12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

This book = 12 Rules (rock solid advice) + Peterson’s Philosophic musings
Jordan Peterson is a beacon of light in this chaotic world, a psychologist whose writing combines science and common sense. One of his talents is his ability to articulate complex ideas to a wide audience. Regardless of whether you have a background in psychology or not, you will understand this book. It covers his twelve rules for life, which are intended not only as a guide for life of the individual, but as a remedy for society’s present ills. Peterson believes that the cure for society starts with curing the individual, the smallest unit of society. Peterson’s well-known advice to clean your room is a reflection of the truth that if you can’t even manage the most basic and mundane responsibilities of life, then you have no business dictating to others how to fix society.One of the main themes of this book is: Personal change is possible. There’s no doubt you can be slightly better today than you were yesterday. Because of Pareto’s Principle (small changes can have disproportionately large results), this movement towards the good increases massively, and this upward trajectory can take your life out of hell more rapidly than you could believe. Life is tragic and full of suffering and malevolence. But there’s something you can start putting right, and we can’t imagine what good things are in store for us if we just fix the things that are within our power to do so.The 12 Rules for Life:In Peterson’s own words, it’s 12 rules to stop you from being pathetic, written from the perspective of someone who himself tried to stop being pathetic and is still working on it. Peterson is open about his struggles and shortcomings, unlike many authors who only reveal a carefully curated façade.Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back. People have bad posture, and the meaning behind it can be demonstrated by animal behaviors. Peterson uses the example of the lobster. When a lobster loses a fight, and they fight all the time, it scrunches up a little. Lobsters run on serotonin and when he loses, levels go down, and when he wins, levels go up and he stretches out and is confident. Who cares? We evolutionarily diverged from lobsters 350 million years ago, but it’s still the same circuit. It’s a deep instinct to size others up when looking at them to see where they fit in the social hierarchy. If your serotonin levels fall, you get depressed and crunch forward and you’re inviting more oppression from predator personalities and can get stuck in a loop. Fixing our posture is part of the psycho-physiological loop that can help you get started back up again.Rule 2: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. People often have self-contempt whether they realize it or not. Imagine someone you love and treat well. You need to treat yourself with the same respect. Take care of yourself, your room, your things, and have respect for yourself as if you’re a person with potential and is important to the people around you. If you make a pattern of bad mistakes, your life gets worse, not just for you, but for the people around you. All your actions echo in ways that cannot be imagined. Think of Stalin’s mother and the mistakes she made in life, and how the ripple effects went on to affect the millions of people around him.Rule 3: Choose your friends carefully. It is appropriate for you to evaluate your social surroundings and eliminate those who are hurting you. You have no ethical obligation to associate with people who are making your life worse. In fact, you are obligated to disassociate with people who are trying to destroy the structure of being, your being, society’s being. It’s not cruel, it’s sending a message that some behaviors are not to be tolerated.Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. You need to improve, and you may even be in real bad shape, but many unfairly compare themselves to some more seemingly successful person. Up till around age 17, random comparisons to other people can make sense, but afterwards, especially age 30+, our lives become so idiosyncratic that comparisons with others become meaningless and unhelpful. You only see a slice of their life, a public facet, and are blind to the problems they conceal.Rule 5: Don’t let children do things that make you dislike them. You aren’t as nice as you think, and you will unconsciously take revenge on them. You are massively more powerful than your children, and have the ability and subconscious proclivity for tyranny deeply rooted within you.If you don’t think this is true, you don’t know yourself well enough. His advice on disciplinary procedure: (1) limit the rules. (2) use minimum necessary force and (3) parents should come in pairs.It’s difficult and exhausting to raise children, and it’s easy to make mistakes. A bad day at work, fatigue, hunger, stress, etc, can make you unreasonable.Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. Life is tragic and there’s malevolence. There’s plenty to complain about, but if you dwell on it, you will become bitter and tread down a path that will take you to twisted places. The diaries of the Columbine killers are a chilling look into minds that dwelled on the unholy trinity of deceit, arrogance, and resentment) . So instead of cursing the tragedy that is life, transform into something meaningful. Start by stop doing something, anything, that you know to be wrong. Everyday you have choices in front of you. Stop doing and saying things that make you weak and ashamed. Do only those things that you would proudly talk about in public.Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient). Meaning is how you protect yourself against the suffering that life entails. This means that despite the fact that we’re all emotionally wounded by life, we’ve found something that makes it all worthwhile. Meaning, Peterson says, is like an instinct, or a form of vision. It lets you know when you’re in the right place, and he says that the right place is midway between chaos and order. If you stay firmly ensconced within order, things you understand, then you can’t grow. If you stay within chaos, then you’re lost. Expediency is what you do to get yourself out of trouble here and now, but it comes at the cost of sacrificing the future for the present. So instead of doing what gets you off the hook today, aim high. Look around you and see what you can make better. Make it better. As you gain knowledge, consciously remain humble and avoid arrogance that can stealthily creep on you. Peterson also says to be aware of our shortcomings, whatever they may be; our secret resentments, hatred, cowardice, and other failings. Be slow to accuse others because we too conceal malevolent impulses, and certainly before we attempt to fix the world.Rule 8: Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie. Telling the truth can be hard in the sense that it’s often difficult to know the truth. However, we can know when we’re lying. Telling lies makes you weak. You can feel it, and others can sense it too. Meaning, according to Peterson, is associated with truth, and lying is the antithesis of meaning. Lying disassociates you with meaning, and thus reality itself. You might get away with lying for a short while, but only a short time. In Peterson’s words “It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of people.”Rule 9: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t. A good conversation consists of you coming out wiser than you went into it. An example is when you get into an argument with your significant other, you want to win, especially if you get angry. If you’re more verbally fluent than the other person then you can win. One problem is that the other person might see something better than you, but they can’t quite articulate it as well. Always listen because there’s a possibility they’re going to tell you something that will prevent you from running headfirst into a brick wall. This is why Peterson says to listen to your enemies. They will lie about you, but they will also say true things about yourself that your friends won’t. Separate the wheat from the chaff and make your life better.Rule 10: Be Precise in Your Speech: There is some integral connection between communication and reality (or structures of belief as he likes to say). Language takes chaos and makes it into a ‘thing.’ As an example, imagine going through a rough patch in your life where you can’t quite put your finger on what’s wrong. This mysterious thing that’s bothering you—is it real? Yes, if it’s manifesting itself as physical discomfort. Then you talk about it and give it a name, and then this fuzzy, abstract thing turns into a specific thing. Once named, you can now do something about it. The unnameable is far more terrifying than the nameable. As an example, the movie the Blair Witch project didn’t actually name or describe the evil. Nothing happens in the movie, it’s all about the unnameable. If you can’t name something, it means it’s so terrifying to you that you can’t even think about it, and that makes you weaker. This is why Peterson is such a free speech advocate. He wants to bring things out of the realm of the unspeakable. Words have a creative power and you don’t want to create more mark and darkness by imprecise speech.Rule 11: Don’t bother children when they are skateboarding. This is mainly about masculinity. Peterson remembers seeing children doing all kinds of crazy stunts on skateboards and handrails, and believes this is an essential ingredient to develop masculinity, to try to develop competence and face danger. Jordan Peterson considers the act of sliding down a handrail to be brave and perhaps stupid as well, but overall positive. A lot of rebellious behavior in school is often called ‘toxic masculinity,’ but Peterson would say to let them be. An example would be a figure skater that makes a 9.9 on her performance, essentially perfect. Then the next skater that follows her seems to have no hope. But she pushes herself closer to chaos, beyond her competence, and when successful, inspires awe. Judges award her 10’s. She’s gone beyond perfection into the unknown and ennobled herself as well as humanity as well.Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street. This chapter is mainly autobiographical and he writes about tragedy and pain. When tragic things are in front of you and you’re somewhat powerless, you must keep your eyes open for little opportunities that highlight the redemptive elements of life that make it all worthwhile. The title of this chapter comes from his experience of observing a local stray cat, and watching it adapt to the rough circumstances around it. Another thing you must do when life is going to pieces is to shorten your temporal horizon. Instead of thinking in months, you maybe think in hours or minutes instead. You try to just have the best next minute or hour that you can. You shrink the time frame until you can handle it, this is how you adjust to the catastrophe. You try to stay on your feet and think. Although this chapters deals about harsh things, it’s an overall positive one. Always look for what’s meaningful and soul-sustaining even when you’re where you’d rather not be.

Un libro che semplicemente ti cambia la vita. se letto ed interiorizzato con attenzione, si intende. è un libro che va vissuto, praticato, incorporato nella propria vita e reso parte di sé. Del resto, Jordan Peterson è tutto sommato un esistenzialista che prende le mosse dalle tesi di fondo di Kierkegaard, Nietzsche e Jung. Per lui l’azione e la scelta sono caratteri costitutivi della vita di un essere umano. Ed in qualche modo la fede non fa differenza. Perché dobbiamo sempre scegliere a priori “come” percepire il mondo. Per me, da studioso e da scrittore, questo è stato uno dei testi più importanti ed impattanti della mia vita recente. Tanto che ad oggi l’ho già regalato ad un bel po’ di persone, a partire da mio fratello (a cui pure ha cambiato la vita). Se è il momento giusto, non esitate a leggerlo.

Bzdurna książka dla znoszonych chyba realnością.

Jordan B. Peterson has been much in the news. His courageous stand against the totalitarianism inherent in Bill C-16 (google it if you don’t know what I’m talking about) suddenly made him a public figure and then with that interview everyone was talking about him. Peterson did that interview while in the UK publicising his book, 12 Rules for Life: An antidote to chaos. It has been a long time since I’ve read a book that has caused me so many out-loud oohs, ahs, ahas, sighs, and laughs. Here is a chapter by chapter summary.Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders backThis is the chapter about lobsters.Cathy Newman and other commentators have been choking on the crustaceans Peterson offers as evidence for his first rule, but I wonder if they have actually read the chapter. It’s all pretty self-explanatory and obvious: dominance hierarchy is “an essentially permanent feature of the environment to which all complex life has adapted.” That’s true for lobsters, and it’s true for humans: “It’s permanent. It’s real. The dominance hierarchy is not capitalism…It’s not the patriarchy.”If you’re at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy – as either lobster or human – life is harder on you. Low status lobsters and humans produce less serotonin. “Low serotonin means decreased confidence. Low serotonin means more response to stress and costlier physical preparedness for emergency…higher serotonin levels…are characterized by less illness, misery and death.”So what to do? Put your shoulders back! “Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.”Rule 2: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helpingThis is the chapter that explains why people will buy prescription medicine for their dog, and carefully administer it, but fail to do the same for themselves.It boils down to this: “Why should anyone take care of anything as naked, ugly, ashamed, frightened, worthless, cowardly, resentful, defensive and accusatory as a descendant of Adam? Even if that thing, that being, is himself? And I do not mean at all to exclude women with this phrasing.”That humans are like this provides Peterson with what I think might be the most important insight into the problem of evil since Augustine identified original sin with pride. This is how JP describes it: “We know exactly how and where we can be hurt, and why. That is as good a definition as any of self-consciousness. We are aware of our own defencelessness, finitude and mortality. We can feel pain, and self-disgust, and shame, and horror, and we know it. We know what makes us suffer. We know how dread and pain can be inflicted on us – and that means we know exactly how to inflict it on others. We know we are naked, and how that nakedness can be exploited – and that means we know how others are naked, and how they can be exploited.”The solution? “You could help direct the world, on its careening trajectory, a bit more toward Heaven and a bit more away from Hell. Once having understood Hell, researched it, so to speak – particularly your own individual Hell – you could decide against going there or creating that. You could aim elsewhere. You could, in fact, devote your life to this. That would give you a Meaning, with a capital M. That would justify your miserable existence. That would atone for your sinful nature, and replace your shame and self-consciousness with the natural pride and forthright confidence of someone who has learned once again to walk with God in the Garden.”Rule 3: Make friends with people who want the best for youThis is the chapter about not casting your pearls before swine.Sometimes helping is beyond us.”But Christ himself, you might object, befriended tax-collectors and prostitutes. How dare I cast aspersions on the motives of those who are trying to help? But Christ was the archetypal perfect man. And you’re you. How do you know that your attempts to pull someone up won’t instead bring them – or you further down?”Ouch.So, how to help? “Before you help someone, you should find out why that person in in trouble.” The thing is, that often takes more effort than just helping – it’s easier to throw money at a problem than really understand why the problem is there. But that is to cast our pearls before swine – and it was Jesus, not just Peterson, who warned us against that.And help yourself, by making friends with people who are going to genuinely help you – with people who are prepared to put the work in, because they want the best for you.Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is todayThis is the chapter about silencing your internal critic.Is this the very heart of Petersonism? Perhaps so. Certainly, it’s something I’ve heard him talk about in pretty much every clip and lecture of his I’ve listened to. It’s this:”Aim small. You don’t want to shoulder too much to begin with, given your limited talents, tendency to deceive, burden of resentment, and ability to shirk responsibility. Thus, you set the following goal: by the end of the day, I want things in my life to be a tiny bit better than they were this morning. Then you ask yourself, ‘What could I do, that I would do, that would accomplish that, and what small thing would I like as a reward?’ Then you do what you have decided to do, even if you do it badly. Then you give yourself that damn coffee, in triumph. Maybe you feel a bit stupid about it, but you do it anyway. And you do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. And, with each day, your baseline of comparison gets a little higher, and that’s magic. That’s compound interest. Do that for three years, and your life will be entirely different. Now you’re aiming for something higher. Now you’re wishing on a star. Now the beam is disappearing from your eye, and you’re learning to see. And what you aim at determines what you see. That’s worth repeating. What you aim at determines what you see.”Peterson is brutally honest about the human condition: “What do you know about yourself? You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can’t even set the clock on your microwave. Don’t over-estimate your self-knowledge.”So, you – amazing, ignorant you – aim at something, and “compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.”Rule 5: Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike themThis is the chapter every parent needs to read.If you are a parent you must read it. And if you are not a parent but know someone who is, you need to persuade them to read it.Peterson sees, “today’s parents as terrified by their children.” We are heirs of the revolutions of the 1960s and have forgotten what children need and what parents are meant to provide. What children need is parents who will give them the right kind of attention, and that means parents remembering that they are parents. “A child will have many friends, but only two parents – if that – and parents are more, not less, than friends. Friends have very limited authority to correct. Every parent therefore needs to learn to tolerate the momentary anger or even hatred directed towards them by their children, after necessary corrective action has been taken.”Parents must learn to correct their children, and socialise them. After all, “Two-year-olds, statistically speaking, are the most violent of people.” If parents don’t take this responsibility seriously, their children will be disciplined by the much harsher realities of the world. “If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends. The research literature on this is quite clear.”So what should parents teach their kids? Peterson suggests the following:”Do not bite, kick or hit, except in self-defence. Do not torture or bully other children, so you don’t end up in jail. Eat in a civilised and thankful manner, so that people are happy to have you at their house, and pleased to feed you. Learn to share, so other kids will play with you. Pay attention when spoken to by adults, so they don’t hate you and might therefore deign to teach you something. Go to sleep properly, and peaceably, so that your parents can have a private life and not resent your existence. Take care of your belongings, because you need to learn how and because you’re lucky to have them. Be good company when something fun is happening, so that you’re invited for the fun. Act so that other people are happy you’re around, so that people will want you around. A child who knows these rules will be welcome everywhere.”And that is why so many children are unwelcome, pretty much everywhere. If you are a parent, don’t let this be your child.Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the worldThis is the chapter that tells you to take responsibility for yourself.”Don’t blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. Don’t reorganise the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your own household, how dare you try to rule a city?”Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)This is the longest and densest chapter.”Life is suffering. That’s clear. There is no more basic, irrefutable truth. It’s basically what God tells Adam and Eve, immediately before he kicks them out of Paradise.” The way to deal with this is by learning delayed gratification – that is, to work and to sacrifice. Be Abel, not Cain. “Cain turns to Evil to obtain what Good denied him, and he does it voluntarily, self-consciously and with malice aforethought.” Don’t do that. Aim higher.It is here that Peterson gives the clearest definition of his ethic, his “fundamental moral conclusions”:”Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don’t be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture and death. Become aware of your own insufficiency – your cowardice, malevolence, resentment and hatred. Consider the murderousness of your own spirit before you dare accuse others, and before you attempt to repair the fabric of the world. Maybe it’s not the world that’s at fault. Maybe it’s you. You’ve failed to make the mark. You’ve missed the target. You’ve fallen short of the glory of God. You’ve sinned. And all of that is your contribution to the insufficiency and evil of the world. And, above all, don’t lie. Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell. It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of people.”And that leads us to the next chapter…Rule 8: Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lieThis is the chapter to put courage into your moral spine.We lie in order to make others like us more than they otherwise would, to make ourselves look better, to avoid difficult tasks or conversations – because we think lying makes life easier. But lying makes things worse:”If you say no to your boss, or your spouse, or your mother, when it needs to be said, then you transform yourself into someone who can say no when it needs to be said. If you say yes when no needs to be said, however, you transform yourself into someone who can only say yes, even when it is very clearly time to say no. If you ever wonder how perfectly ordinary, decent people could find themselves doing the terrible things the gulag camp guards did, you now have your answer. By the time no seriously needed to be said, there was no one left capable of saying it.”Rule 9: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’tThis is the chapter Cathy Newman should have read.Peterson is not only an academic, he is a clinical psychologist, and he knows how to listen. He has some things to teach those of us who aspire to hear people.Peterson recounts the case of ‘Miss S’ who came to see him, saying, “I think I was raped. Five times.” Peterson explains how he could have convinced her of the truth, which could have been either, “You are an innocent victim” or “You have made yourself a victim.” To have done so would have been to give her advice; but Peterson didn’t give advice, he listened.Peterson gives advice (ha!) about how to listen well. And it is this that Cathy Newman should have read and applied before tangling with the clinical psychologist:”When someone opposes you, it is very tempting to oversimplify, parody, or distort his or her position. This is a counterproductive game, designed both to harm the dissenter and unjustly raise your personal status. By contrast, if you are called upon to summarize someone’s position, so that the speaking person agrees with that summary, you may have to state the argument even more clearly and succinctly than the speaker has yet managed. If you first give the devil his due, looking at his arguments from his perspective, you can (1) find the value in them, and learn something in the process, or (2) hone your positions against them (if you still believe they are wrong) and strengthen your arguments further against challenge. This will make you much stronger. Then you will no longer have to misrepresent your opponent’s position (and may well have bridged at least part of the gap between the two of you). You will also be much better at withstanding your own doubts.”Rule 10: Be precise in your speechThis is the chapter that might save your marriage.The world is only simple when it is working. That is so obvious we miss it all the time. Peterson illustrates with the story of a woman who believes herself to be in a happy, stable, marriage, only to discover her husband is having an affair. Suddenly chaos roars, the dragon is unleashed. This is what happens when we don’t communicate, precisely.”One day it bursts forth, in a form that no one can ignore. It lifts the very household from its foundations. Then it’s an affair, or a decades-long custody dispute of ruinous economic and psychological proportions. Then it’s the concentrated version of the acrimony that could have been spread out, tolerably, issue by issue, over the years of the pseudo-paradise of the marriage. Every one of the three hundred thousand unrevealed issues, which have been lied about, avoided, rationalized away, hidden like an army of skeletons in some great horrific closet, bursts forth like Noah’s flood, drowning everything. There’s no ark, because no one built one, even though everyone felt the storm gathering.”So, how about this suggestion?”Maybe a forthright conversation about sexual dissatisfaction might have been the proverbial stitch in time – not that it would be easy. Perhaps madame desired the death of intimacy, clandestinely, because she was deeply and secretly ambivalent about sex. God knows there’s reason to be. Perhaps monsieur was a terrible, selfish lover. Maybe they both were. Sorting that out is worth a fight, isn’t it? That’s a big part of life, isn’t it? Perhaps addressing that and (you never know) solving the problem would be worth two months of pure misery just telling each other the truth (not with intent to destroy, or attain victory, because that’s not the truth: that’s just all-out war).”Like I say, this chapter could save your marriage.Rule 11: Do not bother children when they are skateboardingThis is the chapter that refutes the “postmodern/neo-Marxist claim that Western culture, in particular, is an oppressive structure, created by white men to dominate and exclude women.”Boys and girls are different. Sexual difference is biological in basis. Sexual difference is not a cultural construct. The current cultural narrative that denies these things is bad for boys – and for girls. Boys don’t know how to compete when they are forced to compete in the girls’ hierarchy. “Girls can win by winning in their own hierarchy – by being good at what girls value, as girls. They can add to this victory by winning in the boys’ hierarchy. Boys, however, can only win by winning in the male hierarchy. They will lose status, among girls and boys, by being good at what girls value. It costs them in reputation among the boys, and in attractiveness among the girls.” If we insist on going down this path, soon there will be no men left that any self-respecting woman would want to form a relationship with.It was alarming to hear the president of the Marxist Society at the university where my eldest daughter is a student, defend and promote communism on national radio recently. Marxist ideology always ends in starvation and murder. That has been demonstrated, irrefutably, at the cost of millions of lives. Yet it is this very philosophy that underpins so many current cultural developments. It is Marxism filtered through the French intellectuals and now dominant in our universities and media that says things like, “There are ‘women’ only because men gain by excluding them. There are ‘males and females’ only because members of that heterogeneous group benefit by excluding the tiny minority of people whose biological sexuality is amorphous.” Peterson retorts, “It is almost impossible to over-estimate the nihilistic and destructive nature of this philosophy. It puts the act of categorization itself in doubt. It negates the idea that distinctions might be drawn between things for any reasons other than that of raw power.”And then he deals with the “equal pay for equal work” argument. You should read that.This is a powerful chapter, that deserves careful reading, not angry, knee-jerk, liberal reaction. The practical consequences are profound: “If you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one on the streetThis is the chapter that will make you cry.The inevitability of suffering is a recurring theme for Peterson. Here he deals with it through the suffering of his daughter, who endured the misery of severe polyarticular juvenile idiopathic arthritis.How are we supposed to make sense of suffering? How are we meant to cope with it?Peterson says that part of the answer is this: “Being of any reasonable sort appears to require limitation.” It is our human limitations that make us human, and that makes suffering something we have to face. He offers wise counsel for those caught in the maelstrom of suffering – counsel about how to talk, and to listen. And he says to stop and stroke a cat: “And maybe when you are going for a walk and your head is spinning a cat will show up and if you pay attention to it then you will get a reminder for just fifteen seconds that the wonder of Being might make up for the ineradicable suffering that accompanies it.”CodaThis is the chapter in which Peterson tells us what he hopes for – he hopes for the best.So…So what to make of all this?There are incredible depths of wisdom here. There is much to glean, much to feed on.Peterson is courageous, and clear. He loves people, and hates tyranny. He is engaging and funny. Thoughtful and emotional. More of us need to share something of his courage and clarity. He is kicking down doors we should be unafraid to walk through.In fact, my most serious complaint about 12 Rules is that the fascinating endnotes are endnotes, rather than easier to access footnotes; and that there is an incredibly irritating misnumbering of these from note 33. I don’t know how that slipped through the net, but as Peterson often states, things fall apart, and chaos is always waiting to overwhelm us. What we need is order. 12 Rules will help you understand that.