In 2018, before he had become an unexpected avatar of the American culture war, then-56-year-old Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson published 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
It took a conservative tack on discipline and relationships, inspired by his clinical practice, his teaching and his politics. I certainly didn’t agree with all of it back then, but the framework of spinning a specific even prosaic rule-of-thumb into a bit of wider philosophy seemed like fun. Friends and I created our own lists.
In the years since, Peterson became an unexpected lightning rod, and a near cartoonish hero or villain depending on your politics. It was time to go back and read his breakout book. So I did just that. It’s too long and does dip into strange pseudoscience at times. I also think it presents a worldview that looked fresh and productive to many, especially young men.
My notes for future reference below.
My notes:
- Intro: “ideologies are substitutes to true knowledge”
- My note: Author’s frequent use of the “Masculine order” and “feminine disorder” feels unnecessary, strange and either intentionally provocative or purely naive to me
- Low status lobster: that dominance hierarchies are very old. If you’re dominant you’re more likely to be open for more; if you’re not then you might grab for crumbs and fight
- People are better at filling prescriptions for their pets than themselves (is this true?), which he argues as evidence that it’s about people not thinking they deserve help
- “Chaos is freedom, dreadful freedom too.” Order is explored territory; chaos is unexplored
- The Male/female divide has existed for a billion years; parent/child relationship in mammals existed for just 200 million years
- Women rate men less attractive but are more likely to connect
- He asks parents: want your kid to be strong or safe?
- “Our hierarchies of accomplishment are now dizzyingly vertical.” (Easier to get serotonin hit of stature and confidence in a small pond of online communities
- Sustained Inattentiinal blindness (famous gorilla-in-the-video research)
- Compare yourself to who you were yesterday not who someone is today
- Author asks: Was it good to liberalize divorce laws in 1960s?
- Everyone is the unconscious follower of some philosopher (Rousseau believed children unsullied )
- Author argues that Hunter gatherer societies murdered far more than industrialized societies (He references the prominently researched Yahonami and Kato people, though Dawn of Everything book argues there’s more complexity in prehistoric societies)
- People often get psychological questions backward: not why we’re violent, why we take drugs, why we have anxiety but in stress why is anyone ever not doing this?
- For kids “bad laws drive out respect for good laws”
- Once we discover vulnerability in ourselves we understand how to torment others
- “Evil enters the world with our own self consciousness”
- Hobbes: life is nasty brutish and short (Dawn of Everything discusses this too)
- “After Auschwitz,” wrote Thomas Adorno, “there should be no poetry”
- Carl Jung: “no tree can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell”
- Solzhenitsyn ‘s gulag archipelago includes the point that living for something matters even during starvation
- Carl Jung: Europe’s focus on technology followed the determination that Christianity alone didn’t solve suffering
- Complementary of Christianity: argues it made a less barbaric world that could then focus on its own failures
- Jung followed Nietchze in dismantling Christianity: “God is dead…who will wipe the blood off us?”
- Marx: religion is the opiate of the masses
- Dead facts vs ideas that are alive
- Anti psychotic drugs and deinstitutionalization of the late 1960s closed residential asylums
- Alfred Adler: life lies
- “Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life’s meaning as the central human motivational force”
- “Drunk people know about the future but they don’t care about it”
- Don’t steal other people’s problems: ask questions
- Children’s book “There’s No Such Thing as a Dragon” by Jack Kent: ignore a problem and it gets worse
- If things are made too safe, people, especially children, will make them dangerous; let them develop competence
- Orwell published The Road to Wigan Pier in 1936: the Socialist leaders didn’t love they poor, they just hated the rich
- Jung: if you cannot understand why someone did something look at the consequences – and infer the motivation
- Men are dropping out of labor force and failing out of university; men will marry those of lower status but women haven’t. Author argues that gender imbalances have more to do with women having many of the same work-related challenges of men but also pregnancy, menstruation, traditional childcare-roles and, for some jobs, are physically less strong. Teaching about patriarchal oppression creates adversaries while most average men fall out of system, author argues
- Horkheimer critical theory in 1930s and Derrida is his view of the postmodernists
- Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea: these are the examples of communism. Early on there was hope in the Soviet system and many supported Republicans in Spain over the fascist nationalists while America snd Great Britain stayed out of it. This all created progressive support for the socialists
- Jean Paul Sartre stayed Marxist and communist while others broke with the communists (like Orwell’s animal farm)
- The Soviet’s killed the kulaks for having possessions but likely many were the most productive residents
- After Stalin’s Soviet lost virtue, the author argues Derrida swapped his attacks of the rich for those in power: instead rich vs poor it is that all hierarchies exist to exclude; all definitions of skill are biased etc
- But author argues: just because power does play a role doesn’t mean it plays the only role in society
- Cynthia Eller: myth of matriarchal prehistory
- Men and women are different; what men offer is toughness that comes with consequences which some don’t want; most women want tough men though some women don’t actually like men, author argues
- “Leave children alone when they are skateboarding” is his strongest and clearest chapter: let me toughen up, there are gender differences, he’s arguing
- “If you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”
- Tajfel: minimal group identification
- “What can be truly loved about a person is inseparable from their limitations”
- Story from the Torah: what does a being that is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent lack? Limitation. So god created man; no limitation no story, no story, no being. We need limitation for existence to matter
- “Being requires becoming”
- To end an argument, retreat and ask yourself sincerely: what did I do to contribute to this and what can I do? (That’s true prayer) Do you want to be right or do you want to have peace?
- First rule: the waiter who stops complaining about his low status and starts working
- Peterson’s books have a lot of references to Disney movies and the Bible
- He denigrates the young woman who is so depressed because she expresses climate hopelessness that she doesn’t entirely understand
- Both of his books are too long, in my reading of them
- Socrates all learning is remembering
- Luke 6:31 is golden rule
- Enuma Elish old written hero story
- A lot of Harry Potter references
- Fraud’s defense mechanisms overlook sins of omission (not just commission) and assumes that we know and can make sense of the past, argues author
- In both his books, he references that how all major religions acknowledge that life is suffering (Buddhism and Hinduism too)
- Peter Pan who refuses to grow up
- Osiris let himself go blind and gave up his kingdom to an evil brother
- Happy us. Right now thing not the right goal
- Abraham Is called on by his and still suffers so much; that is Symbol of life with purpose
- Politically correct of flip chart and blackboard and master key
- He addresses his surge of fame and 160 city lecture tour, said the question of responsibility brought most attention from all global audiences
- We spent 50 years telling young people to demand rights without also asking something of them
- Nietzsche and Dostoevsky predicted the turmoil of pure collectivism, Nietzsche in particular thought an experiment with a “vast expenditure of lives” might help people learn the danger of how attractive it all sounds
- -ism uses low resolution truth and villains
- Like his other book, he again argues Foccault and Derrida swapped economics for power to continue on the Marxist battle (after soviet collapse)
- Ideologues leave nothing outside of their understanding
- It is impossible to “fight patriarchy” or “run every organization like a business” because these are too low resolution
- Ideology should have died in the 20th century
- “Clean your bedroom” is what he’s known for but he goes beyond it: try to make one room your home as beautiful as possible
- Matthew 4:4 “man shall not live by bread alone”
- Artists transfer chaos to order (including in physical neighborhoods)
- Robert Sopolsky wildebeest story: biologists smeared red paint on specimen to follow them but lions kept eating them. Wildebeest are hard to distinguish from each other for lions which struggle to coordinate on one to attack. They chase old and weak and tiny ones not to cull the weak exactly but because it’s easy to coordinate attacking them. The moral is to stand out is to get attacked by lions always waiting
- “Artists teach others to see”
- In a marriage, the master should be that who chooses best for both not a zero sum
- Do not confuse nice and good
- The young use unearned cynicism to replace wisdom
- Have children if you can; 30% have difficulty doing so
- The hard part is negotiating every trivial matter but trivial matters over a lifetime become less trivial
- Relationships hope you’re not the same kind of insane so you keep yourselves in check
- Have sex once or twice a week with kids; Much less, he argues, and typically that means one is tyrannizing the other
- Do not punish your partner for something you want them to continue doing
- We conceptualize via story
- Sins of commission vs omission
- Proverbs 9:10: “fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom”
- Columbine killers had a philosophy of nihilism, that we must for to pay for the sins of existence
- “You might love people despite their limitations, but you also love them because of their limitations”
- Dr Maxim Itkin at Penn Center for Lymphatic. disorders treated the author, he notes in his acknowledgments
