12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson Page B

is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are choosy maters (unlike female chimps, their closest animal counterparts 39 ). Most men do not meet female human standards. It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness. 40 It is for this reason that we all have twice as many female ancestors as male (imagine that all the women who have ever lived have averaged one child. Now imagine that half the men who have ever lived have fathered two children, if they had any, while the other half fathered none). 41 It is Woman as Nature who looks at half of all men and says, “No!” For the men, that’s a direct encounter with chaos, and it occurs with devastating force every time they are turned down for a date. Human female choosiness is also why we are very different from the common ancestor we shared with our chimpanzee cousins, while the latter are very much the same. Women’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are. 42 It is Nature as Woman who says, “Well, bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.”
    The most profound religious symbols rely for their power in large part on this underlying fundamentally bipartisan conceptual subdivision. The Star of David is, for example, the downward pointing triangleof femininity and the upward pointing triangle of the male. fn1 It’s the same for the
yoni
and
lingam
of Hinduism (which come covered with snakes, our ancient adversaries and provocateurs: the Shiva Linga is depicted with snake deities called the Nagas). The ancient Egyptians represented Osiris, god of the state, and Isis, goddess of the underworld, as twin cobras with their tails knotted together. The same symbol was used in China to portray Fuxi and Nuwa, creators of humanity and of writing. The representations in Christianity are less abstract, more like personalities, but the familiar Western images of the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child and the Pietà both express the female/male dual unity, as does the traditional insistence on the androgyny of Christ. 43
    It should also be noted, finally, that the structure of the brain itself at a gross morphological level appears to reflect this duality. This, to me, indicates the fundamental, beyond-the-metaphorical reality of this symbolically feminine/masculine divide, since the brain is adapted, by definition, to reality itself (that is, reality conceptualized in this quasi-Darwinian manner). Elkhonon Goldberg, student of the great Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, has proposed quite lucidly and directly that the very hemispheric structure of the cortex reflects the fundamental division between novelty (the unknown, or chaos) and routinization (the known, order). 44 He doesn’t make reference to the symbols representing the structure of the world in reference to this theory, but that’s all the better: an idea is more credible when it emerges as a consequence of investigations in different realms. 45
    We already know all this, but we don’t know we know it. But we immediately comprehend it when it’s articulated in a manner such asthis. Everyone understands order and chaos, world and underworld, when it’s explained using these terms. We all have a palpable sense of the chaos lurking under everything familiar. That’s why we understand the strange, surreal stories of
Pinocchio
, and
Sleeping Beauty
, and
The Lion King
, and
The Little Mermaid
, and
Beauty and the Beast
, with their eternal landscapes of known and unknown, world and underworld. We’ve all been in both places, many times: sometimes by happenstance, sometimes by choice.
    Many things begin to fall into place when you begin to consciously understand the world in this