This book is a bit difficult for me to review. Before reading it I listened to 100+ hours of JBP lectures, debates, and interviews. There’s no doubt that he’s brilliant and that his unique perspective is worth considering. However, If I had to recommend just one of his works, it would be his biblical lecture series: not this. The book isn’t bad, in fact, there were some parts that were deeply interesting. At first, I thought the issue must be because so much of what he says here I’d already heard him say in his lectures; however, when my wife read the book, she had a similarly difficult time getting through it. It’s a little bit of a slog: more the kind of book you’d keep by your nightstand for 2 years than one you’d cream through in a week.
Most critics of the book say it’s trite or banal; filled with obvious and overused aphorisms. They’re not entirely wrong, in the words of Jim Rohn “You’ve Got To Be A Little Suspicious Of Someone Who Says, “I’ve Got A New Fundamental.” Those with this critique are missing the point of the book (and perhaps self-help books in general). JBP’s great ability is to take the mundane copybook heading and show why it’s been considered a god for several thousand years. He takes a unique combination of deep expertise in philosophy, psychology, narrative, and evolution, and weaves them together into an extraordinary if somewhat disjointed thesis.
- Stand up straight with your shoulders back
- “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).”
- “And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”
- Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
- “Love yourself as thy neighbor” might be a good way of summing this up.
- “We deserve some respect. You deserve some respect. You are important to other people, as much as to yourself. You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself. You should take care of, help and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help and be good to someone you loved and valued. You may therefore have to conduct yourself habitually in a manner that allows you some respect for your own Being—and fair enough. But every person is deeply flawed. Everyone falls short of the glory of God. If that stark fact meant, however, that we had no responsibility to care, for ourselves as much as others, everyone would be brutally punished all the time. That would not be good. That would make the shortcomings of the world, which can make everyone who thinks honestly question the very propriety of the world, worse in every way. That simply cannot be the proper path forward.”
- Make friends with people who want the best for you
- Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
- “Always place your becoming above your current being.”
- “If you remember that something bad happened, and you can figure out why, then you can try to avoid that bad thing happening again. That’s the purpose of memory. It’s not “to remember the past.” It’s to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over.”
- Don’t let your kids do anything that makes you dislike them
- “When my now-adult daughter was a child, another child once hit her on the head with a metal toy truck. I watched that same child, one year later, viciously push his younger sister backwards over a fragile glass-surfaced coffee table. His mother picked him up, immediately afterward (but not her frightened daughter), and told him in hushed tones not to do such things, while she patted him comfortingly in a manner clearly indicative of approval. She was out to produce a little God-Emperor of the Universe. That’s the unstated goal of many a mother, including many who consider themselves advocates for full gender equality. Such women will object vociferously to any command uttered by an adult male, but will trot off in seconds to make their progeny a peanut-butter sandwich if he demands it while immersed self-importantly in a video game. The future mates of such boys have every reason to hate their mothers-in-law. Respect for women? That’s for other boys, other men—not for their dear sons.”
- “Here are some suggestions. Do not bite, kick or hit, except in self-defence. Do not torture and bully other children, so you don’t end up in jail. Eat in a civilized and thankful manner, so that people are happy to have you at their house, and pleased to feed you. Learn to share, so other kids will play with you. Pay attention when spoken to by adults, so they don’t hate you and might therefore deign to teach you something. Go to sleep properly, and peaceably, so that your parents can have a private life and not resent your existence. Take care of your belongings, because you need to learn how and because you’re lucky to have them. Be good company when something fun is happening, so that you’re invited for the fun. Act so that other people are happy you’re around, so that people will want you around. A child who knows these rules will be welcome everywhere.”
- Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
- “It took untold generations to get you where you are. A little gratitude might be in order. If you’re going to insist on bending the world to your way, you better have your reasons.”
- “It is my firm belief that the best way to fix the world—a handyman’s dream, if ever there was one—is to fix yourself,”
- Persue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
- “Always place your becoming above your current being.”
- “The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.”
- Allways tell the truth, or at least don’t lie
- “Nietzsche said that a man’s worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate”
- “Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us.”
- “If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise. Tell the truth. Or, at least, don’t lie.”
- Assume that the person you’re listening to might know something you don’t
- “So, listen, to yourself and to those with whom you are speaking. Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom.”
- “Mark Twain once said, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
- “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.”
- Be precise in your speech
- “People organize their brains with conversation. If they don’t have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds. Like hoarders, they cannot unclutter themselves.”
- Don’t bother children when they are skateboarding
- “It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them.”
- “the fundamental moral question is not how to shelter children completely from misadventure and failure, so they never experience any fear or pain, but how to maximize their learning so that useful knowledge may be gained with minimal cost.”
- Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street
- Stop to smell the roses… appreciate the beuty arround you. You get the idea.
The rest of Jordan’s critics attack him for stating things in the most unconventional ways that are at odds with PC culture. His views on the importance of gender in society, for example are extremly uncouth. “Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are choosy maters (unlike female chimps, their closest animal counterparts). 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. It is for this reason that we all have twice as many female ancestors as male (imagine that all the women who have ever lived have averaged one child. Now imagine that half the men who have ever lived have fathered two children, if they had any, while the other half fathered none).41 It is Woman as Nature who looks at half of all men and says, “No!” For the men, that’s a direct encounter with chaos, and it occurs with devastating force every time they are turned down for a date. Human female choosiness is also why we are very different from the common ancestor we shared with our chimpanzee cousins, while the latter are very much the same. 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.”
The ideas are worth considering, this book might not be the place for that consideration.