our environment of origin were personalities, not things, objects or situations.

The personalities we have evolved to perceive have been around, in predictable form, and in typical, hierarchical configurations, forever, for all intents and purposes. They have been…

the category of “parent” and/or “child” has been around for 200 million years. That’s longer than birds have existed. That’s longer than flowers have grown. It’s not a billion years, but it’s still a very long time. It’s plenty long enough for male and female and parent and child to serve as vital and fundamental parts of the environment to which we have adapted. This means that male and female and parent and child are…

Our brains are deeply social. Other creatures (particularly, other humans) were crucially important to us as we lived, mated and evolved. Those creatures were…

From a Darwinian perspective, nature—reality itself; the environment, itself—is what selects. The environment cannot be defined in any more fundamental manner. It is not mere inert matter. Reality itself is whatever we contend with when we are striving to survive and reproduce. A…

as our brain capacity increased and we developed curiosity to spare, we became increasingly aware of and curious about the nature of the world—what we eventually conceptualized as the objective…

“outside” is not merely unexplored physical territory. Outside is outside of what we currently understand—and understanding is dealing with and coping with…

when we first began to perceive the unknown, chaotic, non-animal world, we used categories that had originally evolved to represent the pre-human animal social world. Our minds are far older than mere…

Our most…

category—as old, in some sense, as the sexual act itself—appears to be that of sex, male and female. We appear to have taken that primordial knowledge of structured, creative opposition and…

Order, the known, appears symbolically associated with masculinity (as illustrated in the aforementioned yang of the Taoist yin-yang symbol). This is perhaps because the primary…

Chaos—the unknown—is symbolically associated with the feminine. This is partly because all the things we have come to know were born, originally, of the unknown, just as all beings we encounter were born of mothers. Chaos is mater, origin, source, mother; materia, the substance from which all things are made.

In its positive guise, chaos is possibility itself, the source of ideas, the mysterious realm of gestation and birth. As a negative force, it’s the impenetrable darkness of a cave and the accident by the side of the road.

Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection.

Most men do not meet female human standards. It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness.40

Women’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are.42 It is Nature as Woman who says, “Well, bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.”

Many things begin to fall into place when you begin to consciously understand the world in this manner. It’s as if the knowledge of your body and soul falls into alignment with the knowledge of your intellect.

And there’s more: such knowledge is proscriptive, as well as descriptive. This is the kind of knowing what that helps you know how. This is the kind of is from which you can derive an ought. The Taoist juxtaposition of yin and yang, for example, doesn’t simply portray chaos and order as the fundamental elements of Being—it also tells you how to act.

The Way, the Taoist path of life, is represented by (or exists on) the border between the twin serpents. The Way is the path of proper Being. It’s the same Way as that referred to by Christ in John 14:6: I am the way, and the truth and the life. The same idea is expressed in Matthew 7:14: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

We eternally inhabit order, surrounded by chaos. We eternally occupy known territory, surrounded by the unknown. We experience meaningful engagement when we mediate appropriately between them. We are adapted, in the deepest Darwinian sense, not to the world of objects, but to the meta-realities of order and chaos, yang and yin. Chaos and order make up the eternal, transcendent environment of the living.

To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure.

Chaos and order are fundamental elements because every lived situation (even every conceivable lived situation) is made up of both.

you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.

The serpent in Eden therefore means the same thing as the black dot in the yin side of the Taoist yin/yang symbol of totality—that is, the possibility of the unknown and revolutionary suddenly manifesting itself where everything appears calm.

The outside, chaos, always sneaks into the inside, because nothing can be completely walled off from the rest of reality. So even the ultimate in safe spaces inevitably harbours a snake.

We have seen the enemy, after all, and he is us. The snake inhabits each of our souls.

The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity for evil. The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal. No walls, however tall, will keep that out. Even if the fortress were thick enough, in principle, to keep everything bad whatsoever outside, it would immediately appear again within.

I have learned that these old stories contain nothing superfluous. Anything accidental—anything that does not serve the plot—has long been forgotten in the telling. As the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov advised, “If there is a rifle hanging on the wall in act one, it must be fired in the next act. Otherwise it has no

business being there.”50

Eve immediately shares the fruit with Adam. That makes him self-conscious. Little has changed. Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time. They do this primarily by rejecting them—but they also do it by shaming them, if men do not take responsibility. Since women bear the primary burden of reproduction, it’s no wonder. It is very hard to see how it could be otherwise. But the capacity of women to shame men and render them self-conscious is still a primal force of nature.

What does it mean to know yourself naked

Naked means vulnerable and easily damaged. Naked means subject to judgment for beauty and health. Naked means unprotected and unarmed in the jungle of nature and man. This is why Adam and Eve became ashamed, immediately after their eyes were opened. They could see—and what they first saw was themselves.

In their vulnerability, now fully realized, they felt unworthy to stand before God.

Beauty shames the ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living—and the Ideal shames us all.

He tells the woman that she will now bring forth children in sorrow, and desire an unworthy, sometimes resentful man, who will in consequence lord her biological fate over her, permanently. What might this mean? It could just mean that God is a patriarchal tyrant, as politically motivated interpretations of the ancient story insist. I think it’s merely descriptive.

women pay a high price for pregnancy and child-rearing, particularly in the early stages, and that one of the inevitable consequences is increased dependence upon the sometimes unreliable and always problematic good graces of men.

then God banishes the first man and the first woman from Paradise, out of infancy, out of the unconscious animal world, into the horrors of history itself. And then He puts cherubim and a flaming sword at the gate of Eden, just to stop them from eating the Fruit of the Tree of Life.

Perhaps Heaven is something you must build, and immortality something you must earn.

so we return to our original query: Why would someone buy prescription medication for his dog, and then so carefully administer it, when he would not do the same for himself?

Why should anyone take care of anything as naked, ugly, ashamed, frightened, worthless, cowardly, resentful, defensive and accusatory as a descendant of Adam? Even if that thing, that being, is himself?

We know how we are naked, and how that nakedness can be exploited—and that means we know how others are naked, and how they can be exploited. We can terrify other people, consciously. We can hurt and humiliate them for faults we understand only too well. We can torture them—literally—slowly, artfully and terribly. That’s far more than predation. That’s a qualitative shift in understanding. That’s a cataclysm as large as the development of self-consciousness itself. That’s the entry of the knowledge of Good and Evil into the world.

Only man could conceive of the rack, the iron maiden and the thumbscrew. Only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the best definition of evil I have been able to formulate.

with this realization we have well-nigh full legitimization of the idea, very unpopular in modern intellectual circles, of Original Sin.

Human beings have a great capacity for wrongdoing. It’s an attribute that is unique in the world of life. We can and do make things worse, voluntarily, with full knowledge of what we are doing (as well as accidentally, and carelessly, and in a manner that is willfully blind). Given that terrible capacity, that proclivity for malevolent actions, is it any wonder we have a hard time taking care of ourselves, or others—or even that we doubt the value of the entire human enterprise?

The juxtaposition of Genesis 1 with Genesis 2 & 3 (the latter two chapters outlining the fall of man, describing why our lot is so tragedy-ridden and ethically torturous) produces a narrative sequence almost unbearable in its profundity. The moral of Genesis 1 is that Being brought into existence through true speech is Good.

The original Man and Woman, existing in unbroken unity with their Creator, did not appear conscious (and certainly not self-conscious). Their eyes were not open. But, in their perfection, they were also less, not more, than their post-Fall counterparts. Their goodness was something bestowed, rather than deserved or earned.

Maybe, even in some cosmic sense (assuming that consciousness itself is a phenomenon of cosmic significance), free choice matters.

here’s a proposition: perhaps it is not simply the emergence of self-consciousness and the rise of our moral knowledge of Death and the Fall that besets us and 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.

The entire Bible is structured so that everything after the Fall—the history of Israel, the prophets, the coming of Christ—is presented as a remedy for that Fall, a way out of evil. The beginning of conscious history, the rise of the state and all its pathologies of pride and rigidity, the emergence of great moral figures who try to set things right, culminating in the Messiah Himself—that is all part of humanity’s attempt, God willing, to set itself right. And what would that mean?

And this is an amazing thing: the answer is already implicit in Genesis 1: to embody the Image of God—to speak out of chaos the Being that is Good—but to do so consciously, of our own free choice.

Back is the way forward—as T. S. Eliot so rightly insisted

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

If we wish to take care of ourselves properly, we would have to respect ourselves—but we don’t, because we are—not least in our own eyes—fallen creatures.

If we lived in Truth; if we spoke the Truth—then we could walk with God once again, and respect ourselves, and others, and the world. Then we might treat ourselves like people we cared for.

We might strive to set the world straight. We might orient it toward Heaven, where we would want people we cared for to dwell, instead of Hell, where our resentment and hatred would eternally sentence everyone.

Then, the primary moral issue confronting society was control of violent, impulsive selfishness and the mindless greed and brutality that accompanies it.

It is easy to believe that people are arrogant, and egotistical, and always looking out for themselves. The cynicism that makes that opinion a universal truism is widespread and fashionable.

But such an orientation to the world is not at all characteristic of many people. They have the opposite problem: they shoulder intolerable burdens of self-disgust, self-contempt, shame and self-consciousness. Thus, instead of narcissistically inflating their own importance, they don’t value themselves at all, and they don’t take care of themselves with attention and skill.

Christ’s archetypal death exists as an example of how to accept finitude, betrayal and tyranny heroically—how to walk with God despite the tragedy of self-conscious knowledge—and not as a directive to victimize ourselves in the service of others.

To sacrifice ourselves to God (to the highest good, if you like) does not mean to suffer silently and willingly when some person or organization demands more from us, consistently, than is offered in return. That means we are supporting tyranny, and allowing ourselves to be treated like slaves.

I learned two very important lessons from Carl Jung, the famous Swiss depth psychologist, about “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “loving your neighbour as yourself.”

The first lesson was that neither of these statements has anything to do with being nice. The second was that both are equations, rather than injunctions.