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And the newfound optimism comes with three big caveats: The worst may be over if too many people don't let down their guard too fast, if the more dangerous variants don't make cases surge before enough people get vaccinated, and if the vaccination campaign doesn't stumble badly.

But if none of those problems occurs, life could slowly but steadily return to something much more normal.The optimism is based on the rapid ramp-up of the vaccination campaign combined with the fact that a significant proportion of the country already has some immunity from being exposed to the virus, and the warmer weather that is linked to slower viral spread.

Now, not everyone is quite ready to say the worst might be over. Several experts worry about the more contagious variants combining with too many communities lifting mask mandates and other restrictions and too many people letting down their guard, especially over spring break and Easter.

In fact, new hot spots look like they could already be emerging, especially in Michigan and other parts of the Midwest, and in the Northeast, especially New York City and New Jersey.But while most experts agree that combination of factors is the big sword of Damocles hanging over the nation's hopes, most think that the country could avoid another big surge such as the one that occurred over the winter.

this spring, as more people are vaccinated, more people may be able to return safely to stores, restaurants and work, more children could return to in-person learning, and small groups of fully vaccinated people getting together for dinner parties indoors without masks.

the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued guidelines that say vaccinated people can already start to get together that way.And if case counts continue to decline and vaccination rates increase, many public health authorities think the summer could be even better.

It could, however, still be causing significant problems in parts of the world that haven't gotten vaccinated, which could spawn new, even more dangerous variants that could travel to the United States.As a result, the country will probably need new versions of the vaccines for the variants and booster shots. And many experts say it's crucial that the U.S. help the rest of the world vaccinate as quickly as possible, too.

By the fall, while young children still won't be vaccinated because scientists have just started testing the vaccines on them, their teachers hopefully will be. So in places where infections are low, schools should be pretty safe, experts told NPR.Students will probably still wear masks and may still need to keep their distance from one another. But hopefully no more slogging through school on laptops at the kitchen table for most kids.

Researchers such as Fauci hope that more aspects of our day-to-day lives could edge back closer to pre-pandemic times.

Some experts worry the virus could follow a seasonal pattern like the flu and surge again in the late fall or early winter. And that threat may be even greater because of the variants, especially the strains originally spotted in South Africa and Brazil that appear to be better at evading natural immunity and the vaccines.

The vaccine works against the U.K. variant, says Mokdad of the University of Washington, so with more vaccination, other variants may become dominant. "And by winter we assume these two will become the dominant one unless we have more that show up. And they will cause more infections and more mortality."But even if there is no new winter surge, the virus won't be gone. It just hopefully won't be causing anything like the suffering that's already occurred.

Americans still need to be careful: Hot spots could flare up due to the variants, people getting careless, triggering superspreader events, and among pockets of people who haven't gotten vaccinated.

But even if the country is on the road out of this, the impact has been tremendous, and the aftereffects are likely to be long-lasting, many experts say.

The pandemic revealed some deep problems, such as how society treats older people, poor people and people of color.

It could change so many parts of our lives. Our homes. Our work. Travel. How we touch each other. Will the the elbow bump replace the handshake for good?

The Black Death led to the Renaissance. The 1918-19 flu pandemic gave way to the roaring 20s. We've just begun the new 20s. It's impossible to know what world will emerge as the virus recedes. But it seems pretty clear we'll be hearing the echoes of this pandemic for a long time.

In the United States, the mutant virus has been spotted only in a handful of states but is expected to spread swiftly, becoming the predominant source of infections by March.

The new variant, while more contagious, is still thwarted by these measures. But only a few schools in Britain implemented them.

In the United States, the variant has only been spotted in a handful of states, and still accounts for less than 0.5 percent of infections. Schools remain open in New York City and many other parts of the country, but some have had to shut down because of rising virus infections in the community.

Adolescents and teenagers between ages 10 and 19 were more likely than younger children to spread the variant, but not as likely as adults. (The range for the older group in the study is too broad to be useful for drawing conclusions, Dr. Cevik said. Biologically, a 10-year-old is very different from a 19-year-old.)

Officials tested the nearly 300 students and staff at the end of that week, found only two cases, and decided to reopen.

The tests cost $61 per child, but schools that cannot afford it could consider testing only teachers, he added, because the data suggest the virus is “more likely to move from teacher to teacher than it is from student to teacher.”

Experts believe vaccines have done little to slow most outbreaks so far, but a small group of countries, primarily wealthy ones, plan to vaccinate vulnerable groups by the spring.

More contagious variants — or just lapses in social distancing and other control measures — could still bring new spikes in infections that could outpace the positive effects of vaccination.

There is no single cause behind the slowdowns, and the factors may differ in different places.

Each factor may not be enough on its own. Natural immunity, for instance, is believed to be well short of levels required to stop the epidemic.

“During the winter, when things were getting really bad, I think people saw how bad things were getting in their community and made different choices,” Dr. Rivers said.

British experts attribute the decline to a strict national lockdown put in place after the holiday season. Vaccines don’t explain it: Even though a quarter of the population has been vaccinated, only the earliest recipients had significant protection by Jan. 10, when cases there started to drop.

The challenge of keeping infections down until vaccines take effect will be considerably greater in countries with slower vaccination programs.

And a finding from South Africa that the AstraZeneca vaccine had little effect on a fast-spreading variant dealt another blow to countries that had planned to rely on the relatively cheap, easy-to-store vaccine as a part of their rollout.

Experts believe that vaccines will play a critical role in keeping infections down, preventing hospitalizations and deaths and even reducing the chance of future mutations if countries are able to vaccinate large swaths of their populations.

“We have a small window of opportunity here to take advantage of the decreasing number of new infections,” said Bruno Ciancio, the head of disease surveillance at the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.

Scientists in South Africa and Botswana who are already doing this kind of routine surveillance of the coronavirus were able to rapidly warn their research networks and the rest of the world about Omicron. Going forward, such findings must also trigger an effective collective response.

When concerning variants are identified, there needs to be a global agreement on how countries should jointly react to mitigate any health and economic harms.

Every country must also ramp up its testing infrastructure for the coronavirus.

Most important, the global vaccination effort must be scaled up to blunt the continued circulation of the virus.

During surges, countries need to increase access to the measures that can lower risk of infection, like masks. The right mask, worn properly and consistently in indoor public spaces, can provide some protection against all variants

Now that there are drugs available to treat infections, country leaders and drug companies must ensure that there’s plenty of supply and that it is available to everyone.

The world got lucky with Omicron. It’s unimaginable what would have happened if that highly contagious variant had caused disease as severe as Delta has

Michigan's surge is a combination of two factors, Gounder says: the spread of the B.1.1.7 variant combined with people relaxing on mitigation measures before enough residents are vaccinated.

Florida has the highest number of cases of the variant, followed by Michigan, Minnesota and Massachusetts, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Experts say it's more contagious, may cause more severe disease and may potentially be more deadly. And it's rapidly spreading across the country.

Here's why: It takes about two weeks after the Pfizer and Moderna second doses and about two weeks after the Johnson & Johnson vaccine before people are immune, she said. Meanwhile, Gounder added, "the incubation period, which is the time from when you are exposed to when you are infected with coronavirus, is four to five days."close dialogSign up for the Results Are In NewsletterGet the latest expert advice to live a healthier and happier lifeSign me upNo, ThanksBy subscribing you agree to ourPrivacy PolicySign up for the Results Are In NewsletterGet the latest expert advice to live a healthier and happier lifePlease enter aboveSign me upNo, ThanksBy subscribing you agree to ourPrivacy PolicyYou have successfully subscribed.By subscribing you agree to ourPrivacy Policyclose dialog

"So there is no way that a surge in vaccination is going to help curb this when transmission is happening right now," she said.

the only thing that will curb transmission right now are measures that take effect immediately.

Michigan is now reporting thousands of new Covid-19 cases daily, when just weeks ago, state data showed the daily reported case count was as low as 563 cases.

"Hospitals are being inundated," Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University, told CNN. "Michigan needs to shut down."

The first warning sign came when case numbers, after weeks of steep declines, appeared to level off -- with the country still averaging tens of thousands of new cases daily.

But governors cited fewer Covid-19 cases and more vaccinations while lifting measures aimed at curbing the spread of the virus.

Chicago officials earlier this month raised indoor capacity for bars, restaurants and other businesses and Baltimore leaders announced Wednesday they were easing restrictions on places including religious facilities, retail stores and malls, fitness centers and food service establishments -- changes that will go into effect next week.

Delaware, Montana, Alabama and West Virginia have also seen big increases.

The B.1.1.7 variant, she said this week, is projected to become the dominant variant in the US by the end of this month or early April.Despite the warnings, spring break crowds are gathering -- with Florida officials reporting too many people and not enough masks -- and nationwide, air travel numbers are hitting pandemic-era records.

Now, as the country inches closer to 30 million reported infections, cases are rising by more than 10% in 14 states this week compared to last week,

We're in a race to get the population vaccinated. At the same time, we're fighting people's exhaustion with the restrictions that public health has put in place and we're fighting the move by so many governors to remove the restrictions that are keeping us all safe."

Michigan cases are increasing the fastest, with more than a 50% jump this week compared to last,

All that while cases of the worrying variants -- notably the highly contagious B.1.1.7 variant -- climbed. The variants have the potential to wipe out all the progress the US made if Americans get lax with safety measures,

In West Virginia, Gov. Jim Justice said Wednesday that Covid-19 hospitalizations have "jumped up" slightly

Those include the rolling back of restrictions, a prison outbreak, Covid-19 fatigue, a failure to wear masks, and the B.1.1.7 variant fueling the surge, Morse told CNN. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer eased restrictions earlier this month, upping capacity limits at restaurants as well as in retail stores, gyms and other facilities.

There's a long list of factors contributing to the spike in cases in Michigan,

Justice had eased restrictions earlier this month, increasing capacity at bars, restaurants and other businesses to 100% and upping the social-gathering limit.

During Wednesday's news briefing, he added that the state has had "seven outbreaks in our church community" across five counties.

what could play a key role in helping control the pandemic will be more accessible, inexpensive coronavirus tests, top health officials

"I do believe that once we have teachers vaccinated that we can use testing in the schools -- serial testing, cadence testing -- to identify potential infections, asymptomatic infections, shut down clusters and keep our schools open."

Her remarks came the same day the CDC released updated guidance about testing, saying more and better testing should help catch asymptomatic cases and control the spread.

More than 73.6 million Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to CDC data. And more than 39.9 million people are fully vaccinated -- roughly 12% of the US population. But challenges -- including vaccine hesitancy, disinformation and inequities -- remain, and it's not entirely clear when the US will hit herd immunity -

On Wednesday, both Fauci and Walensky pushed back against questions about herd immunity, saying a lot depended on how quickly Americans take vaccines.

For now, the US still has a long way to go to overcome vaccine hesitancy,

Vaccination is the country's best hope to get beyond the pandemic, he said, "and yet there's all this overlay, and some of it is politics and some of it's social media conspiracy theories and some of it is just distrust of anything that the government had anything to do with."

Additionally, in the first two and half months of vaccine distribution, counties considered to have high social vulnerability had lower vaccine coverage than counties considered to have low social vulnerability,

The agency's social vulnerability index identifies communities that may need additional support during emergencies based on more than a dozen indicators across four categories: socioeconomic status, household composition, racial/ethnic minority status and housing type.

By March 1, vaccination coverage was about 2 percentage points higher in counties with low social vulnerability than in counties with high social vulnerability -- and the differences were largely driven by socioeconomic disparities, particularly differences in the share of the population with a high school diploma and per capita income.

Only five states -- Arizona, Montana, Alaska, Minnesota and West Virginia -- had higher coverage in counties with high social vulnerability.

Achieving vaccine equity, the CDC said, is an important goal requiring "preferential access and administration to those who have been most affected"

one study showing a 64% increased risk of death for people infected with B.1.1.7 compared to those infected with the older

implement the public health measures that we talk about all the time

That makes it more important than ever to get people vaccinated quickly,

To get as many people vaccinated as quickly and as expeditiously as possib

But vaccines appear to protect well against B.1.1.7

That's because the vaccines cause a broad immune response so that even if it's a little weakened, it's still powerful enough to prevent serious disease and death.

"The vaccine remained effective against B.1.1.7 with a slight but significant decrease in neutralization that was more apparent in participants under 55 years of age.

"had no significant effect on neutralization by serum obtained from participants who had received the mRNA-1273 vaccine in the phase 1 trial,"

if more mutations were acquired by the virus

including the B.1.351 variant first seen in South Africa and the P.1 variant that is common now in Brazil.

may much more easily evade the immune response prompted by vaccines

, it nonetheless strongly protected people against severe disease, hospitalizations and deaths in clinical trials.

that makes it even more important to get as many people vaccinated as possible before those variants can spread.

Under the changes that came into force on Monday, pubs and restaurants can serve indoors as well as outside, people can hug each other and mix inside their homes in limited numbers.

A legal ban on all but essential foreign travel ended too, though travelers to any other than a small number of destinations will have to quarantine on their return.

Pakistan and Bangladesh were red listed on April 9 but India was not added until April 23, and Mr. Johnson’s critics have suggested he was reluctant to upset India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, with whom he is trying to strike a trade deal.

While the government will fight hard not to have to reverse the changes introduced on Monday, there are growing doubts about whether it can proceed with the next stage of the road map. That change, scheduled to take place on June 21, would scrap almost all remaining restrictions.

“We must be humble in the face of this virus,” the health secretary, Matt Hancock, told Parliament on Monday, adding that there were now 86 areas with five or more cases of the variant whose higher transmission rate “poses a real risk.”

Mr. Johnson continues to hear criticism for failing to clamp down fast enough on travel from India, even sparing it for some weeks after placing restrictions on travel from Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Altogether, that represents the first real breath of freedom for many in England since the third national lockdown was declared in early January.

But some experts believe that the government should have reacted faster to the emergence of the variant. “Many of us in the U.K., we’re appalled at the huge delay in classifying it as a variant of concern,” said Peter English, a retired consultant in communicable disease control.

In general, Britons are being offered vaccination based on their age, with those oldest treated first. Appointments are to be extended this week to 37-year-olds, Mr. Hancock said.

On Monday, Mr. Hancock also said that of 19 cases in Bolton hospitals, most of the patients were eligible for vaccination but had not had one. That prompted a debate in and beyond Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party about whether the lifting of lockdown restrictions should be reversed to protect people who refuse a vaccine.

Almost all of these accidental mutations are inconsequential: The virus still looks and functions just as its parent before it did. Over time, though, sets of mutations can layer on top of one another and accumulate, and the virus begins to function differently. Some of these differences confer an advantage of one sort or another—for example, increased transmissibility.

He has been at the forefront of identifying and tracking the variant, but says huge questions remain unanswered. “There’s still considerable uncertainty as to the long-term consequences” of B.1.1.7, Pybus told me. “We don’t even know whether this lineage truly originated in the U.K., with so many countries not doing this surveillance.”

Both cities have also banned celebrations of the upcoming Hindu festival of Holi, where people gather in large groups and smear colored powder on each other. Authorities have also expressed concern about another Hindu gathering, the Kumbh Mela, held in the northern Indian town of Haridwar. It is expected to attract tens of millions of pilgrims from across the country and the government is urging local officials to ramp up testing.

Meanwhile, India has relaxed eligibility rules for coronavirus vaccinations. Starting in April, anyone who is 45 years of age or older will be allowed to get a coronavirus shot. India began its massive immunization campaign in mid-January starting with healthcare and frontline workers, followed by elderly people and people above 45 years of age with certain health conditions. Calls to open up the vaccination program to all adults have been growing, especially as cases rise.

India's second wave comes one year after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a strict lockdown with barely four hours' notice that left poor migrant workers stranded and pushed the economy into a recession. Infections began climbing when the lockdown was lifted in June and reached a peak of nearly 100,000 cases a day last September. India has the third-highest coronavirus caseload in the world, after the United States and Brazil.

"These viruses may be able to infect people who are further than 6 feet away from the person who is infected or after that person has left the space," the CDC said.

Many hospitals are now filled beyond capacity,

pandemic fatigue.

And many of those who are sick of taking precautions are getting sick.

, more people are socializing indoors.

"linger in the air for minutes to hours,"

A variant first detected in South Africa

Gathering with multiple friends indoors can be dangerous.

"If you go to a party with five or more people, almost certainly there's going to be somebody with Covid-19 at that party,"

more than 50% of all infections are transmitted from people who aren't showing symptoms.

That's an average of 3.5 people getting infected every second.Read More

The United States has confirmed at least 76 cases of a highly transmissible variant of the coronavirus that was first detected in the United Kingdom.

And the United States ranks 61st in how quickly virus samples are collected from patients, analyzed and then posted to an international database to find new variants.

While it may be more transmissible, there's no evidence this variant first detected in the UK is deadlier or causes more severe disease, the CDC said.

Some patients have been put in hospital break rooms, parking garages and gift shops.

As of Thursday, it has not been detected in the United States.

That didn't happen. Not even close.

As of Thursday morning, about 10.2 million vaccine doses had been administered, out of roughly 29.3 million doses that have been distributed across the United States, according to the CDC.

You can test

negative

but still be infected and contagious.

And don't think you're invincible -- even if you're young and healthy.

"We see severe illness among healthy, young adults with no apparent underlying causes," Hotez said.

On Saturday, Britain reported eight cases of one of the variants found in Brazil, hours after the British authorities imposed a travel ban from Latin American countries and Portugal, which is linked to Brazil by its colonial history and by current travel and trade ties. Italy also suspended flights from Brazil, its health minister, Roberto Speranza, announced on Facebook.

Scientists don't understand why the variant has spread so explosively in Brazil, and the variant carries a particularly dangerous set of mutations.

One study estimated that the population should have reached herd immunity and the virus shouldn't be able to spread easily in the community. So why would the city see an even bigger surge 10 months later? Could P.1 be evading the antibodies made against the previous version of the virus, making reinfections easier?

"In fact, it was really quite a dramatic drop-off in sensitivity. We saw that in half of the serum, the antibodies were significantly less effective against the new variant [from South Africa]." So far, scientists haven't tested out P.1 in similar neutralization experiments, but P.1 has two mutations that scientists have already shown reduce antibody binding.

The agency said the testing could be done in a single age group and then extrapolated to other age groups.

The newly tweaked Covid-19 vaccines would be authorized under an amendment to the emergency authorization granted to the original vaccine, regulators said.

“Whether the Delta variant is already at that plateau, or whether there’s going to be further increases before it gets to that plateau, I can’t say. But I do think that plateau exists.”

Antibodies, which can prevent the virus from entering our cells, are engineered to latch onto specific molecules on the surface of the virus, snapping into place like puzzle pieces. But genetic mutations in the virus can change the shape of those binding sites.

“If you change that shape, you can make it impossible for an antibody to do its job,”

But as more people acquire antibodies against the virus, mutations that allow the virus to slip past these antibodies will become even more advantageous.

The good news is that there are many different kinds of antibodies, and a variant with a few new mutations is unlikely to escape them all, experts said.

its sleeve to counteract the evolution of the virus,” Dr. Pepper said. “Knowing that there is this complex level of diversity in the immune system allows me to sleep better at night.”

“It’s a lot harder to evade T cell responses than antibody responses,”

And then there are B cells, which generate our army of antibodies. Even after we clear the infection, the body keeps churning out B cells for a while, deliberately introducing small genetic mutations. The result is an enormously diverse collection of B cells producing an array of antibodies, some of which might be a good match for the next variant that comes along.

Whether the virus will become more virulent — that is, whether it will cause more serious disease — is the hardest to predict,

Unlike transmissibility or immune evasion, virulence has no inherent evolutionary advantage.

Some scientists predict that the virus will ultimately be much like the flu, which can still cause serious illness and death, especially during seasonal surges.

“The virus has no interest in killing us,” Dr. Metcalf said. “Virulence only matters for the virus if it works for transmission.”

It is too early to say whether SARS-CoV-2 will change in virulence over the long-term. There could certainly be trade-offs between virulence and transmission; variants that make people too sick too quickly may not spread very far.

Then again, this virus spreads before people become severely ill. As long as that remains true, the virus could become more virulent without sacrificing transmissibility.

Moreover, the same thing that makes the virus more infectious — faster replication or tighter binding to our cells — could also make it more virulent.

Although many possible paths remain open to us, what is certain is that SARS-CoV-2 will not stop evolving — and that the arms race between the virus and us is just beginning.

We lost the first few rounds, by allowing the virus to spread unchecked, but we still have powerful weapons to bring to the fight. The most notable are highly effective vaccines, developed at record speed. “I think there is hope in the fact that the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines at this point are more effective than flu vaccines have probably ever been,”

“I have great faith that we can sort any detrimental evolutionary trajectories out by improving our current or next generation vaccines,”

be you have a re-infection, but it’s relatively mild, which also boosts your immunity,”

rising vaccination rates may already be suppressing new mutations.And the evolution rate could also slow down as the virus becomes better adapted to humans.

“There’s low-hanging fruit,” Dr. Lauring said. “So there are certain ways it can evolve and make big improvements, but after a while there aren’t areas to improve — it’s figured out all the easy ways to improve.”

Eventually, as viral evolution slows down and our immune systems catch up, we will reach an uneasy equilibrium with the virus, scientists predict. We will never extinguish it, but it will smolder rather than rage.

So far, studies suggest that our antibody, T cell and B cell responses are all working as expected when it comes to SARS-CoV-2. “This virus is mostly playing by immunological rules we understand,”

Others are more optimistic. “My guess is that one day this is going to be another cause of the common cold,”

There are four other coronaviruses that have become endemic in human populations. We are exposed to them early and often, and all four mostly cause run-of-the-mill colds.

much of the world remains unvaccinated, and this virus has already proved capable of surprising us. “We should be somewhat cautious and humble about trying to predict what it is capable of doing in the future,”

While we can’t guard against every eventuality, we can tip the odds in our favor by expanding viral surveillance, speeding up global vaccine distribution and tamping down transmission until more people can be vaccinated

The future, he said, “depends much, much more on what humans do than on what the virus 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.