12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos — Book Review
So good, just so good!
— From Dayo, as she experiences and learns. Welcome to The Mind Palace!
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Short Take
The argument of this book? You can (should) do something, something a bit better about your life. So, you don’t end up, you know, miserable because “life is inevitably suffering”. And well, what to do about that!
12 Rules is a book about personal responsibility and I like it. Now, every chapter is a long, evolving, almost spiralling argument about one way we ought to step up to face reality so we don’t become miserable, and then, build society through collective individual action. The book is a cross between philosophy and psychology.
So, if you’re into either, you’re likely to enjoy it. It’s dense though; serious warning
My description is simple though:
“Talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show-stopping, spectacular, never the same, totally unique, completely not ever been done before, unafraid to reference or not reference, … eat it, give birth to it.”
Source (😅)
Give This Man His Flowers, Bruh 💐
I have favourite chapters; Rule 4 (“Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today”) and Rule 7 (“Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)”) live rent-free in my head.
But many other striking, well-made arguments in 12 Rules made me go, “Ugh, that was so good; underline it!”
Like, take a look at this:
“Taking the easy way out or telling the truth — those are not merely two different choices. They are different pathways through life. They are utterly different ways of existing.
[…] Only the most cynical, hopeless philosophy insists that reality could be improved by falsification. Such a philosophy judges Being and becoming alike, and deems them flawed. It denounces truth as insufficient and the honest man as deluded. It is a philosophy that brings about and then justifies the endemic corruption of the world.”
Source: Rule 8, Tell the truth– or, at least, don’t lie
And the one where I got a crash course on conversations with different or opposing opinions:
“You already know what you know, after all — and, unless your life is perfect, what you know is not enough. […] However, your current knowledge has neither made you perfect or kept you safe. So, it is insufficient, by definition — radically, fatally insufficient.
You must accept this before you can converse philosophically, instead of convincing, oppressing, dominating or even amusing. […] To have this kind of conversation, it is necessary to respect the personal experience of your conversational partners. You must assume that they have reached careful, thoughtful, genuine conclusions (and perhaps, they must have done the work that justifies the assumption).
[…] If you fail, or refuse, to do so, then you merely and automatically repeat what you already believe, seeking its validation and insisting on its rightness.”
Source: Rule 9, Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
*Emphasis is mine.
You guys! That’s a good book right there.
I like this book. I really do.
Err, The One Downer
The only thing, though, is that it’s a dense material. On some occasions, I had to recheck the chapter title because how did we get from there to here? (This is the reason why the argument on the nature of evil acts crystallized in my mind.) It can be laborious to read. But they were always well-made arguments.
Well-made doesn’t mean I agree with everything, though. I don’t believe “original sin” is the reason we don’t treat ourselves in the best manner possible. Once, I wrote on why I needed to take my meds so I didn’t go blind and deaf. I’m not sure original sin was the root cause there.
Also, that an article gave an insight somewhere does not mean said insight is the case everywhere (I’d like more data). I was glad I had read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In for Graduates when reading the latter portion of Lest We Forget: Ideas Have Consequences, a section in Rule 11. All said, these do not take away from the brilliance of the book.
Closing
Splendid stuff. It’s such a good book.
I like this book. I really do.
I hope you read it sometime too. :)
Dayo 🍹
Originally published on Substack: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos — Book Review [TMP #68]
