12 Rules for Life (Full) ENGLISH

part lends life its sustaining meaning. We experience almost all the emotions
that make life deep and engaging as a consequence of moving successfully
towards something deeply desired and valued. The price we pay for that
involvement is the inevitable creation of hierarchies of success, while the
inevitable consequence is difference in outcome. Absolute equality would
therefore require the sacrifice of value itself—and then there would be
nothing worth living for. We might instead note with gratitude that a
complex, sophisticated culture allows for many games and many successful
players, and that a well-structured culture allows the individuals that compose
it to play and to win, in many different fashions.
It is also perverse to consider culture the creation of men. Culture is
symbolically, archetypally, mythically male. That’s partly why the idea of
“the patriarchy” is so easily swallowed. But it is certainly the creation of
humankind, not the creation of men (let alone white men, who nonetheless
contributed their fair share). European culture has only been dominant, to the
degree that it is dominant at all, for about four hundred years. On the time
scale of cultural evolution—which is to be measured, at minimum, in
thousands of years—such a timespan barely registers. Furthermore, even if
women contributed nothing substantial to art, literature and the sciences prior
to the 1960s and the feminist revolution (which is not something I believe),
then the role they played raising children and working on the farms was still
instrumental in raising boys and freeing up men—a very few men—so that
humanity could propagate itself and strive forward.
Here’s an alternative theory: throughout history, men and women both
struggled terribly for freedom from the overwhelming horrors of privation
and necessity. Women were often at a disadvantage during that struggle, as
they had all the vulnerabilities of men, with the extra reproductive burden,
and less physical strength. In addition to the filth, misery, disease, starvation,
cruelty and ignorance that characterized the lives of both sexes, back before
the twentieth century (when even people in the Western world typically
existed on less than a dollar a day in today’s money) women also had to put
up with the serious practical inconvenience of menstruation, the high
probability of unwanted pregnancy, the chance of death or serious damage
during childbirth, and the burden of too many young children. Perhaps that is
sufficient reason for the different legal and practical treatment of men and
women that characterized most societies prior to the recent technological