Fun fact: it's very hard to live without rules.
There's a clip of Jordan Peterson online where he tells us that the escape from a tyranny isn't into paradise, but into desert, much like with the Israelites in that one Bible story. I reckon one interpretation of this metaphor is about order and chaos: that in tyranny, you at least know what to expect and can count on the rules of cause and effect, while desert is just pure chaos without any structure.
But who can live without rules, in pure chaos, without any structure?
Even if you rebelled against an external authority and the rules they've set for you (parents, society, you name it) and went out into the wild to live in total freedom, you could not handle it. Before long, your head would explode.
Then there are two solutions:
- Go back to the original tyranny, or
- Become your own tyrant.
If you choose road number 2, you can be absolutely sure that before long, you'll begin to rebel against the tyrant that is yourself, too. The rules only work for a while in bringing you comfort and a sense of structure. Then you begin to resent the tyranny, even if it was built by yourself, because maybe it's not you anymore who set the rules, but a previous version of you, which is completely different from the current you.
So, you rebel. You let go of rules, and try to live in the desert, and it's all fun and games for a while, until you begin to crave the structure of the tyranny.
This is exactly the pendulum effect I've talked about before: swinging from order to chaos, from rules to freedom, from death to life. (All credit to Otto Rank.)
But is the pendulum a tyrannical structure itself on the macro level? And if yes, how do you rebel against that?
RK
