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

Voyage to the past with Doc Peterson: a time of lobsters and dominance hierarchy, a time of myths and legends and religious texts, a time of bootstrapping and individualism and Jung and curtailing your pretentious nihilism, just clean your damn room and don't be such a whiny loser. A time when men were men and women were women, when there was nothing to get hung about, strawberry fields were forever. Will you enjoy this journey through time & space? Mileage may vary, so here is a handy guide:

1. Are you a young man of an apolitical, libertarian, or conservative bent, one who feels rather adrift in life and the only option you can think of to get out of your rut is to join the military, otherwise you'll be stuck in whatever small town you live in? This is your book. I hope it helps!

2. Are you an ardently political progressive who rejects gender essentialism and binaries in general, and you are considering working in social services or in a field that will make use of your liberal arts degree? This isn't your book. It will infuriate and enrage you, and who has time for that?

3. Are you someone who loves following a person's stream of conscious, all of the digressions, their personality and quirks on full display, a book in which the author is transparent and almost completely unselfconscious about his obsessions? Consider this book. It is, as they say, an experience.

4. Are you very online, identify as leftist or as woke or as an attack helicopter, embrace identity politics and intersectionality, have watched the Peterson of today and are revolted, and you didn't much like him before today either? Avoid this book at all costs, comrade.

My own reaction: there was a lot that I disagreed with, but even more that I appreciated. This was a fascinating and surprisingly enjoyable book, despite my many aggravations.

CAUSA 6/5/22

Peterson is getting way over the top lately, so I thought I'd bump this one up the list and read it before I became more turned off and perhaps predisposed against his book. I want to come to this with a really open mind. I've enjoyed a lot of Doctor How's videos so I hope to see more of that guy, rather than the person I just unfollowed (lol).

RULE 6Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world

"Don't blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. Don't reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?"

Peterson starts this chapter by examining the stated motivations of the Columbine killers, ruminates on Goethe and Tolstoy's perspectives on human destructiveness, considers the serial killer Carl Panzram, and provides a couple examples from his practice of people who have withstood and then countered the evils that life has thrown at them. He also spends some time musing on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (and the reader gets a glimpse of Peterson's own fervent anti-communism).

This was a short yet very dense chapter. By starting off his conversation with an examination of the mindset of mass murderers, things get heavy quickly. He positions their attitude, and the attitude of many others who seek to lash back at the world, as the ultimate response of people who want revenge on everyone and everything. People who have seen the evils of the world and/or been subjected personally to those evils, and who respond not simply with apathy, but with nihilistic vengeance: a defiance of God and law and decency, and a mission to prove to everyone that their personal perspective of a burning world is a universal truth. It is a perspective that removes the individual from the equation, the victims of course, but also the individual who is thinking those thoughts and who is killing all those people. Rather than focusing on what they can do to change themselves, their own part of the world and the people in it, they instead seek to give the world their ultimate criticism. They seek to become a symbol of their own rejection of the world, rather than an individual capable of change and capable of creating change. And so they become a judgment upon the world and against life itself, which they consider to be an innately unjust and evil state of being.

There is always a temptation to blame fate, God, luck, how fucked up the world can be, rather than to look inward, at how we and our peers and our family and our community may be complicit. We especially resist examining ourselves and how we engage with the world. As the author says in the next chapter: "the world is revealed... through the template of your values." In this chapter, he provides an example: the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. One can blame fate or nature or even naivete; it is more comfortable than recognizing culpability. Katrina was a natural disaster, but New Orleans's leaders and government chose not to complete improvements to its levee system that were mandated in 1965. Who is to blame - Nature or the corrupt blindness that led to a disastrous lack of preparation?

I think it is easy to (willfully) misunderstand Peterson's point in this chapter. I saw that misunderstanding when watching a video of the author being questioned while on a panel in Australia. The questioner tried to score a point by dismissing this chapter as Peterson telling folks not to be critical of the world unless they're personally perfect. It's like that audience member just read the chapter title and didn't bother reading the actual chapter. The message here is clear: humans should not give in to the evils that impact life, to the urges that lead a person to vengeance and destruction. We instead need to engage in self-examination, we need to ask ourselves how we may have contributed to these catastrophes that sadden or enrage us, and perhaps most importantly, we need to see the evils that we experience as... instructive. These evils represent modes of behavior that we must reject in our own lives. Otherwise, as the clich goes, we have let those bad things and bad occurrences and bad people win. This chapter is not about not being critical, it is about not allowing hopelessness, resentment, and anger to take over our lives. Impossible for me to find fault with the message of this rule.

RULE 11Do not bother children when they are skateboarding

"The spirit that interferes when boys are trying to become men is, therefore, no more friend to woman than it is to man... It negates consciousness. It's antihuman, desirous of failure, jealous, resentful and destructive. No one truly on the side of humanity would ally him or herself with such a thing... And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of."

Peterson starts by, yes, talking about kids skateboarding. This was a nice intro with a nice message: let kids be kids, even if they are putting themselves into a little bit of danger, because that is how you allow things like bravery, grit, and resilience to develop. Unfortunately, as the chapter progresses, it became clear to me that this charming preface is solely concerned with skateboarding boys. Heaven forbid girls consider skateboarding!

Anyway, from there Peterson continues on another wild series of what appear to be tangents but are all actually linked musings that together form the moral of Rule 11. (view spoiler)[He revisits his tragic friend Chris and is a bit more empathetic this time; the point of this section is that Chris was always angry at the injustices of the world, and that put him in a kind of personal development stasis as a self-annihilating rebel without a cause. He notes that women are the majority of college students and there are less male college students every year. He argues that patriarchy is less about the oppression of women and more about the attempt of men and women "to free each other from privation, disease, and drudgery"... his primary examples being the two men who created tampons. Words can't describe my mixed feelings in even writing that last sentence LOL. He talks about the Soviet massacre of two million kulaks ("their richest peasants") which was fascinating/horrific new history for me and also I didn't understand the point of including this history. He rakes postmodernist philosopher-king Jacques Derrida over the coals because of Derrida's insistence that there are exclusionary hierarchical structures, and here I thought that was the exact point that Peterson himself was making in prior chapters. He argues that it is actually not power but competence and ability and skill that are the prime determiners of status in well-functioning societies, to which I must ask him to list me examples of such societies. He attacks the idea of equality of outcomes (i.e. "equity") as hollow and unrealistic, and I actually agree with him there. He discusses how aggression is not an inherently negative trait and I also agree. He spends quite a lot of time discussing the archetypal Terrible Mother and her smothering ways and "compassion as a vice" and I got a little sick to my stomach because here he goes again about women and now he's using all the fables and even Disney cartoons as evidence. He talks about men and their aggressive ways of interacting and how that's not bad, and I agree again, but then he literally uses the ancient Charles Atlas ads as evidence that only alpha men genuinely interest women and then he talks about how Lisa on The Simpsons once had a crush on the bully Nelson and (hide spoiler)] I realized that his point across this entire chapter is that boys need to grow up to be manly men because that's basically what women want. Is he wrong?

Let's ask my Inner Gender Essentialist and my Inner Gender Anarchist to both respond!

GENDER ESSENTIALIST MARK:

Peterson makes an interesting point early on about physical competition between girls & boys: it can be seen as admirable for a girl to even try to compete against a boy, whether or not she wins or loses; for a boy, it is suspect if he even competes with a girl in the first place, unless he is playing down to her as an adult would with a child, and if he loses to her, he will suffer a loss of status. This is an uncomfortable point but there is truth there too. As there is truth in his thoughts on the different interaction styles that men and women can have, and in disparities between men and women when it comes to some forms of physical labor.

Well, at least the truth of my own memories of physical competitions that I've seen or been a part of from childhood through college. And the truth of the many straight male-female relationships I've seen over the years. And the truth of how all of my decent, women-supporting, not-misogynist male friends would never be less than a "gentleman" in their treatment of women, in particular their understanding that women should not be talked to in the same way that men talk to each other, nor expected to operate at the same physical level as men when it comes to certain tasks.

And the truth that for many of my empowered female friends, when talking pre-marriage to their queer bachelor friend Mark about the guys they are attracted to, only talked about fit manly men who are rough around the edges as their ideal, and hey that's who they usually ended up marrying. They married my guy friends, who are gentlemen and who are mainly non-collegiate manly alpha types and who, ironically enough, would probably hate everything Jordan Peterson stands for, and yet who are, essentially, the very type of man that Peterson is extolling (and who are, again the irony, quite the opposite of over-educated, not-particularly-manly, ivory tower-dwelling Peterson himself LOL). So is this gender essentialism or is this simply reality for the vast majority of women and men? Do people hate JP because he is telling an uncomfortable truth?

GENDER ANARCHIST MARK:

Okay unlike fucking Gender Essentialist Mark, I'm not going to go on and fucking on. Instead I'm just going to point to one fucking phrase in this fucking fucked-up chapter: "Disney's more recent and deeply propagandistic Frozen." And then I'm going to point to an interview he gave with some magazine all about that phrase, where he says that he hated Frozen because it turns out the supposed hero is a conniving villain who doesn't rescue the heroine, she has to rescue herself and her sister too. So, prince doesn't rescue princess and a moral that girls sometimes gotta take care of each other and how poor nave JP was surprised & horrified at the twist, and all of that was apparently enough to drive this fragile maniac out of his mind. And so he bestowed the label of Deeply Propagandistic to a benign cartoon about female empowerment because Peterson is basically cosplaying Cro-Magnon Man Who Take Care Of Woman and anything that takes him out of his fantasy world of prescribed gender roles is deeply triggering to this poor fucking snowflake and he's just got to let the whole damn world know all about it.

RULE 12Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

"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."

Peterson talks about how we must alleviate our suffering by finding inspiration and joy where we can, whether it's in witnessing the strength displayed by someone facing terrible challenges or just appreciating a moment with a friendly cat. He speaks movingly on his daughter's struggles with severe juvenile idiopathic arthritis, on "recognizing that existence and limitation are inextricably linked," and on the awesomeness of cats and dogs.

This chapter's message is timeless and this rule was an appealing way to end the book. (Especially after that prior chapter.) Probably biased here, because this rule is definitely one that governs my own life.

THE OTHER RULES

(view spoiler)[responses to these rules in messages 28-31 below

Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders backRule 2: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.Rule 3: Make friends with people who want the best for youRule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is todayRule 5: Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

Rule 8: Tell the truth - or, at least, don't lie"First, a little lie; then, several little lies to prop it up. After that, distorted thinking to avoid the shame that those lies produce, then a few more lies to cover up the consequences of the distorted thinking. Then, most terribly, the transformation of those now necessary lies through practice into automatized, specialized, structural, neurologically instantiated "unconscious" belief and action."

Rule 10: Be precise in your speech. (hide spoiler)]

Jordan Peterson is a person who receives a lot of derision in my world (view spoiler)[ well at least in my online world, although just typing the phrase "my online world" sorta makes me cringe; okay to be precise, people I like or follow or whatever online don't seem to like him - the people in my actual world probably have never heard of him plus they are not big readers anyway, more into talking about music or local politics than talking about things like books let alone pop culture phenomena like Peterson and I've noticed some eyerolls if I mention something I saw on youtube, a place where Peterson pops up a lot, so does tom cardy who is this hilarious lo-fi australian musician that everyone should watch, and so do a lot of cute animal videos, and a lot of Maangchi's cooking videos, and a lot of Key & Peele, oh man my youtube algorithm really gets me - and damn those eyerolls literally happened yesterday and there I thought I was being helpful by mentioning this particular youtuber named ContraPoints, it seemed like a natural fit in the conversation - but the silence and certain eye movements suddenly made me decide to order another round for everyone because hopefully by the time I got back with drinks everyone would have forgotten my apparent social lapse and overall lack of EQ and would have moved on to something super fascinating to me *cough* like the ins & outs of running a cabinet-making business or will schools be opened or not because the kids are getting to be a lot but also it's scary because the kids don't need to be bringing home no corona, although when I did return they weren't talking about that at all because we had been joined by an old friend who we knew from back in the day, and I think her boyfriend, I wonder if they were actually out on a date, if so they certainly could have picked a better venue, and they were all talking about the homeless crisis and local politics and it all sounded very boring so time for a smoke - Graham joined me to bum one but fortunately for him it was my last one, I thought he quit and I do not want to be his enabler, and so he received a well-deserved chiding - but then when I returned a second time the conversation was back to delta variant and seriously that topic just makes me want to put a bullet in my brain so instead of doing that - as I mentioned to them earlier, it would really suck if I died in the near future because I still have a lot of books I just really, really need to read before I die, oh and places to visit, and various dvd boxsets that are still wrapped in plastic; my friends couldn't tell if I was being serious or not, but let me tell you, I was dead serious - so instead of raising gun to head I just made up some excuse about something I had to go do so gotta say goodbye, and the funny thing is that I cut Graham off just as he was about to say the same thing, I know him all too well, but since I got mine out first, and since he's such a courteous guy, I knew that he'd feel he'd have to stick around with that boring conversation for who knows how long; I smiled to myself but also felt sorta bad - Sorry, Graham! - oh now I just got a bite of fear because the last time I did something rude at this exact bar, it precipitated a cold war between the two of us that lasted like 3 years and was a drag for everyone - Jesus Christ, Graham, you cannot hold this one minor infraction against me, please! (hide spoiler)] and that sorta interests me. But what really interests me is how 12 Rules is apparently all about the digressions and tangents, despite the simplicity of the points being made. Totally into that.

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