12 Rules for Life (Full) ENGLISH

(Orlando Isaí DíazVh8UxK) #1

If a father disciplines his son properly, he obviously interferes with his
freedom, particularly in the here-and-now. He put limits on the voluntary
expression of his son’s Being. forcing him to take his place as a socialized
member of the world. Such a father requires that all that childish potential be
funneled down a singly pathway. In placing such limitations on his son, he
might be considered a destructive force, acting as he does to replace the
miraculous plurality of childhood with a single narrow actuality. But if the
father does not take such action, he merely lets his son remain Peter Pan, the
eternal Boy, King of the Lost Boys, Ruler of the non-existent Neverland.
That is not a morally acceptable alternative.
The dogma of the Church was undermined by the spirit of truth strongly
developed by the Church itself. That undermining culminated in the death of
God. But the dogmatic structure of the Church was a necessary disciplinary
structure. A long period of unfreedom—adherence to a singular interpretive
structure—is necessary for the development of a free mind. Christian dogma
provided that unfreedom. But the dogma is dead, at least to the modern
Western mind. It perished along with God. What has emerged from behind its
corpse, however—and this is an issue of central importance—is something
even more dead; something that was never alive, even in the past: nihilism, as
well as an equally dangerous susceptibility to new, totalizing, utopian ideas.
It was in the aftermath of God’s death that the great collective horrors of
Communism and Fascism sprang forth (as both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche
predicted they would). Nietzsche, for his part, posited that individual human
beings would have to invent their own values in the aftermath of God’s death.
But this is the element of his thinking that appears weakest, psychologically:
we cannot invent our own values, because we cannot merely impose what we
believe on our souls. This was Carl Jung’s great discovery—made in no little
part because of his intense study of the problems posed by Nietzsche.
We rebel against our own totalitarianism, as much as that of others. I
cannot merely order myself to action, and neither can you. “I will stop
procrastinating,” I say, but I don’t. “I will eat properly,” I say, but I don’t. “I
will end my drunken misbehavior,” I say, but I don’t. I cannot merely make
myself over in the image constructed by my intellect (particularly if that
intellect is possessed by an ideology). I have a nature, and so do you, and so
do we all. We must discover that nature, and contend with it, before making
peace with ourselves. What is it, that we most truly are? What is it that we

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