The Order and Chaos Map
Both extremes are pathologies — diagnose which one is eating you before you prescribe.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 93%
Asked where the title Beyond Order comes from, Peterson builds it from the ground up. If you move towards something, you value it, and in order to act you need a gradient of value to prioritise — you cannot do everything at once, so you do the thing that is most important right now, which means you inhabit a world of importance, a value world. That value world has two broad components: the Taoist yin and yang, which he glosses as order and chaos, represented respectively with masculine and feminine symbols, a symbolic claim he notes he has been pilloried for even though it is hardly his proposition. Order is where what you want to happen happens when you act — reassuring twice over, because you get what you want and the fact that you get it indicates your theory about how to get it is true. That is also why people hate to fail: you do not know how far down your hierarchy of presuppositions a failure can echo, and if you are clinically depressed every minor failure means you are a worthless human being. Chaos is the flood, the domain of terror and pain where nothing you want happens no matter what you do, but also the domain of unlimited possibility, because outside what you know is everything you do not know and there are untold riches there. And order has its own pathology: if it becomes too extreme everything becomes cramped and totalitarian — that is the dying king, dying for lack of the water of life, the old tyrant who can no longer see beyond his own presuppositions. Peterson says his first book concentrated more on the pathologies of chaos and the second more on the pathologies of order, and that they are a matched set.
Origin
Peterson developed the order-chaos structure over the fourteen years he spent writing Maps of Meaning, from 1985 to 1999, three hours a day. The pairing became the architecture of his two rule books: 12 Rules for Life on the pathologies of chaos, Beyond Order on the pathologies of order.
Core principles
- 01The value world has two broad components, which the Taoists called yin and yang and which Peterson calls order and chaos.
- 02You are in order when what you want to happen happens when you act, which is doubly reassuring: you get what you want and your theory about how to get it is validated.
- 03Every failure costs twice — you do not get what you want, and you undermine the validity of the theory organising your perceptions and actions.
- 04Chaos is the flood: too much of it overwhelms you, and you are somewhere where no matter what you do nothing you want happens.
- 05Chaos is simultaneously the domain of unlimited possibility, because outside what you know is everything you do not know, with untold riches in it.
- 06Order taken to the extreme becomes cramped and totalitarian — the dying king who can no longer see beyond his own presuppositions.
- 07Liberals are sensitive to the pathologies of order and conservatives to the pathologies of chaos, and they are both right; there is no final solution, only an eternal existential concern.
How to run it
- 1
Establish that you are operating in a value world
If you move towards something you value it, otherwise you would not move towards it. You need a gradient of value to organise action and prioritise, because you cannot do everything at once — so you are always in a world of importance.
Pro tip Peterson's joke version: why did the chicken cross the road — he thought the other side was better.
- 2
Diagnose which domain you are in
You are in order when what you want to happen happens when you act. You are in chaos when your life has got beyond you and no matter what you do nothing you want happens.
Pro tip The test is behavioural, not emotional — check whether your actions produce their intended results.
Watch out Both domains generate suffering, so distress alone does not tell you which one you are in.
- 3
Trace how far the failure echoed
Peterson's account of why people hate to fail is that you never know how far down your hierarchy of presuppositions a failure will echo. In clinical depression every minor failure means you are a worthless human being.
Pro tip Explicitly bounding what a failure does and does not invalidate is a direct intervention on this mechanism.
Watch out You never know in advance which failure is going to demonstrate that, which is why the fear is not irrational.
- 4
Read chaos as possibility as well as threat
Chaos is a domain of terror and pain, and it is also a domain of unlimited possibility, because outside of what you know is everything you do not know and there are untold riches to be gathered there.
Pro tip Deliberate small excursions into the unknown are how you harvest the riches without drowning in the flood.
Watch out It still needs to be managed. It is dangerous.
- 5
Check for the pathology of order
If order becomes too extreme everything becomes cramped and totalitarian. Peterson's image is the dying king, dying for lack of the water of life — the old tyrant who can no longer see beyond his own presuppositions.
Pro tip The tell is a system where everything works and nothing new can enter.
- 6
Grant that your opponents see the half you do not
Peterson's political application: liberal types are very sensitive to pathologies of order and conservative types to pathologies of chaos — and they are both right. There is no final solution; you are stuck with it as an eternal existential concern.
Pro tip Treating an ideological opponent as a sensor for the failure mode you are blind to converts an argument into a diagnostic.
Watch out Expecting a resolution is itself the error — the concern is eternal by construction.
In the wild
Peterson keeps in his office a drawing his son made at about six. On one side there is a forest full of pine trees; on the other there is a town where every house has an amanita muscaria mushroom cap; a river runs down the middle. Out of the river grows a beanstalk that stretches up to heaven, where the clouds are and Saint Peter stands by the gates. His son had no particular Christian religious education and they did not go to church. Peterson calls it a shamanic drawing: order on one side, chaos on the other, and at the point they meet the tree of life grows out of the river and reaches to heaven.
→ Peterson's evidence that the order-chaos structure is not an imposed theory but something a six-year-old with no instruction reproduced spontaneously.
To show how values sit in a hierarchy, Peterson builds a graded example. Your wife's turn to do the dishes and she does not — a minor league ontological shock, with possible implications for her honesty, though maybe she was tired. Once really does not destabilise you because not much else depends on it. Ten times and you might start to question her commitment to your agreements, then her honesty, then the relationship. But if your partner has an affair, that is quite a shock, because you have modelled your plans for behaviour and even your perception of the world on the assumption of fidelity, and if that assumption is demolished all those plans dissolve and the uncertainty comes rushing in.
→ A concrete illustration that the depth of a value in the hierarchy determines how much chaos its violation releases.
Peterson describes his first book as concentrating more on the pathologies of chaos and the second more on the pathologies of order, and says they are a matched set in that regard, insofar as he was successful at doing it. That is the genesis of the title Beyond Order — not a rejection of order but an examination of what lies past it, including where it turns totalitarian.
→ A two-volume structure that treats the two failure modes symmetrically rather than prescribing one direction for everyone.
Common mistakes
Prescribing by temperament instead of by diagnosis
People who love structure add structure and people who love freedom remove it, regardless of which pathology is actually present. Peterson's point that liberals and conservatives each detect one failure mode is exactly this bias described at population scale.
Treating chaos as pure threat
Chaos is a domain of terror and pain and also a domain of unlimited possibility with untold riches, because outside what you know is everything you do not know. Sealing yourself off from it is how you arrive at the dying king.
Expecting a final solution
Peterson is explicit that there is no final solution to the problem and you are stuck with it — it is an eternal existential concern. Designing for permanent resolution guarantees the pendulum swings to the opposite pathology.
Letting a small failure echo all the way down
Failure undermines the theory organising your perceptions and actions, and you never know how far down the hierarchy the echo travels. In clinical depression that echo reaches the bottom every time, which is why bounding it explicitly matters.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone stuck — personally or organisationally — who needs to know which direction the fix runs before choosing an intervention.
Not ideal for
Narrow technical problems with a known solution, where the order-chaos frame adds abstraction rather than clarity.
From the transcript
“the value world as far as i can tell has two broad components the taoists talked about it as yin and yang and broadly speaking…”
“order is you're in order when what you want to happen happens when you act”
“it's also a domain of unlimited possibility because outside of what you know is everything you don't know and there's untold riches to be gathered…”
“the liberal types they're very sensitive to pathologies of order and the conservative types are very sensitive to pathologies of chaos but they're both right”
From the episode
#502: Jordan Peterson on Rules for Life, Psychedelics, The Bible, and Much More