Twelve Rules For Life — Jordan B. Peterson

Amazon link

"It took a long time to settle on a title: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Why did that one rise up above all others? First and foremost, because of its simplicity. It indicates clearly that people need ordering principles, and that chaos otherwise beckons. We require rules, standards, values—alone and together. We’re pack animals, beasts of burden. We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence. We require routine and tradition. That’s order. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown—and that is also not good. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path. Each of the twelve rules of this book—and their accompanying essays—therefore provide a guide to being there. “There” is the dividing line between order and chaos. That’s where we are simultaneously stable enough, exploring enough, transforming enough, repairing enough, and cooperating enough. It’s there we find the meaning that justifies life and its inevitable suffering. Perhaps, if we lived properly, we would be able to tolerate the weight of our own self-consciousness. Perhaps, if we lived properly, we could withstand the knowledge of our own fragility and mortality, without the sense of aggrieved victimhood that produces, first, resentment, then envy, and then the desire for vengeance and destruction. Perhaps, if we lived properly, we wouldn’t have to turn to totalitarian certainty to shield ourselves from the knowledge of our own insufficiency and ignorance. Perhaps we could come to avoid those pathways to Hell—and we have seen in the terrible twentieth century just how real Hell can be."

 I think this is a book everyone should read. There's a chance it might change your life (unlikely in the short-term, but quite possible in the long-term, especially upon meditation), but even if it doesn't, it's hecka fun to read. I recognize that a reading a book cover-to-cover is not an insignificant investment of time in today's day and age, so I'd recommend starting with one of his podcasts (any of them, but this is a good one). You'll get a feel for his voice, the way he thinks, and the way he engages with the material. 

Though 12 Rules For Life (12R4L) was published in 2018, Jordan B. Peterson (JBP) arose in the public consciousness in 2016 for contesting Canada's passing of a 2016 human rights law that added gender identity and expression to a list of prohibited grounds for discrimination. As a result — despite his rather liberal leanings — he became an eloquent poster-child for the alt-right given his seemingly anti-PC-ness. In essence, he defends biological gender difference and rails against the idea that these differences can be socialized away or that all power is arbitrary and therefore subject to scrutiny.

It's worth noting that JBP is a (practising) clinical psychologist who wrote another book Maps of Meaning (MoM) in 1999. In MoM he studied history, mythology, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, child psychology, poetry, large sections of the Bible, Paradise Lost, Faust, and Inferno to understand and address why the Cold War happened. Specifically he wanted to understand how:

"how belief systems could be so important to people that they were willing to risk the destruction of the world to protect them. [He] came to realize that shared belief systems made people intelligible to one another—and that the systems weren’t just about belief." 

MoM is incredibly dense (there's a YouTube series of lectures, which I'll get around to one day), but basically 12R4L (and it's precursor, a Quora answer that facetiously answered "What's the meaning of life," now since deleted, but available here) is an incredibly accessible distillation of a few of MoM's core concepts:

• shared belief/cultural systems regulate the worse of human behaviors/emotions

• in the absence of such systems, people cannot act or even perceive, because  both require goals

• worse still, in the absence of such systems and the positive values we inherit from them and aspire to, we do not even have meaning— "nihilism beckons" 

12R4L and almost all of JBP's material (his podcasts are exceptional, this one on Aim and having a goal (AND LOBSTERS) is one of my favorites)... the man thinks out loud and it's a joy to hear him orate... and they're actually where I started my JBP journey) go on to explore how history/mythology/the Bible/ and even DISNEY give us the answers to the Big Question, "how to live a meaningful life." 

Since I've listened to JBP more than I've read him, and can't explain his thoughts any better than he can, I thought the best way I could make this useful to you/me would be to add links to his podcasts/videos where relevant. It's worth repeating that 12R4L is a distillation made accessible, it's going down the rabbit-hole of JBP's mind, but if you couldn't tell, it's a hole worth going down because the direction is self-discovery and improvement. 

1  Stand up straight with your shoulders back— the LOBSTER chapter

Confront the uncertainty of the world voluntarily, and with faith and courage.

• "Dominance hierarchies are older than trees," lobsters exhibit them, and they're 350M years old, which tells us that these hierarchies "have been an essentially permanent feature of the environment to which all complex life has adapted"

  • unequal distribution, including in wealth, is therefore natural and cannot be blamed on human constructs (capitalism); also all social experiments that have tried to disprove this (communism) have failed and failed horrendously; in society, what's important is having our hierarchies determined by

    • competency (YT video)

  • any collective pursuit of a goal (money/fame in people, territory/mating opportunities in animals) leads to a hierarchy, and the pursuit of goals leads to meaning; meaning and hierarchies are therefore intertwined to some degree

• posture interact with your serotonin system, better posture makes you happier and signals that to others that you're happy/confident/and worth interacting with (relevant scientific paper)

  • interacting with other fairly over a long period of time is the most important thing in life; whether you win or lose in any game isn't as important as whether people invite you to play games

  • this system of ethics (which moral relativists would argue can't exist) exists even in

    • (Hierarchies and Fair Play, rats, podcast 44:47), one of my favorite podcasts

  • "life isn't a game, it's a sequence of games, and whether you win or lose is not as important a whether you play the game... you never sacrifice the opportunity to play games for victory at one game."

    • (rats, podcast 52:50)

• standing up straight can also be thought of as acknowledging the burden of existence, choosing to accept it, and thereby saying no to nihilism

• negative posture and choosing not to play can lead to a negative feedback loop of withdrawal and always being triggered by social situations

  • being reactive to life, and always prepared for an emergency will biomechanically wear you down; poverty works in a similar way and has been shown to lower your IQ

    • Poverty (TED talk)

2 Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping— why do we treat our pets better than we treat ourselves?

• as preluded in the opening quote, the two constituent elements of reality are order and chaos, and The Way (the Taoist path to life), the same Way as referred to by Christ in John 14:6 "I am the way, and the truth, and the life”, involves navigating the path between them

  • we are therefore adapted not to the world of objects, but to the "meta-realities of order and chaos"

• since you know yourself best, you know…

the full range of your secret transgressions, insufficiencies and inadequacies. No one is more familiar than you with all the ways your mind and body are flawed. No one has more reason to hold you in contempt [than you], to see you as pathetic—and by withholding something that might do you good, you can punish yourself for all your failings…

[people] shoulder intolerable burdens of self-disgust, self-contempt, shame and self-consciousness. Thus, instead of narcissistically inflating their own importance, they don’t value themselves at all, and they don’t take care of themselves with attention and skill. It seems that people often don’t really believe that they deserve the best care, personally speaking. They are excruciatingly aware of their own faults and inadequacies, real and exaggerated, and ashamed and doubtful of their own value. They believe that other people shouldn’t suffer, and they will work diligently and altruistically to help them alleviate it. They extend the same courtesy even to the animals they are acquainted with—but not so easily to themselves.

• basically your potential for self-hatred and self-sabotage is not to be understated or underestimated — Jung’s Shadow

  • it’s important to have your own story, Jung: “it’s important to figure out what your story is because it might be a tragedy, and if it is you might want to rethink it… The easiest sort of life to have is a tragedy”

    • (Why you should treat yourself as if you have value, podcast 23:45)

• and although sacrifice is valorized in Western culture (Jesus Christ), “It is not virtuous to be victimized by a bully, even if that bully is oneself.”

3 Make friends with people who want the best for you

If you surround yourself with people who support your upward aim, they will not tolerate your cynicism and destructiveness. They will instead encourage you when you do good for yourself and others and punish you carefully when you do not. This will help bolster your resolve to do what you should do, in the most appropriate and careful manner...

People who are not aiming up will do the opposite. They will offer a former smoker a cigarette and a former alcoholic a beer. They will become jealous when you succeed, or do something pristine. They will withdraw their presence or support, or actively punish you for it. They will over-ride your accomplishment with a past action, real or imaginary, of their own. Maybe they are trying to test you, to see if your resolve is real, to see if you are genuine. But mostly they are dragging you down because your new improvements cast their faults in an even dimmer light.

4 Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today

There will always be people better than you—that’s a cliché of nihilism, like the phrase, In a million years, who’s going to know the difference? The proper response to that statement is not, Well, then, everything is meaningless. It’s, Any idiot can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters. Talking yourself into irrelevance is not a profound critique of Being. It’s a cheap trick of the rational mind.

• standards are important, but comparing yourself to others (usually across one dimension “salary/looks/etc” is an exercise in futility)

  • a flat globalized world exacerbates this by increasing your comparison pool: “Our hierarchies of accomplishment are now dizzyingly vertical”

• what you aim at determines what you see and do

• iteration + compound interest in the key

You might ask yourself, “What could I say to someone else—my friend, my brother, my boss, my assistant—that would set things a bit more right between us tomorrow? What bit of chaos might I eradicate at home, on my desk, in my kitchen, tonight, so that the stage could be set for a better play? What snakes might I banish from my closet—and my mind?” Five hundred small decisions, five hundred tiny actions, compose your day, today, and every day. Could you aim one or two of these at a better result? Better, in your own private opinion, by your own individual standards? Could you compare your specific personal tomorrow with your specific personal yesterday? Could you use your own judgment, and ask yourself what that better tomorrow might be?

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.

• re: aiming on a star and Pinocchio, “To catalyse the development of something autonomous and real you have to lift your eyes above the horizon and establish a relationship with a transcendent goal”

  • (The Necessity of Aim, podcast, 1:18:07)

 5 Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them

• involves acknowledging that you can dislike your children

• your children will have many friends, but only two parents

• Goodall’s chimps showed that animals have an innate capacity for violence, so while violence is the norm, peace has to be learnt

• the idea that a child has unbounded potential for creativity and that rules restrict this is false:

  • (1) creativity beyond trivial levels is shockingly rare (scientific paper), and

  • (2) strict limitations facilitate rather than inhibit creative achievement (scientific paper)

• “parents are the arbiters of society,” whose primary function is to socialize their kids so that other kids want to play with them

Imagine a toddler repeatedly striking his mother in the face. Why would he do such a thing? It’s a stupid question. It’s unacceptably naive. The answer is obvious. To dominate his mother. To see if he can get away with it. Violence, after all, is no mystery. It’s peace that’s the mystery. Violence is the default. It’s easy. It’s peace that is difficult: learned, inculcated, earned. (People often get basic psychological questions backwards. Why do people take drugs? Not a mystery. It’s why they don’t take them all the time that’s the mystery. Why do people suffer from anxiety? That’s not a mystery. How is that people can ever be calm? There’s the mystery. We’re breakable and mortal. A million things can go wrong, in a million ways. We should be terrified out of our skulls at every second. But we’re not. The same can be said for depression, laziness and criminality.)

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

• life is suffering, and existential dread is always at hand, which makes blaming the world only too easy

  • one of the Sandy Hook shooters notes: “The human race isn’t worth fighting for, only worth killing. Give the Earth back to the animals. They deserve it infinitely more than we do. Nothing means anything anymore.”

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? Let your own soul guide you. Watch what happens over the days and weeks. When you are at work you will begin to say what you really think. You will start to tell your wife, or your husband, or your children, or your parents, what you really want and need. When you know that you have left something undone, you will act to correct the omission. Your head will start to clear up, as you stop filling it with lies. Your experience will improve, as you stop distorting it with inauthentic actions. You will then begin to discover new, more subtle things that you are doing wrong. Stop doing those, too. After some months and years of diligent effort, your life will become simpler and less complicated. Your judgment will improve. You will untangle your past. You will become stronger and less bitter. You will move more confidently into the future. You will stop making your life unnecessarily difficult. You will then be left with the inevitable bare tragedies of life, but they will no longer be compounded with bitterness and deceit.

7 Pursue what is meaningful not what is expedient

• The Bible codifies the idea of a useful sacrifice, which can be thought of as delayed gratification— something that separates us from animals

• suffering is real, one of the few things that we know to be real and evil, reducing it is therefore good and meaningful

• Aim on a star

• We have much to be grateful to Christianity for, chiefly the Christian doctrine:

“elevated the individual soul, placing slave and master and commoner and nobleman alike on the same metaphysical footing, rendering them equal before God and the law… In consequence, the metaphysical conception of the implicit transcendent worth of each and every soul established itself against impossible odds as the fundamental presupposition of Western law and society. That was not the case in the world of the past, and is not the case yet in most places in the world of the present. It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the hierarchical slave-based societies of our ancestors reorganized themselves, under the sway of an ethical/religious revelation, such that the ownership and absolute domination of another person came to be viewed as wrong.

• Though Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were severe critics of the Church, they recognized the “vital necessity of the dogma of the Church.”

  • An unbounded life, without limits and restrictions, has no meaning

• The death of Christian dogma has lead to something even more dangerous— nihilism

There is no faith and no courage and no sacrifice in doing what is expedient. There is no careful observation that actions and presuppositions matter, or that the world is made of what matters. To have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want, because you may neither know what you want, nor what you truly need. Meaning is something that comes upon you, of its own accord. You can set up the preconditions, you can follow meaning, when it manifests itself, but you cannot simply produce it, as an act of will. Meaning signifies that you are in the right place, at the right time, properly balanced between order and chaos, where everything lines up as best it can at that moment.

8 Tell the truth, or at least, don’t lie

• “whatever you bring into being as a consequence of participating in the truth is by definition good”

  • (The Necessity of Aim, podcast, 1:12:45)

• in times of critical decision-making, all you’ll have to rely on is your moral virtue, and lying and deception contaminates that

  • (Be precise in your speech, podcast, 58:45)

• it may not be easy to tell the truth, but you can tell when you’re going to lie

• “You should be integrated in your body and your mind, and so that not only should you say things that you believed to be true, or at least weren't lies, but you should act them out as well so that you’re kind of a unified thing… you can actually detect when you were about to say something false and that you could learn to listen to yourself and you can learn feel whether what you were saying was making you stronger or weaker… [lying] is an anxiety, provoking experience… you can learn to feel, you can learn to listen to what you say, and you can feel whether what saying is making you stronger and more positioned, or whether it making you weak and fragmented, and now the weakness often has the benefit of allowing you to do something impulsively pleasurable, so there’s a high pay off the in the short-term, but it’s a catastrophe in the long-term.”

  • (The topic of truth, podcast, 1:18:40)

9 Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t

• the (evolutionary) purpose of memory is not to remember the past, but to prepare you for the future… memory is not infallible

• talking about something, especially the first time, is as much about what you don’t say (omission) as it is about submission; additionally, people organize their brains with conversation

10 Be precise in your speech

Why refuse to specify? Because while you are failing to define success (and thereby rendering it impossible) you are also refusing to define failure, to yourself, so that if and when you fail you won’t notice, and it won’t hurt. But that won’t work! You cannot be fooled so easily—unless you have gone very far down the road! You will instead carry with you a continual sense of disappointment in your own Being and the self-contempt that comes along with that and the increasing hatred for the world that all of that generates (or degenerates).

When things fall apart, and chaos re-emerges, we can give structure to it, and re-establish order, through our speech. If we speak carefully and precisely, we can sort things out, and put them in their proper place, and set a new goal, and navigate to it—often communally, if we negotiate; if we reach consensus. If we speak carelessly and imprecisely, however, things remain vague. The destination remains unproclaimed. The fog of uncertainty does not lift, and there is no negotiating through the world.

Precision specifies. When something terrible happens, it is precision that separates the unique terrible thing that has actually happened from all the other, equally terrible things that might have happened—but did not. If you wake up in pain, you might be dying. You might be dying slowly and terribly from one of a diverse number of painful, horrible diseases. If you refuse to tell your doctor about your pain, then what you have is unspecified: it could be any of those diseases—and it certainly (since you have avoided the diagnostic conversation—the act of articulation) is something unspeakable. But if you talk to your doctor, all those terrible possible diseases will collapse, with luck, into just one terrible (or not so terrible) disease, or even into nothing. Then you can laugh at your previous fears, and if something really is wrong, well, you’re prepared. Precision may leave the tragedy intact, but it chases away the ghouls and the demons.

You must determine where you have been in your life, so that you can know where you are now. If you don’t know where you are, precisely, then you could be anywhere. Anywhere is too many places to be, and some of those places are very bad. You must determine where you have been in your life, because otherwise you can’t get to where you’re going. You can’t get from point A to point B unless you are already at point A, and if you’re just “anywhere” the chances you are at point A are very small indeed.

You must determine where you are going in your life, because you cannot get there unless you move in that direction. Random wandering will not move you forward. It will instead disappoint and frustrate you and make you anxious and unhappy and hard to get along with (and then resentful, and then vengeful, and then worse).

Say what you mean, so that you can find out what you mean. Act out what you say, so you can find out what happens. Then pay attention. Note your errors. Articulate them. Strive to correct them. That is how you discover the meaning of your life. That will protect you from the tragedy of your life. How could it be otherwise?

Confront the chaos of Being. Take aim against a sea of troubles. Specify your destination, and chart your course. Admit to what you want. Tell those around you who you are. Narrow, and gaze attentively, and move forward, forthrightly.

11 Don’t bother children when they’re skateboarding

• don’t overcoddle your kids, lest they become useless— similar to the concept of Taleb’s Antifragile

12 Pet a cat on the street when you meet one

“What shall I do when I despise what I have?” Remember those who have nothing and strive to be grateful. Take stock of what is right in front of you. Consider Rule 12—somewhat tongue-in-cheek—(Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street).

If you are already everything, everywhere, always, there is nowhere to go and nothing to be. Everything that could be already is, and everything that could happen already has. And it is for this reason, so the story goes, that God created man. No limitation, no story. No story, no Being. That idea has helped me deal with the terrible fragility of Being. It helped my client, too. I don’t want to overstate the significance of this. I don’t want to claim that this somehow makes it all OK. She still faced the cancer afflicting her husband, just as I still faced my daughter’s terrible illness. But there’s something to be said for recognizing that existence and limitation are inextricably linked.

Other stuff

• Faust’s Mephistopheles is quite the nihilist and says something along the lines of “things are so comprised by their limitations and the suffering that produces, that it would be better if nothing existed at all”... that’s the opposite of love, which is that “you have to embrace the catastrophe... you decide at the deepest level of your being that for all the fragility, inadequacy, and error of that person, that it’s spectacularly wonderful that they existed at all”

  • (The topic of truth, podcast, 1:35:45)

• postmodernists (and the “angry liberal left”) posit that “All definitions of skill and of competence are merely made up by those who benefit from them, to exclude others, and to benefit personally and selfishly… But (and this is where you separate the metaphorical boys from the men, philosophically) the fact that power plays a role in human motivation does not mean that it plays the only role, or even the primary role.”

Repeated concepts and important assumptions

• life is suffering, and much of this is related to consciousness, but "the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being. It is simultaneously the will to dare set your sights at the unachievable, and to sacrifice everything, including (and most importantly) your life. You realize that you have, literally, nothing better to do."

• self-consciousness can also be thought of as awareness of human vulnerabilities, from which knowledge we've learned to torture people: "only man could conceive of a the rack, the iron maiden and the thumbscrew.  Only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the  best definition of evil I have been able to formulate"

• And from the definition of evil comes the definition of good: the alleviation of suffering

• everything is not morally relative, there is a proper way to conduct yourself in the world (rats (podcast 53:35))

• humans are moral animals but we have not developed an ethics based on modern science, hence there may be a thing to learn from the rest of the animal kingdom (JBP is fascinated by proto-ethics in other animals, especially the ancient ones like LOBSTERS and brings it up frequently)

• the Bible is the foundational document of Western civilization, and therefore of Western values, morality, and concepts of good and evil. And "Its careful, respectful study can reveal things to us about what we believe and how we do and should act that can be discovered in almost no other manner."