12 Rules for Life (Full) ENGLISH

It took further eons of observation and hero-worship, and then millennia of
study, to distill that idea into a story. It then took additional vast stretches of
time to assess that story, to incorporate it, so that we now can simply say, “If
you are disciplined and privilege the future over the present you can change
the structure of reality in your favour.”
But how best to do that?
In 1984, I started down the same road as Descartes. I did not know it was
the same road at the time, and I am not claiming kinship with Descartes, who
is rightly regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. But I was
truly plagued with doubt. I had outgrown the shallow Christianity of my
youth by the time I could understand the fundamentals of Darwinian theory.
After that, I could not distinguish the basic elements of Christian belief from
wishful thinking. The socialism that soon afterward became so attractive to
me as an alternative proved equally insubstantial; with time, I came to
understand, through the great George Orwell, that much of such thinking
found its motivation in hatred of the rich and successful, instead of true
regard for the poor. Besides, the socialists were more intrinsically capitalist
than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just
thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing
humanity would vanish. This is simply untrue. There are many problems that
money does not solve, and others that it makes worse. Rich people still
divorce each other, and alienate themselves from their children, and suffer
from existential angst, and develop cancer and dementia, and die alone and
unloved. Recovering addicts cursed with money blow it all in a frenzy of
snorting and drunkenness. And boredom weighs heavily on people who have
nothing to do.
I was simultaneously tormented by the fact of the Cold War. It obsessed
me. It gave me nightmares. It drove me into the desert, into the long night of
the human soul. I could not understand how it had come to pass that the
world’s two great factions aimed mutual assured destruction at each other.
Was one system just as arbitrary and corrupt as the other? Was it a mere
matter of opinion? Were all value structures merely the clothing of power?
Was everyone crazy?
Just exactly what happened in the twentieth century, anyway? How was it
that so many tens of millions had to die, sacrificed to the new dogmas and
ideologies? How was it that we discovered something worse, much worse,