Author: Jordan B. Peterson
Year: 2018
Publisher: Allen Lane
Language: English
Jordan Peterson
rose to fame largely thanks to his smash hit “12 Rules for Life” in 2018 and
has since then taken a place among the most notable popular thinkers and
educators of today alongside Richard Dawkins, Slavoj Zizek, Sam Harris, Neil DeGrasse
Tyson, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb to mention a few. His right-wing,
conservative, Christian perspective on culture and the human psyche fills a
void in the non-academic discourse that, whether you agree with him or not, is
a valid viewpoint in Western society. His academical credentials (PhD in Psychology
from McGill, teaching positions at Harvard and Toronto, long practical experience
from clinical psychology and therapy) are impeccable and he gave lectures,
participated in debates, and featured on talk-shows and panels around the world
long before he became a superstar.
“12 Rules
for Life” is exactly what it says on the cover. Peterson lists twelve rules and
elaborates on how following them may lead a person to a better and more
harmonious life. The rules are
1. Stand up straight with your
shoulders back. Peterson’s point of departure is similar to Hobbes’ as described
in “Leviathan” (see review from April 2022), that chaos is a state of nature
and the driving force for each individual human is to dominate other humans.
Peterson here argues that if you act like a winner, you will be perceived as a
winner, and ultimately become a winner.
2. Treat yourself like someone you are
responsible for helping. Peterson notes that people are more likely to pamper
their loved ones (or even pets) than themselves and encourages his readers to
pay as much attention to themselves and their needs as they do to others.
3. Make friends with people who want
the best for you. Friendship, to Peterson, is a reciprocal arrangement. There
has to be value in friendship for both parties engaged in it. If you realise
nothing good for yourself is coming out of your relationship, or if you would
not recommend one of your friends to your sister or your father, then you may
be better off not entertaining friendship with that person.
4. Compare yourself to who you were
yesterday, not to who someone else is today. Life choices are games of success and
failure. Our selective mind compares us unfairly because the standards it
chooses for our comparison are arbitrary. Peterson argues that we see what we
expect to see so our experience of success or failure can be managed by
adjusting our expectations.
5. Do not let your children do anything
that makes you dislike them. Children are monsters. And if they are allowed to
remain monsters into adulthood, it can only end in calamity. Peterson tells his
readers to take responsibility for assimilating their children into society in
a way that will make other people like them. A person that is appreciated by
others has a better chance of getting ahead in life. And it is the parents’
responsibility to make this happen.
6. Set your house in perfect order
before you criticize the world. Being prepared is a virtue. The only thing that
you can truly influence is your own life and your own house. You have full
power to prepare your house for a flood or a storm, in a way that you do not
have to prepare your neighbourhood, or town or country. Peterson wants us to
dig where we stand.
7. Pursue what is meaningful (not what
is expedient). Work and sacrifice are delayed gratification. By sacrificing
something small today, we may gain something significant tomorrow. This
insight, according to Peterson, is characteristic for humans and makes us
superior to other creatures. He wants us to invest in our future, instead of
hunting for instant pleasure.
8. Tell the truth – or, at least don’t
lie. Peterson argues that people lie when reality becomes too hard to handle.
Lies are a tool to warp reality. However, if reality becomes warped, we
ourselves risk getting lost in a mirage. We lose sight of what is real.
Therefore, lies eventually come to hurt ourselves in the end.
9. Assume that the person you are
listening to might know something you don’t. People seem to be gripped by fear
of having to change their minds. Conversations usually turn into power
struggles. Peterson claims, that the search for knowledge is the highest form
of wisdom. By this rule, he wants our dialogues to be centred on knowledge, and
not on ourselves.
10. Be precise in your speech. The world
is simple when it behaves. That is why people navigate via categories. It makes
the world predictable. Simple minds require simple rules. A person who does not
know him- or herself, can find comfort in ignorance. Self-discovery, however,
is empowerment. The more we know, and the better we know it, the more precise
we can express ourselves, and the better we can formulate our goals, our
critique, and our demands.
11. Do not bother children when they are
skateboarding. People are not risk-minimisers; they are risk-optimisers, says Peterson.
Exploring the limits of danger, fear, and one’s own capacity builds confidence
and self-awareness. Boys and girls play different games because they have
different predispositions. Male aggression is natural, not cultural. That is
why one should allow boys to be boys and girls to be girls. Both in school and
elsewhere.
12. Pet a cat when you encounter one on
the street. Suffering is the baseline of life, says Peterson. Every major
religion is based on the assumption of suffering. By finding moments in life where
suffering can be temporarily suspended, we keep ourselves from perishing or going
mad. Peterson advises his readers to pay attention to every little ray of light
in their lives, even if that ray is just petting a random cat. Dogs are fine,
too.
Many of
these rules seem rather straightforward and uncontroversial at first glance. I
can certainly subscribe to the advice that we need to take care of ourselves
and engage in relationships that are mutually beneficial or to take the time to
smell the roses (or pet cats) every now and then. Still, I would like to make
one or two remarks.
First, it
is imperative that the reader understands that the rules in this book are not universal
but rather intimately associated with the Western, or I should say even
Northern American, culture. Even though Peterson’s worldview is rooted in his
base postulate that life equals suffering, which he shares with many major
religions including Buddhism, his antidote to chaos is narrowly focused on
people like himself. His frequent referrals to Scripture (most notably the
story of Cain and Abel in the Genesis) and his own upbringing in Fairview,
Alberta, as a proxy for society as he perceives it, make an unmistakeable statement
about his intended audience.
Second,
Peterson is quick to make claims in a way that suggests that his conclusions
are the only possible ones from the evidence at hand. But that is not always
so. Even if we may agree with him, intellectual honesty demands that we remain
open to alternative interpretations of the facts. Peterson proposes a
simplified universe and tolerates no disputes. To a lesser mind, his assertiveness
may sound powerful, but to an educated reader, this constitutes a weakness in
Peterson’s argument.
Third, Peterson assumes that each individual person is an independent agent and that
there is no option for collective action. Society, in Peterson’s eyes, is a
Leviathan or a law of nature that cannot be changed or influenced, since all
intervention by any human being must be done on an individual level. Every rule
in his book is rooted in this assumption.
Apart from these
three general observations, some of the individual rules require particular
unpacking. As this book has been twisted and turned by readers far more
competent than I in both philosophy and psychology, I will not claim to make a
comprehensive analysis of the Peterson-doctrine, but I will allow myself to
highlight a few of the many thoughts and arguments that caught my attention.
Rule 4. Jordan
Peterson seems to align himself with the neoclassical dogma of the rational man
that governs modern economics. “If you hadn’t decided that what you are doing right
now was better than the alternatives, you wouldn’t be doing it.” This seems like
a very bold statement for a psychologist to build a rule of life upon. There
are countless of reasons why people knowingly commit acts that they are fully
aware are not optimal for them. This happens due to an array of reasons such as
laziness, fear, hatred, malevolence, self-harm, mental illness, or (as Peterson
points out himself in Rule 7) as a pursuit of instant gratification rather than
long-term benefits. Actions are not always based on decisions. On the contrary,
we are just as busy deciding subconsciously what not to do as we are deciding
what to actually do. The bulk of human actions are driven by instinct and
emotions, and very little is subject to conscious and rational deliberation. As
Peterson says himself in Rule 9, “[p]eople think they think but it’s not true.”
Rule 5. In
this rule Peterson, again, makes some sweeping claims. He suggests that humans (Homo
sapiens) are naturally violent, and presents as evidence the violent
predisposition of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) as our species’ closest
relatives, claiming that evolution maintained aggression in our branch of the
evolutionary tree of primates. What he fails to address is that another branch
of Pan, equally closely related to humans, the Bonobos (Pan paniscus) are
significantly more docile than chimpanzees and possess little of the aggressive
instincts of their slightly larger cousins. This doesn’t mean that Peterson’s
claim about human aggression is false, but his evidence is by any standard inadequate.
Rule 11.
This is probably the most problematic of the twelve rules and the one where Peterson
does away with all scientific or pseudo-scientific decorum and indulges fully
in his personal opinions and preferences. He goes on a completely unsubstantiated
rant on how the educational system, from primary school all the way through
higher education, favours girls/women and how post-modernism was created as a
way to oppress men by calling out the myth of the patriarchy as the root cause
for every female failure or short-coming. To his credit, he admits that culture
(I prefer the term “society” or “social norms”/“social expectations” but I will
humour Peterson in this regard) is an oppressive structure and his thought on
the balance between oppression and opportunity that culture provides is valid
for the type of popular science that this book is supposed to be. But he then
dismisses the claim of the patriarchy as “perverse” without offering much more than
anecdotal evidence that sounds more like coming from an anonymous twitter-troll
than a world-renowned professor of psychology. As an example, he submits that “[t]he
Swedes, /…/, push equality to its limits” without explaining what the limits of
equality might be. Can men and women be too equal?
To
conclude, there is abundant evidence that what we are witnessing now, and which
is causing the right-wing backlash in many communities, is the final hour of
the White, Christian male hegemony. Peterson himself, is a prominent warrior in
defence of a world-order that is being challenged by non-Whites, women, and gender
fluidity. It is a valid, albeit problematic position to desire the perpetuation
of the old world order, but it does not do anybody any favours to deny its
premise or misrepresent the ideas that challenge it.
“12 Rules
for Life” is a textbook on how to preserve current power structures and how each
and every one of us can and should assimilate ourselves and our offspring into
the matrix without questioning it or trying to influence it. “If the world you
are seeing is not the world you want, /…/ it’s time to examine your values.” A
recurring theme in Peterson is just this. Life is suffering. Don’t try to
change it. Learn to live with it. The only thing you can change is yourself, the
world is unchangeable. Don’t even try. This message is hammered in through every
single one of the rules.
If you
agree with this doctrine, then this book will certainly give you massive
support and I do not doubt that it will offer useful advice on how to make
space for yourself in the purgatory that is life and make your time on earth less
torturous. If on the other hand you believe that the world can be changed and
should be changed, and that cooperation and collective action are a thing, Peterson
has very little to say that will convince you.
Having said
all that, I want to make perfectly clear that I hugely enjoyed reading “12 Rules
for Life”. I would not have chosen it myself but received it as a gift from a friend
whose opinions and taste in literature I highly value. This encounter gave me
the opportunity to reflect upon my own hierarchy of values and my arguments in
support of my standpoints on various issues. Moreover, it offered me a window
into the mind of a competent conservative thinker which gave me insights I
would otherwise not have been able to gain in my everyday environment. In the spirit
of Peterson’s Rule 9, I would therefore like to add one additional rule.
Rule 13. Read
books that you receive as a gift and that you wouldn’t have picked yourself.
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