Most of his rules are to do with personal responsibility, and making the kind of life choices that will allow a person to function efficiently in the world. Peterson’s stern preceptor persona probably works well in a clinical setting, where he presumably encounters damaged people in need of an authority figure who can provide an external source of order and stability.
Photograph: Michael Nigro/Pacific/BarcroftImages Peterson styles himself as a prolific culture warrior who has no truck with social justice movements. The effect is bizarre, like being shouted at by a rugby coach in a sarong. Within a page, we are told that “expedience is cowardly, and shallow, and wrong” and “meaning is what emerges beautifully and profoundly like a newly formed rosebud opening itself out of nothingness into the light of sun and God”. He likes to capitalise the word “Being” and also to talk about “fundamental, biological and non-arbitrary emergent truth”. Once the cloud of testosterone has cleared (leaving behind the lingering curiosity as to why, exactly, one would want a longhouse upstairs), the reader discovers that each of Peterson’s 12 rules is explained in an essay delivered in a baroque style that combines pull-your-socks-up scolding with footnoted references to academic papers and Blavatskyesque metaphysical flights. Jordan B Peterson, raised and toughened in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta, has flown a hammerhead roll in a carbon fibre stunt plane, piloted a mahogany racing sailboat around Alcatraz Island, explored an Arizona meteorite crater with a group of astronauts, built a Native American longhouse on the upper floor of his Toronto home, and been inducted into the coastal Pacific Kwakwaka’wakw tribe.
His publisher has preferred to gloss over his reputation as an internet controversialist, characterising him tactfully as a “modern day truth teller” and furnishing him with a page-long biography that begins: His baroque style combines pull-your-socks-up scolding with Blavatskyesque metaphysical flights It is a book that combines sensible advice gleaned from his clinical practice with inspirational anecdotes from his personal life, accounts of his academic work in the field of psychology and a lot of intellectual history of the “great books” variety, which he interprets in highly tendentious ways. This response captures much of what, for good and ill, informs 12 Rules for Life, his long and often peculiar foray into the self-help genre. Metaphysically I am an American pragmatist who has been strongly influenced by the psychoanalytic and clinical thinking of Freud and Jung.” Philosophically I am an individualist, not a collectivist of the right or the left. In an emailed rebuttal to a journalist who termed him a figure of the “far right”, he described his own politics as those of a “classic British liberal … temperamentally I am high on openness which tilts me to the left, although I am also conscientious which tilts me to the right. His work on the psychology of political correctness has raised eyebrows, given his recent proposal to purge “corrupt” academic departments of courses and teachers he deems infected by this pathology. 12 Rules for Life delves deeply into the hidden realms lurking beneath our commonplace assumptions, enlightening the mind and spirit of its readers, keeping the chaos and nihilism that threaten and tempt the modern mind firmly at bay.His academic work includes many papers in which he seeks to understand political and religious belief in terms of the so-called “big five” personality traits – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
Peterson discusses discipline, responsibility, and the necessity of clear, truthful thinking, distilling the discoveries of science and the lessons from the great myths of the world into 12 profound directives for living properly in today's ever-transforming world. Why should you never let your children do anything that makes you dislike them? Why did the ancient Egyptians worship the capacity to pay attention as the highest of their gods? What can we learn from the lowly lobster about standing up straight and moving forthrightly through life? Dr. Peterson tells us straightforwardly why skateboarding kids should be left alone, why you should always pet a cat when you meet one on the street, and what dreadful fate awaits those who carelessly criticize everything but themselves. At once informative, surprising and humorous, Dr. Peterson, an intellectual provocateur like no one since the arrival of Camille Paglia, brings his uncompromising voice to readers wanting to lead a deeper and more profoundly meaningful life.
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