In Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life he discusses briefly the proper way to function in the world. That is, with both feet planted firmly in reality, one foot in chaos and the other in order. What does this mean? It means that in order to survive, to flourish, to face the constant flux of life we must recognize what we don’t know, what we don’t understand, and order it, bend it, forge it into something we can conquer–and perhaps wield. The small child who faces his first day of school must learn the routine of his classes, must analyze their content, learn it, digest it, make sense of it, all while familiarizing himself with the faces of dozens of strangers, deciding which ones are friendly, which ones he should stay away from, which ones he should trust. The small child faces a storm of experience, a sudden rush of garbled complexity, a web of new social encounters, new formats of learning. But, if he is to persist, he learns to make sense of it, order it, make it his own. And so, from the infancy of our lives, all the way through our adulthood we survive by taking the unknown and transferring it into the known, the familiar, the conquerable.

Now this is no doubt evident to us all. What could be the purpose of Peterson putting so much emphasis on a rather mundane datum of reality? Because the principles of chaos and order are so obvious they are by consequence incredibly important. Sometimes the most evident things are those that get muffled into white noise. When you divide human life up into these two domains of chaos and order you can improve yourself. Suddenly you are no longer a bumbling organism making his way through life, suffering through unfortunate circumstances, grasping for whatever stability he can find among the tangled webs of stress, tragedy, emotion and pain that characterize the course of human life. Rather, you become the hero who faces life, suffering, the valley of death, the realm of shadows, the very depths of Hades, transforming it all into the conquerable, a battleground of victory.

What happens when we fail to do this, when we fail to bring chaos into order? We inevitably die. For when tragedy strikes, when the last fluttering moments of light seemingly escape under a dark horizon, a growing shadow of nihilism, we may find ourselves unable to pin the darkness under our feet, becoming instead subdued by it. And so the cosmos moves on, churning in the void, leaving behind another person in his own decay, his own defeat.

Jordan Peterson once said in a lecture of his that suicide may often be prompted by life becoming too complex, too much to handle. That is, the floodgates breaks, chaos reigns free, and there is no order. The human mind, a complex of near-miraculous simplicity, able to unify the haphazardness of sense-data, bringing into a singular realm of experience the countless motions of reality, the billions upon billions of firing neurons, cannot find solace in a reality which overpowers it. There is only so much a cup of water can hold. The brim is the stopping point. So, when someone reaches that chasm of pure and utter chaos, when he looks down and notices the darkness, and looks up and notices the shrinking light, he will begin to realize that he is falling from an incredible height. So his suicide, to him, may already be happening. It is only a matter of time before he stops falling, before he hits the ground.

But how can you avoid this? Surely chaos can be defeated in these situations–at least we would like to think so. Well, in these moments of abyssal chaos we should perhaps heed a principle that I have distilled from Peterson’s thought: fear is a liar, a damn liar. It is those moments of near-psychotic break that fear overwhelms us. Fear is the key motivation for not properly engaging chaos. The small child does not want to walk through the school doors, he would rather climb back into his mother’s minivan, he would rather enjoy the comforts of an unlearned, simple, and naive childhood–a life of sandboxes, playgrounds, and halcyon ignorance of the terrible suffering that maturity brings. Fear is being caught in the headlights, stuck, frozen, not wanting to move. And this is what fear does, it keeps you static, it prevents you from ordering the chaos. To order, to conquer, to engage the unknown, what you fear, is to actively actualize the pure potential realm of chaos into the actual realm of the known, the familiar, the you. But there is no actualization, there is no ordering, if fear keeps you still.

As a child who suffered with social anxiety, I remember deliberately feigning sickness week after week to delay having to go to a certain class. I remember not wanting to go to middle school–even convincing myself that I should stay back a year. I had grown accustomed to my life as it was, and fear almost prevented me from stepping forward, from facing the hidden dimensions of my life, from unveiling the next chapter. I was giving into chaos by not engaging it. And this is how chaos wins. There is a sort of dualism to chaos and order, both entities tugging at each other, each one trying to consume the other. In order to make it through life, to endure the suffering, to take responsibility, and to stave off the terror of nihilism, one has to constantly order chaos. But if one does not order chaos at all, if one remains still, chaos wins out. For suppose I did not move on to middle school. And suppose even the year after I again opted to stay back in fifth grade. Suppose I convinced myself that I could not face the chaos that is my future. Suppose I never made it through school. I would have ended up stupid, unhappy, friendless, depressed, and behind. Behind on life. Chaos would win, it would loom over me–a seemingly inescapable storm.

So much of this I saw at my university with fellow students. Many had switched majors several times, going seven years into school without even finishing a Bachelor’s degree. I began to realize why this was. It was a way of delaying that horrific side of our lives, that thing that haunts us but, like death, seems forever beyond us–that is, the real world. Students would complain about how much time they’ve spent at school, yet they seemed perfectly content in a quasi-limbo state, hovering in a shadowy existence somewhere between adolescence and adulthood. Not quite willing to give up the comforts of a school schedule, a part time job, and guaranteed housing for the uncertainty of adulthood. I even encountered one student who was in his late forties. We talked for well over an hour, him confessing his sins to me–what he had done wrong, how he preferred to be the kid, to never grow up. And now, gesturing to himself as the example, he showed me the end-product. A depressed man, not knowing what to do with his life, not knowing what his next job would be, not knowing how he would pay off his loans, now knowing how his life would play out in the final few decades he had left on earth. His life was motionless for so long, not engaging chaos, not moving through the darkened cave of life, not willing to kill the dragon, not willing to bear the cross. As a consequence, chaos seeped in, it broke him, and it left him, some twenty-five years later, at a crossroad with a hundred different directions and no clear paths.

If I can leave you readers with any advice, a sort of tl;dr statement of what has just been covered, it would be this: don’t let fear win. You are better than what you convince yourself you are. Fear dwells on the permanence of you as you, it doesn’t praise what you could be, it hates what you could be because it viciously suggests that failure awaits those who dare to go beyond themselves, to reach out for their potential, to order the chaos. Fear would rather let the princess burn to death, content with having the knight forever farming radishes in his hometown. Fear would rather knights not be knights. But don’t listen to it.

There is a telling image in Dante’s Inferno of Satan frozen mid-chest in ice at the very heart of Hell. He is stuck, unable to move, only able to flap his demonic wings. The most beautiful angel of light has become the imprisoned prince of darkness. This is what fear and chaos does–it imprisons you. Fear shrinks you, it makes you smaller. It takes every opportunity, every chance to fold back the chaotic veil of life, and tramples it. Fear is dangerous. Damn it to Hell before it damns you.