The Rules

Given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. They will believe a lie because they want to believe it is true, or because they are afraid it might be true. Their heads are full of knowledge, facts and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. They can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can — and so are all the easier to fool.

Zedd teaches this to Richard after Darken Rahl has already been using it. Give people an enemy, a purpose, a fear or a wish, and they will march. The old wizards made Confessors and Seekers precisely because of it: the truth, when it matters, has to be fought for.

Kindness without wisdom is not harmless. Nathan Rahl gives Richard the rule in Stone of Tears, at a point where good motives have already torn the veil and started filling the world of the living with what should have stayed dead.

The counter is knowledge, forethought, and the First Rule — and the book is honest enough to show that even all three together are not always enough. In these novels, meaning well is never a defense.

Found in Kolo’s journal in the Wizard’s Keep, during Blood of the Fold. The rule leaves feeling alone. What it asks is who is driving.

The books keep putting love, rage and faith in the same room as a decision that still has to be thought through, and then watching what happens. Almost every disaster in eleven novels can be traced to somebody who felt something strongly and treated the feeling as evidence.

In the forgiveness you grant, and more so in the forgiveness you receive. This one arrives twice in Temple of the Winds: Shota puts it to Kahlan first, careful about the qualifier in a way a gentler character would not be, since spoken forgiveness without the real thing is theater. Richard receives it from the spirit of Kahlan’s mother, called into a dark room by the Mud People.

Richard and Kahlan have already paid for that distinction by the time it is named. The rule is about healing a life, and it asks the harm to be seen for exactly what it was — which is why it belongs in the same series as a rule about contradictions.

It was an object before it was a sentence. The Sword of Truth has a white blade in it that only comes out when the hate goes out of the man holding it — and in the first book he already knows he will never be able to bring himself to forgive his brother, and so will never make it white for him.

Deeds betray a lie. Kolo’s journal again, in Soul of the Fire, while Anderith talks eloquently of peace and prepares a rather different kind of surrender.

Watch the hands. The mouth is a poor witness. Of all eleven, this is the one that needs the least translation.

What exists, exists. What is, is. Wishes are not a method for finding facts. Richard lives this in Faith of the Fallen long before Zedd names it, and Nicci is forced to stand there and watch a man build a life instead of a sacrifice.

The book holds a longer statement of it. The short one is enough to steer by: do not let anybody — including your own fear — talk you out of the evidence of the world. Every other rule on this page is downstream of this one.

The past can teach and it can comfort. Only the future holds life. To live in what is already over is to embrace what is dead.

Richard speaks it in The Pillars of Creation, a book almost entirely about people being hunted by yesterday — by a bloodline, a name, a grievance they did not choose. Each day, he says, must be created anew.

High D’Haran, cut into the base of Kaja-Rang’s statue in Naked Empire. Be justified in your convictions. Be committed. Earn what you need rather than waiting for the world to hand it over.

It is the racing rule as much as the war rule, and Goodkind spent race days in a cockpit learning it the literal way: the corner does not care that you meant well.

Not in part, nor in whole. To believe one is to give up the world as it is for the world as you wish it. Zedd gives Richard this in Chainfire, when a spell has erased a woman from the memory of everyone alive and the physical evidence still insists she was there.

That is a superb piece of plotting: the rule and the crisis are the same shape. The book holds the rest of the statement, including a hard paragraph on faith as a device of self-delusion. The rule’s own job is simpler — if two claims cannot both be true, do not make peace by calling them both true.

And people who do not want the truth can be remarkably hostile to whoever carries it in. Zedd, in Phantom.

The Seeker’s work and the reader’s turn out to be the same work: do not betray yourself in exchange for a more comfortable story. It is the First Rule turned around to face inward.