12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is a somewhat controversial book by Canadian clinical psychologist and professor Jordan Peterson. It is a “belligerent self-help” style book that uses ideas and examples from history, religion, psychology, mythology, science, and philosophy to give advise on how to be a successful and better human being.
He believes strongly in human hierarchy and gender roles, and in the importance of truth telling.
Each chapter’s title in the book represents a specific rule for life explained in an essay. The basic idea is that “suffering is built into the structure of being,” but although it can be unbearable, people have a choice either to withdraw, which is a “suicidal gesture”, or to face and transcend it.
According to Peterson, people are born with the instinct for ethics and meaning, and should take responsibility to search for meaning above their own interests. Much of the ancient wisdom come from religious scripture, but Peterson uses also the scientific research to support his strong religious beliefs.
The book was published in 2018 and it was a best-seller in Canada, the U.S. and the UK. It has sold more than two million copies. The style of the book is atypical, humorous, surprising and very interesting.
Peterson’s ideas can easily generate controversy. For The Guardian, for example, Peterson is an
internet celebrity with contentious views on gender, political correctness, good and evil, (who) offers hectoring advice on how to live
and…
He is acerbic, combative and openly contemptuous of his opponents, particularly Marxists and “Postmodernists”, for whom he harbours a special animus. He is an enthusiastic and prolific culture warrior, who has no truck with “white privilege”, “cultural appropriation” and a range of other ideas associated with social justice movements. — (see 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B Peterson review – a self-help book from a culture warrior)
The book was born out of Peterson’s hobby of answering questions on Quora, like, for example, “What are the most valuable things everyone should know?” Originally there were 40 rules, but Peterson has condensed them into a more manageable list of 12 total rules that he includes in the book.
The 12 Rules
Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back
“Standing up straight with your shoulders back is something that is not only physical, because you’re not only a body, you’re a spirit so to speak, a psyche as well. Standing up physically also implies and invokes and demands standing up metaphysically. Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of being.”
Rule 2 Treat yourself like you would someone you are responsible for helping
“Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your being.”
Rule 3 Make friends with people who want the best for you
“People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results.”
Rule 4 Compare yourself with who you were yesterday, not with 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 criticise 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 11 Do not bother children when they are skate-boarding
Rule 12 Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street
37 Quotes From 12 Rules for Life
“It took untold generations to get you where you are. A little gratitude might be in order. If you’re going to insist on bending the world to your way, you better have your reasons.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don’t know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“When you have something to say, silence is a lie.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. 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.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities. Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“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).” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“Perhaps you are overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause: that is Hell.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“So, listen, to yourself and to those with whom you are speaking. Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“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.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“Don’t ever underestimate the destructive power of sins of omission.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“if you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences—and infer the motivation.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise. Tell the truth. Or, at least, don’t lie.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“Always place your becoming above your current being.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“Sometimes it seems the only people willing to give advice in a relativistic society are those with the least to offer.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“It is my firm belief that the best way to fix the world—a handyman’s dream, if ever there was one—is to fix yourself,” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“There are many systems of interaction between brain, body and social world that can get caught in positive feedback loops. Depressed people, for example, can start feeling useless and burdensome, as well as grief-stricken and pained. This makes them withdraw from contact with friends and family. Then the withdrawal makes them more lonesome and isolated, and more likely to feel useless and burdensome. Then they withdraw more. In this manner, depression spirals and amplifies” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“Nietzsche said that a man’s worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“People organize their brains with conversation. If they don’t have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds. Like hoarders, they cannot unclutter themselves.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“You are by no means only what you already know. You are also all that which you could know, if you only would. Thus, you should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are. You should never give up the better that resides within for the security you already have—and certainly not when you have already caught a glimpse, an undeniable glimpse, of something beyond.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure. When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you’re so engrossed in what you’re doing you don’t notice—it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“What you aim at determines what you see.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“Here’s a straightforward initial idea: rules should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Alternatively stated, bad laws drive out respect for good laws. This is the ethical—even legal—equivalent of Occam’s razor, the scientist’s conceptual guillotine, which states that the simplest possible hypothesis is preferable.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“If you remember that something bad happened, and you can figure out why, then you can try to avoid that bad thing happening again. That’s the purpose of memory. It’s not “to remember the past.” It’s to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness,” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“And you must be cautious, because making your life better means adopting a lot of responsibility, and that takes more effort and care than living stupidly in pain and remaining arrogant, deceitful and resentful.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“Mark Twain once said, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“When you decide to learn about your faults, so that they can be rectified, you open a line of communication with the source of all revelatory thought. Maybe that’s the same thing as consulting your conscience. Maybe that’s the same thing, in some manner, as a discussion with God.” — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
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