[PDF]12 Rules For Life An Antidote To Chaos ( PDFDrive.com ) 1

J OEDAN B

PETERSON


12 RULES
FOR LIFE

AN ANTIDOTE TO CHAOS


‘One of the most important thinkers
to emerge on the world stage for
many years’ the spectator


Idllt’


Jordan B. Peterson


12 RULES FOR LIFE


An Antidote for Chaos


Foreword by Norman Doidge
Illustrations by Ethan Van Scriver


Table of Contents


Foreword by Norman Doidge

Overture

RULE l / Stand up straight with your shoulders back
RULE 2 / Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping

RULE 3 / Make friends with people who want the best for you
RULE 4 / 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 them

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

RULE 7 / Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

RULE 8 / Tell the truth — or, at least, don’t lie
RULE 9 / Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t

RULE 10 / Be precise in your speech
RULE ll / Do not bother children when they are skateboarding

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

Coda

Endnotes


Acknowledgements

Follow Penguin


Foreword


Rules? More rules? Really? Isn’t life complicated enough, restricting enough,
without abstract rules that don’t take our unique, individual situations into
account? And given that our brains are plastic, and all develop differently based
on our life experiences, why even expect that a few rules might be helpful to us
all?

People don’t clamour for rules, even in the Bible ... as when Moses comes
down the mountain, after a long absence, bearing the tablets inscribed with ten
commandments, and finds the Children of Israel in revelry. They’d been
Pharaoh’s slaves and subject to his tyrannical regulations for four hundred years,
and after that Moses subjected them to the harsh desert wilderness for another
forty years, to purify them of their slavishness. Now, free at last, they are
unbridled, and have lost all control as they dance wildly around an idol, a golden
calf, displaying all manner of corporeal corruption.

“I’ve got some good news ... and I’ve got some bad news,” the lawgiver yells
to them. “Which do you want first?”

“The good news!” the hedonists reply.

“I got Him from fifteen commandments down to ten!”

“Hallelujah!” cries the unruly crowd. “And the bad?”

“Adultery is still in.”

So rules there will be — but, please, not too many. We are ambivalent about
rules, even when we know they are good for us. If we are spirited souls, if we
have character, rules seem restrictive, an affront to our sense of agency and our
pride in working out our own lives. Why should we be judged according to
another’s rule?

And judged we are. After all, God didn’t give Moses “The Ten Suggestions,”
he gave Commandments; and if I’m a free agent, my first reaction to a command
might just be that nobody, not even God, tells me what to do, even if it’s good
for me. But the story of the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we
quickly become slaves to our passions — and there’s nothing freeing about that.

And the story suggests something more: unchaperoned, and left to our own
untutored judgment, we are quick to aim low and worship qualities that are


beneath us — in this case, an artificial animal that brings out our own animal
instincts in a completely unregulated way. The old Hebrew story makes it clear
how the ancients felt about our prospects for civilized behaviour in the absence
of rules that seek to elevate our gaze and raise our standards.

One neat thing about the Bible story is that it doesn’t simply list its rules, as
lawyers or legislators or administrators might; it embeds them in a dramatic tale
that illustrates why we need them, thereby making them easier to understand.
Similarly, in this book Professor Peterson doesn’t just propose his twelve rules,
he tells stories, too, bringing to bear his knowledge of many fields as he
illustrates and explains why the best rules do not ultimately restrict us but
instead facilitate our goals and make for fuller, freer lives.

The first time I met Jordan Peterson was on September 12, 2004, at the home of
two mutual friends, TV producer Wodek Szemberg and medical internist Estera
Bekier. It was Wodek’s birthday party. Wodek and Estera are Polish emigres who
grew up within the Soviet empire, where it was understood that many topics
were off limits, and that casually questioning certain social arrangements and
philosophical ideas (not to mention the regime itself) could mean big trouble.

But now, host and hostess luxuriated in easygoing, honest talk, by having
elegant parties devoted to the pleasure of saying what you really thought and
hearing others do the same, in an uninhibited give-and-take. Here, the rule was
“Speak your mind.” If the conversation turned to politics, people of different
political persuasions spoke to each other — indeed, looked forward to it — in a
manner that is increasingly rare. Sometimes Wodek’s own opinions, or truths,
exploded out of him, as did his laugh. Then he’d hug whoever had made him
laugh or provoked him to speak his mind with greater intensity than even he
might have intended. This was the best part of the parties, and this frankness,
and his warm embraces, made it worth provoking him. Meanwhile, Estera’s
voice lilted across the room on a very precise path towards its intended listener.
Truth explosions didn’t make the atmosphere any less easygoing for the
company — they made for more truth explosions! — liberating us, and more
laughs, and making the whole evening more pleasant, because with de¬
repressing Eastern Europeans like the Szemberg-Bekiers, you always knew with
what and with whom you were dealing, and that frankness was enlivening.
Honore de Balzac, the novelist, once described the balls and parties in his native
France, observing that what appeared to be a single party was always really two.
In the first hours, the gathering was suffused with bored people posing and
posturing, and attendees who came to meet perhaps one special person who
would confirm them in their beauty and status. Then, only in the very late hours,


after most of the guests had left, would the second party, the real party, begin.
Here the conversation was shared by each person present, and open-hearted
laughter replaced the starchy airs. At Estera and Wodek’s parties, this kind of
wee-hours-of-the-morning disclosure and intimacy often began as soon as we
entered the room.

Wodek is a silver-haired, lion-maned hunter, always on the lookout for
potential public intellectuals, who knows how to spot people who can really talk
in front of a TV camera and who look authentic because they are (the camera
picks up on that). He often invites such people to these salons. That day Wodek
brought a psychology professor, from my own University of Toronto, who fit the
bill: intellect and emotion in tandem. Wodek was the first to put Jordan Peterson
in front of a camera, and thought of him as a teacher in search of students —
because he was always ready to explain. And it helped that he liked the camera
and that the camera liked him back.

That afternoon there was a large table set outside in the Szemberg-Bekiers’
garden; around it was gathered the usual collection of lips and ears, and
loquacious virtuosos. We seemed, however, to be plagued by a buzzing
paparazzi of bees, and here was this new fellow at the table, with an Albertan
accent, in cowboy boots, who was ignoring them, and kept on talking. He kept
talking while the rest of us were playing musical chairs to keep away from the
pests, yet also trying to remain at the table because this new addition to our
gatherings was so interesting.

He had this odd habit of speaking about the deepest questions to whoever was
at this table — most of them new acquaintances — as though he were just making
small talk. Or, if he did do small talk, the interval between “How do you know
Wodek and Estera?” or “I was a beekeeper once, so I’m used to them” and more
serious topics would be nanoseconds.

One might hear such questions discussed at parties where professors and
professionals gather, but usually the conversation would remain between two
specialists in the topic, off in a corner, or if shared with the whole group it was
often not without someone preening. But this Peterson, though erudite, didn’t
come across as a pedant. He had the enthusiasm of a kid who had just learned
something new and had to share it. He seemed to be assuming, as a child would
— before learning how dulled adults can become — that if he thought something
was interesting, then so might others. There was something boyish in the
cowboy, in his broaching of subjects as though we had all grown up together in
the same small town, or family, and had all been thinking about the very same
problems of human existence all along.


Peterson wasn’t really an “eccentric”; he had sufficient conventional chops,
had been a Harvard professor, was a gentleman (as cowboys can be) though he
did say damn and bloody a lot, in a rural 1950s sort of way. But everyone
listened, with fascination on their faces, because he was in fact addressing
questions of concern to everyone at the table.

There was something freeing about being with a person so learned yet
speaking in such an unedited way. His thinking was motoric; it seemed he
needed to think aloud, to use his motor cortex to think, but that motor also had to
mn fast to work properly. To get to liftoff. Not quite manic, but his idling speed
revved high. Spirited thoughts were tumbling out. But unlike many academics
who take the floor and hold it, if someone challenged or corrected him he really
seemed to like it. He didn’t rear up and neigh. He’d say, in a kind of folksy way,
“Yeah,” and bow his head involuntarily, wag it if he had overlooked something,
laughing at himself for overgeneralizing. He appreciated being shown another
side of an issue, and it became clear that thinking through a problem was, for
him, a dialogic process.

One could not but be struck by another unusual thing about him: for an
egghead Peterson was extremely practical. His examples were filled with
applications to everyday life: business management, how to make furniture (he
made much of his own), designing a simple house, making a room beautiful
(now an internet meme) or in another, specific case related to education, creating
an online writing project that kept minority students from dropping out of school
by getting them to do a kind of psychoanalytic exercise on themselves, in which
they would free-associate about their past, present and future (now known as the
Self- Authoring Program).

I was always especially fond of mid- Western, Prairie types who come from a
farm (where they learned all about nature), or from a very small town, and who
have worked with their hands to make things, spent long periods outside in the
harsh elements, and are often self-educated and go to university against the odds.
I found them quite unlike their sophisticated but somewhat denatured urban
counterparts, for whom higher education was pre-ordained, and for that reason
sometimes taken for granted, or thought of not as an end in itself but simply as a
life stage in the service of career advancement. These Westerners were different:
self-made, unentitled, hands on, neighbourly and less precious than many of
their big-city peers, who increasingly spend their lives indoors, manipulating
symbols on computers. This cowboy psychologist seemed to care about a
thought only if it might, in some way, be helpful to someone.


We became friends. As a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who loves literature, I
was drawn to him because here was a clinician who also had given himself a
great books education, and who not only loved soulful Russian novels,
philosophy and ancient mythology, but who also seemed to treat them as his
most treasured inheritance. But he also did illuminating statistical research on
personality and temperament, and had studied neuroscience. Though trained as a
behaviourist, he was powerfully drawn to psychoanalysis with its focus on
dreams, archetypes, the persistence of childhood conflicts in the adult, and the
role of defences and rationalization in everyday life. He was also an outlier in
being the only member of the research-oriented Department of Psychology at the
University of Toronto who also kept a clinical practice.

On my visits, our conversations began with banter and laughter — that was the
small-town Peterson from the Alberta hinterland — his teenage years right out of
the movie FUBAR — welcoming you into his home. The house had been gutted
by Tammy, his wife, and himself, and turned into perhaps the most fascinating
and shocking middle-class home I had seen. They had art, some carved masks,
and abstract portraits, but they were overwhelmed by a huge collection of
original Socialist Realist paintings of Lenin and the early Communists
commissioned by the USSR. Not long after the Soviet Union fell, and most of
the world breathed a sigh of relief, Peterson began purchasing this propaganda
for a song online. Paintings lionizing the Soviet revolutionary spirit completely
filled every single wall, the ceilings, even the bathrooms. The paintings were not
there because Jordan had any totalitarian sympathies, but because he wanted to
remind himself of something he knew he and everyone would rather forget: that
hundreds of millions were murdered in the name of utopia.

It took getting used to, this semi-haunted house “decorated” by a delusion that
had practically destroyed mankind. But it was eased by his wonderful and
unique spouse, Tammy, who was all in, who embraced and encouraged this
unusual need for expression! These paintings provided a visitor with the first
window onto the full extent of Jordan’s concern about our human capacity for
evil in the name of good, and the psychological mystery of self-deception (how
can a person deceive himself and get away with it?) — an interest we share. And
then there were also the hours we’d spend discussing what I might call a lesser
problem (lesser because rarer), the human capacity for evil for the sake of evil,
the joy some people take in destroying others, captured famously by the
seventeenth-century English poet John Milton in Paradise Lost.

And so we’d chat and have our tea in his kitchen-underworld, walled by this
odd art collection, a visual marker of his earnest quest to move beyond simplistic
ideology, left or right, and not repeat mistakes of the past. After a while, there


was nothing peculiar about taking tea in the kitchen, discussing family issues,
one’s latest reading, with those ominous pictures hovering. It was just living in
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