In his exceptionally popular book, Twelve Rules for Life (2018), the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson advised his readers to “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.” This conservative maxim, or fallacy, was answered by the great English radical, Jeremy Bentham, two hundred years ago:
“Nearly akin to the cry of popular corruption is language commonly used to the following effect:—’Instead of reforming others, instead of reforming your betters, instead of reforming the state, the constitution, the church, every thing that is most excellent,—let each man reform himself—let him look at home, he will find there enough to do, and what is in his power, without looking abroad and aiming at what is out of his power, &c. &c.’
“Language to this effect may at all times be heard from anti-reformists, always, as the tone of it manifests, accompanied with an air of triumph,—the triumph of superior wisdom over shallow and presumptuous arrogance.
“One feature which helps to distinguish it from the cry of popular corruption, is the tacit assumption that, between the operation condemned and the operation recommended, incompatibility has place: than which, when once brought clearly to view, nothing, it will be seen, can be more groundless.
“Certain it is, that if every man’s time and labour is exclusively employed in the correcting of his own personal imperfections, no part of it will be employed in the endeavour to correct the imperfections and abuses which have place in the Government, and thus the mass of those imperfections and abuses will go on, never diminishing, but perpetually increasing with the torments of those who suffer by them, and the comforts of those who profit by them: which is exactly what is wanted.” (Bentham, The Book of Fallacies (1824), pp. 285-286).
Notes in the Margins of the Days 