Most humans crave order and meaning in existence, to deal with the terrifying uncertainty of the world. For much of history, religion served this function (eg being a servant of God). But as secularism rises, a void remains that is filled by nihilism and empty ideologies.
Peterson believes that there is real meaning and good in existence. Look at it this way - if real evil exists (human suffering, especially inflicted by other humans), then good is the opposite of this - it is preventing evil from happening.
You should therefore conduct your life to produce good. This will lead to meaning. This will make your existence matter. Your actions will matter, taking care of your health will matter, having good relationships will matter.
Rule 1: Fix your posture. Others will treat you with more respect.
Rule 2: Take care of yourself, the way you would take care of someone else.
Rule 3: Surround yourself with people who want you to succeed.
Rule 4: Judge yourself by your own goals, not by others’.
Rule 5: As a parent, train your children to follow the rules of society.
Rule 6: Before blaming anything else, think: have I done everything within my ability to solve the problem?
Rule 7: Do what is meaningful to you, and you will feel better about existing.
Rule 8: Act only in ways in line with your personal truth. Stop lying.
Rule 9: Listen to other people thoughtfully. You’ll learn something, and they’ll trust you.
Rule 10: Define your problem specifically. It becomes easier to deal with.
Rule 11: Accept that inequality exists.
Rule 12: Life is tough. Take time to indulge in little bits of happiness.
Jordan Peterson has attracted criticism for his remarks around political correctness and free speech. He also has attracted a politically conservative following. Much of this isn’t relevant to benefiting from 12 Rules for Life or from this book summary. If you come in skeptical because of his background, we suggest you keep an open mind, since the book’s advice can be genuinely useful to a broad range of people.
We found the book’s chapters inconsistent in quality. Some were clear, well-structured, and had forceful logic. Others were confusing meanderings into philosophy and allegories, reading like wandering streams of consciousness. In this summary, we try to structure the advice in a straightforward way. We reorganize sections from different chapters to fit the same theme.
This means we leave out tangents you might find useful. So as always, if you like the summary, we suggest you read the actual book.
Jordan Peterson is Christian, and he refers to the Bible throughout, but this isn’t a religious book. Instead, he argues that because similar tenets underlie a broad range of religions (Christianity, Buddhism, etc.), our human struggles are universal.
However, 12 Rules for Life is based on faith, by which I mean it doesn’t rely so much on data as it does on principles that make intuitive sense. The book doesn’t use randomized controlled trials to prove “not lying to yourself is a good way to improve your life.” But given the complexities in life, not everything can be proven, and often you just have to act according to what you intuit is best. Thus acting out the 12 Rules for Life requires a bit of faith.
Most humans crave order and meaning in their existence, to deal with the terrifying uncertainty of the world. For much of history, this function was served by religion, with rules handed down by gods and supernatural surveillance of behavior. Despite differences in the beliefs, all major religions drew on common themes, and the need for rules and order was universal. The ubiquity of this suggests something biological or evolutionary.
The developed world is moving to greater secularism, as a result of: scientific explanations of the world’s uncertainty; critical thinking around religion and the logical impracticality of all religions being true at once; and moral relativism.
But take away religion, and a void remains. There is no scientific code of ethics that inherited the stabilizing role of religion. In the absence of clear rules and a moral compass, people are prone to nihilism, existential angst, and misery.
In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson argues that there is a right and wrong way to conduct your life. In contrast, he rejects the ambiguity of moral relativism, the idea that good and evil are merely matters of subjective opinion and that every belief has its own truth. Moral relativism tolerates all ideas to avoid being “judgmental,” and prevents adults from telling young people how to live. It also rejects thousands of years of development of virtue and how to live properly.
In this vacuum of guidance on how to live, many are drawn to group-centered belief (like political or national allegiance) or ideologies instead, because it gives them identity, purpose, and a shared code of conduct. It simplifies the world.
As a solution, Peterson focuses on individual responsibility. The central tenets are:
That this book has hit such a chord supports the first point, that most people crave order and structure. The rest of the book clarifies the 12 Rules for Life, with themes of individual responsibility, being truthful to yourself, and defining your own meaning for life.
This chapter discusses social status from a biological point of view, and how your body language affects how others perceive you and how you feel about yourself.
(This is the most science-heavy chapter, so if you don’t enjoy reading this, don’t worry - the rest of the book isn’t like this.)
Inequality of ability occurs through natural biological variation - within a species, some animals are more capable than others. Those higher in ability command greater resources:
Because social status is so important in life outcomes, you try to figure out where on the social hierarchy you are, you signal that position to other people, and you jockey for a higher position. Sound familiar? These are deeply evolved, biological behaviors.
When a behavior is common among divergent species, the behavior was strongly selected for in natural selection and promoted survival in some way.
The function of this signaling and recognition behavior is to distribute scarce resources between individuals, without the need for costly conflict.
(Shortform note: How is this helpful for survival, especially in the case of the subordinate lobster?
The neurotransmitter serotonin is thought to be the internal mediator of social status. If you feel (or are) dominant in status, more serotonin circulates in your bloodstream. Experimental results that support this:
The important point is that there is a primordial calculator in your brain (the medial prefrontal cortex) that monitors signals to figure out your position in society. It recognizes how others behave around you, and it infers your social standing. Then, based on where you think you are in the hierarchy, you change your perceptions, values, emotions, and actions.
Peterson argues that this perception of your social status affects mental illness.
Finally, through feedback loops, you can become stuck in a low social position. You behave in a subordinate way, which makes others treat you as a subordinate, which makes you feel more subordinate, which makes you behave subordinately. Here’s a concrete example:
If all this is true, then to elevate your social status, first you need to signal your confidence through external body language. Peterson suggests, “stand up straight, with your shoulders back.” People will perceive you as higher in social status, and they’ll treat you as competent and able. This will then kick off a virtuous cycle - because you’re receiving positive signals from others, you’ll increase your own self-worth, which will make you act even more confidently.
This begins with your body language, but you also need to improve self-beliefs. Speak your mind, put your desires forward, and dare to be dangerous.
(Shortform note: This is a variant of “fake it ‘til you make it.” Even if you don’t feel confident, act confidently - others will treat you better, and you will develop real confidence.)
You might worry that all this posturing will make you a target for attack by stronger people. Peterson argues that the ability to respond with aggression decreases the probability that actual aggression will become necessary. In other words, acting confidently is a deterrent to attack.
But fake it ‘til you make it might only go so far. Doesn’t this ignore the problem that there is such a thing as real ability, and that a person’s low social status might be warranted?
People are better at filling prescriptions for their dogs than for themselves, even though taking drugs is literally life-saving. Why?
12 Rules for Life argues the root of this is self-loathing - that we understand our faults completely, better than any outside observer, and believe we aren’t worth helping. No one else has more reason to see you as pathetic. By withholding something that does you good, you punish yourself for your failings.
Why do we hate ourselves?
In contrast, our pets and our children are faultless - they don’t know any better, they’re innocent, so they deserve all the help we can give.
The solution is to believe that you are worth helping. You have a vital mission in this world, you are important in this world to others, and you are morally obligated to take care of yourself.
In other words, see yourself like you see your pet or someone else. You don’t see their faults, and you want to care for them. Treat yourself like the same.
This means taking care of yourself, getting healthier (physically and mentally), expanding your knowledge, pursuing goals you want, articulating your principles.
Minor points from this chapter:
Believe that you are worth helping. You have a vital mission in this world, and you are obligated to take care of yourself for the sake of others.
Some people don’t care for themselves because they feel self-loathing - they feel they’re not worth helping. Do you feel this on any level? Describe why, and give an example of how you don’t care for yourself.
If your friend were in the same situation, how would you take care of that friend? Does it make sense for you to treat yourself the same way?
What are some other ways you should take care of yourself, because you have a vital mission in this world?
This rule is similar to the adage “you’re the average of your 5 best friends,” with more focus on why you might be hanging around people you know are bad for you.
Do you have a person you spend a lot of time with, who you feel is dragging you down, doesn’t support your personal growth, and whose goals don’t align well with yours? Consider why you still spend time with this person, knowing their presence isn’t good for you.
Peterson gives three reasons you might still be with these people.
1) Sometimes, if you feel the person is “beneath you” in status, you may feel like you can rescue this person. But consider the other insidious, malevolent factors that could be at play:
While some people may really be capable of improving, some aren’t. People who don’t want to improve can’t be helped. It’s very difficult to overturn this foundational layer and convince someone to change for the better.
All of this is dramatized to the extreme, and Peterson recognizes that if the relationship is genuine and there is sincere desire to improve, then it’s still worth maintaining. But this is hard to accurately assess, so reflect and see if any of the above elements apply to your relationship. See if the person you’re helping accepts any personal responsibility - it’s a red flag if they merely see themselves as the victim of endless external causes.
2) This idea of a savior complex might not apply at all. Instead, you might all be bound by an implicit contract aimed at nihilism and failure. You’ve all decided to sacrifice the future for the present. Everyone deliberately wastes time, sets no goals, and sabotages themselves. No one mentions it, but everyone knows what the game is. If you feel that you’re ready to adopt a new attitude, then you need to move on from this group.
3) Finally, even if everyone’s intentions are good, a negative person’s presence still drags you down. Studies show that pulling a problematic person into a team lowers the team’s overall efficacy - in essence, the team falls to the lowest common denominator.
Even if the friendship isn’t a charity case, be wary of people who insidiously drag you down. They belittle your personal ambition because they’re embarrassed about lack of their own. They override your accomplishments with their own, real or imaginary.
Surround yourself with people who support you and want to see you succeed. You will push each other to greater heights. Your goals will reinforce the others’ goals, and each person’s life improves as the others’ lives improve. They won’t tolerate your cynicism and destructiveness, and they will punish you when you mistreat yourself.
“Friends” who are destructive will do the opposite. They’ll put down your goals. They’ll be jealous when you succeed, and try to knock down your achievements or one-up with their own. They worry that you’ll outshine them, so they pull you back down the abyss.
Avoid these friendships at all costs.
As you learned in Rule 2, have the friendships that you would advise other people to have. If you wouldn’t recommend your friendship with someone to your brother, or your parent - why would you have such a friend for yourself?
Surround yourself with people who support you and want to see you succeed.
Do you have a person you spend a lot of time with, who you feel is dragging you down, doesn’t support your personal growth, and whose goals don’t align well with yours? Describe your relationship, and how you feel around this person.
Why do you believe you still spend time with this person? Think deeply.
Is it a good idea to move on from this relationship? If so, how would you take steps to distance yourself?
With today’s mass media, there is always someone out there better than you in everything you do. Your career seems boring, you wish your friends were more exciting and more attractive, you’re fatter than your co-workers, and you’re bad at sports. How good can you feel as prime minister of Canada, when someone else is the President of the United States?
As explained in Rule 1, this wasn’t the natural case for hundreds of thousands of years. We used to live in small tribes of hundreds. Chances were you were good at something, and you got serotonin signals from people acknowledging you were good. Now you might never get positive feedback, while you get tons of negative feedback about people who seem better than you.
If you compare yourself to other people, you’re using an unfairly harsh standard.
People react to high standards in a variety of ways.
The solution isn’t to simply reject all standards. Standards are useful to guarantee a level of quality (like building bridges) and to keep pushing us up to better things. Being unsatisfied with your present world is a useful push to improve your situation. But setting unrealistically high standards can also lead to crushing, chronic self-criticism, where you feel you aren’t capable of doing anything.
The solution also isn’t nihilism and hopelessness. Don’t think, “there will always be people better than me, so what’s the point? The world’s going to end in a billion years if not a million - why does what I do matter?” Peterson argues that this is a cheap trick - pick a time frame long enough, and nothing matters. This is an unreliable, worthlessly simplistic way to look at life.
The solution also isn’t to protect people from the idea that they have ways to improve, and that standards do exist. Throughout the 20th century, American culture took on the delusionally positive thinking of constant praise for kids. Trophies for everyone, you’re all special and capable of everything you want to do. This merely blinds people to the truth, and when reality hits, people are unprepared to deal with it.
Instead of judging yourself by other people’s yardsticks, you need to set your own. You need a total reworking of your goals, starting with understanding yourself as though you were a stranger. There are 3 steps:
You’ve likely identified a single, arbitrary dimension as THE single most important thing to achieve - like money, fame, or status - and you feel miserable that you don’t have it.
But your existence is multidimensional. You have a lot of components to your existence - family, friends, personal projects, hobbies. Judge your success across all the games you play. Your existence is so unique and customized to you, that you can’t easily compare yourself to any other individual.
Furthermore, there isn’t a binary condition of “success” vs “failure.” There are many gradations in between. What matters is whether you can get better, not whether you can achieve binary success.
Finally, you’re likely only seeing the highlight reel from other people. They don’t expose their deep problems and failing. You’re likely overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do. Even the very people you envy might secretly envy you, in ways you’re not aware.
The first absolute requirement: you need to genuinely want your life to improve. You can’t fool yourself. If you don’t want this, you won’t be able to improve.
Next, you’re likely discontent about not having something (like money, a particular job, an achievement). Drill into your discontent and transform it. What do you want? Why do you feel this way? (Shortform suggestion: Keep asking why until you can’t answer it anymore. Then you’ll hit the foundation of why you feel this way.)
As you question yourself, you may realize that there are multiple conflicting desires at play. List them all out, realize the conflict between them, then prioritize them into a list.
Is the subject of your discontent within your control? If not, look somewhere else. Find something you can fix.
You may find some of your desires to be rooted in bitterness and resentment. How do you transform your goal so that you remove bitterness and resentment? What if you didn’t have to improve yourself at other people’s expense? What if you could achieve your goal, while also making your friends, even your enemies happier?
Finally, realize you may have to give up old goals to find a new direction.
(Shortform note: These are abstract pointers, so let’s work through an example in more detail than the book does. Say you really want your boss’s job. You’re miserable day-to-day because you can’t stand to see your incompetent boss doing a job that should be yours. You believe that if only you got your boss’s job, you’d be happy forever.
Then keep asking why you want your boss’s job. You may find a surprising variety of desires at play:
That’s a lot of desires, and it’s much more complicated than “I want my boss’s job.” You can only produce a list like this by thinking deeply.
Now that you’ve listed them, you can then prioritize which ones are most important to you.
Then you can notice the conflicts between them:
Finally, what can you do to achieve your most important desires?
While Peterson doesn’t go into his example anywhere near this length, we believe it correctly applies his thinking.)
While you do this exercise, realize that you’re blind and can’t see yourself honestly. You’re blind to what goals you really want because you’re focusing on something very narrow. You’ve obsessed over a narrow goal for a long time, so it’ll take an adjustment period to see the bigger picture.
You might have big goals, and that’s good. But break it down to something tractable you can do today. Then you’ll start building ever upwards.
Aim small, then grow your ambition.
Negotiate with yourself and honor your commitments.
Continue to pay attention.
Once you put this into practice, you’ll improve how you feel about your self-worth and comparing yourself to other people.
Ultimately, Peterson believes the answer to nihilism is the “essential goodness of Being.” This comes from aiming for a meaningful goal that improves the lives of people and for a long time. There is beauty to create and order to make in the world. There’s evil to defeat and misery to soothe.
Instead of judging yourself by other people’s standards, redefine your goals to find a new way to measure yourself.
What is the “one” most important thing that you typically obsess over and want to achieve? The thing that makes you miserable because you don’t have it. Describe your desire.
Besides that, your existence is multidimensional. What are all the other things important to you that you should measure yourself by?
Picture someone you envy who has that “one” thing you really want from the first question. Does that person also succeed on all the other dimensions you listed in the second question? If not, what does this mean about how you should perceive that person?
Finish redefining your goals to find a new way to measure yourself.
There’s something you don’t have that is driving much of your discontent. You think if only you got this, you’d be happy. What is it?
Why do you want it? Think deeply, and list all the major reasons that come to mind. Also, keep asking yourself “why?” until you can’t answer anymore.
Take the few reasons that are most important to you. Is there a way to redefine your goal to best fit your most important reasons? The goal might be quite different from your original.
Break down your big goal into something tractable you can do today. What’s one thing in your life you can fix, right now, in pursuit of this?
Children aren’t born ready for life. This is partly a biological compromise with head size - too big of a head wouldn’t fit through a woman’s birth canal. This is also partly because much of human culture isn’t written in our genes - culture has developed faster than biological evolutionary cycles. Instead, as children age, they develop physically, and they also learn a lot about how the human world works.
This means children need training and feedback to understand how to navigate human society. If you’re a typical parent, you want your children to succeed, and helping your children become well-liked, functioning members of society is a key part of success.
Children, curious and exploratory as they are, constantly test limits to figure out where the boundaries are. When they get corrective feedback, they understand where the boundary is. “I now know it’s not OK to throw food on the floor on a restaurant, because my mom yelled at me for it.”
Furthermore, while it’s tempting to think of them as cherubic angels, they have capacity for evil inside them. They will not bloom into perfection if left to their own devices. So if they hit you or yell in supermarkets, and you don’t provide corrective feedback, they’ll think it’s ok. They’ll learn the wrong boundaries of society. Then when they become adults, they’ll be poorly adjusted to function in broader society.
Many parents, in a misguided effort to avoid damaging their child or wanting to be their child’s friend, avoid giving corrective feedback to their kids. These are the parents who let their kids curse at them in public or scream disruptively in movie theaters. These parents are teaching their kids the wrong boundaries of society, and in effect they’re outsourcing the training to society. “Here’s my kid - society, please teach him the right rules.”
The problem is that society doesn’t care about your child nearly as much as you do. If you dislike your own child at times, imagine how other people will react. Other people will swiftly judge and punish your child mercilessly, with nowhere near the tolerance and patience that you have for your child. Here are examples of how a poorly socialized child will be rejected by society:
You are your child’s best shot at teaching society’s rules. Society doesn’t have the patience to teach your child - there are many other well-adjusted, functioning people to spend time on. A bad kid will simply be rejected and left behind.
And this problem can get worse throughout a child’s life. An early poor social experience can set up a vicious cycle of chronic maladjustment - a maladjusted child will act poorly; she will receive negative feedback from the world, often without understanding why; she will withdraw and feel rejected, causing anxiety, depression, and resentment. This further receives negative feedback from the world. This can last for a lifetime.
Shielding your child from corrective feedback is in effect crippling them in the long run. And early exposure matters - a child not taught to behave properly by age 4 will have lasting social difficulties.
As a parent, your purpose is to serve as a proxy for society. You teach the child what is acceptable, and what isn’t.
Think not about having your child avoid all pain, but rather to maximize their learning at minimal cost. In other words, some amount of pain early on will save a lot of pain throughout the child’s life. Don’t protect your kids - make them as competent as you can.
Teaching children the rules should be done with both rewards and punishment - leaving one out removes a tool from your toolkit (most parents omit punishment). Punishments and negative emotions are natural, evolved reactions to events - sadness and shame train people to avoid the situation that led to those painful emotions.
Also, a good reward program requires continuous vigilance, since the behavior needs to be reinforced quickly with the reward. The right reward structure doesn’t work if it’s not correctly applied continuously with the child.
In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson has 4 principles for raising kids:
There is inevitable suffering in life. People are born unequal in ability and attributes. Disaster strikes unpredictably - cancer, a car accident, a mass layoff. You never get quite exactly what you want. Life seems like an unfair joke.
One response to this is anger at the universe or, if you’re religious, at your god. More extremely, this becomes misanthropic thinking, or hating humankind. Then some convert this into the action of vengeance, to express their outrage and spite the universe/god. Peterson argues this underlay the beliefs of the Columbine killers, who sought to punish those who had wronged them.
But there is still potential for redemption, to learn from misfortune and do good despite it. Many people who suffered child abuse by their parents perpetuate the evil and abuse their own children; but most choose not to. Despite the suffering you bear, you have the potential to overturn it and make the world better.
Before blaming the universe for your misfortunes, first consider - what personal responsibility did you have in your misfortune? Did you do everything within your power to improve your situation, or did you passively sabotage yourself by letting bad things happen to you?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn served as a Russian soldier in WWII. He was then arrested and imprisoned by his own people. He got cancer. His misfortunes seemed out of his control. Then he wrote The Gulag Archipelago, at great risk to himself, to expose Soviet prison camps and the flaws of Lenin’s thinking. He realized his unquestioning support of the Communist Party contributed directly to his misery, and he decided to correct his mistake.
Look at it this way - if your suffering is your own fault, then you can actually do something about it. If, in contrast, it’s entirely the universe’s fault, then reality itself is flawed, and you are perpetually doomed, and you have absolutely no ability to change that. Which worldview would you rather have?
Often, disasters could have been prevented with the right mindset. Peterson argues lack of preparation is a sin. When times are good, we get complacent and forget our commitments and responsibilities. Then when disaster strikes, we omit our personal responsibility in causing it. We may learn our lesson temporarily and make empty promises to improve, but inevitably we forget, and so the cycle repeats.
Before blaming the universe, or a political faction, or an enemy, put your own house in order. Have you taken full advantage of every opportunity available to you? Are you working hard at your career? Your relationships? Outside of work to improve yourself?
Are you doing anything you know is wrong? Stop it today. Stop when you feel when an inkling that you should stop. Stop saying things that make you feel ashamed and cowardly; start saying things that make you feel strong. Do only those things about which you would speak with honor.
A nice quote from the book: “If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?”
As you continue doing this, you will continue discovering further wrongs that you can right. Your life will become simpler and more honorable. You’ll stop filling your head with lies and resentment. Then you might see existence as naturally good and worth maintaining. You’ll become resistant to the trials and misfortunes that do appear. And imagine if all people did this - how magnificent would the world be then?
Before blaming the universe for your misfortunes, first consider what you can do about it.
Have you recently blamed the universe or other people for a misfortune? What was the misfortune, and why did you blame others for it?
Think instead - did you do everything within your power to improve your situation? What personal responsibility did you have in your misfortune?
Looking into the future, how can you take full advantage of every opportunity available to you?
So suffering in life is inevitable. The universe can be unfair. In a hundred million years, nothing we do will likely matter. What does one do in the face of this knowledge?
One response is to take the expedient path. Indulge short-term pleasures and put off long-term commitments. Do what feels the best today - indulge your basest desires all the time. Even lie, cheat, and steal to get what you want. Do these things even if you know it makes your future self worse off than better.
Of course, we know this is what we shouldn’t be doing. We know we should be doing the hard things today to make our lives better in the future. We should suppress our immediate impulses to bring future rewards, like studying today and putting off partying to build the career we really want.
One obstacle is our powerful biological instincts - they kept us alive in the Stone Age, but they’re counterproductive today (overeating 100,000 years ago helped us survive a period of famine; today it leads to obesity). But on a higher conscious level, it’s hard to answer: why? How do we define what’s good and worth doing, and what isn’t?
In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson tackles it this way: it seems intuitively true that certain things can be defined as Evil - most abhorrently, conscious human malevolence. Auschwitz, mass shootings, enslavement, knowing torment of others - these are all things most people believe are bad, even without having to read a philosophy book. You likely believe the world is better off without these things happening.
If there is such a thing as Evil, then Good must be the antithesis of Evil - Good is whatever stops Evil from happening. Good alleviates unnecessary pain and suffering.
In the most extreme of cases, literally fighting evil is good - as typified in the Union’s antislavery stance in the Civil War, and the Allies’ anti-Holocaust stance in World War II. But all actions exist on a spectrum, and resolving even little bits of bad are good. This could mean counseling a friend to get out of a bad situation. This could mean improving your own health, so that you have more ability and time to do good. This could mean empowering others to do good - even by helping people understand what good and evil are, like Peterson is doing.
Doing good has Meaning. When you act with Meaning, you will attain more security and strength than would be granted by a short-sighted concern for your own security. What you do will matter to you. In turn, you’ll feel better about your existence, and the evils and injustices of the world are more tolerable, because you know they can be overcome. Remember Socrates who, believing his principles to be right, retained the strength to speak truth at his trial and accepted his death with resolve.
If you’re the type to bemoan your existence, Peterson argues doing good is the salve - by doing good, you are compensating for the sins of your existence and those of humankind.
Meaning is the mature substitute for expedience. Expedience rejects responsibility; it doesn’t have the wisdom or sophistication to look ahead and plan carefully; it has no courage or sacrifice; it’s the easy way out. Meaning regulates impulses and recognizes the value of making the world better. By providing deeper meaning, Meaning gratifies all impulses.
Ask yourself - how can I make the world a little bit better today? Aim upwards. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix.
Even more deeply - what is your true nature? What must you become, knowing who you truly are? How can you make the world a LOT better, if only you made certain changes in your life? Something valuable, given up, ensures future prosperity.
The greater the change you want to make, the greater the sacrifice might be. Inverting the question - what is the greatest sacrifice you can make, that of what you love most - and what good will come of it? In so doing, you change the structure of reality in your favor.
The above is his main point in the chapter, but Peterson also discusses two other topics:
Self-sacrifice and delayed gratification have been part of human teachings for a long time, and the discovery of its utility goes back even further. Picture in the Stone Age that a tribe brings down a mammoth, and they engorge themselves until they can’t possibly eat any more. But then they have leftover food. They learn that they can go through the labor of preserving the food today for the benefit of having food tomorrow. Even better, they can give this food to a neighboring tribe and expect a return of favor in the future.
These sacrificial behaviors promoted survival, and they gradually became ritualized and dramatized, customs inherited through generations. They became enshrined in moral narratives and religious texts, like the Temptation of Christ. Wandering through the desert for 40 days and nights, Satan tempts Jesus with hedonism (relieving hunger by creating his own bread), egoism (jumping off a peak and relying on God to save him), and materialism (ruling the kingdoms of Earth). Jesus rejects all these temptations of evil and immediate gratification. Instead, he reaches for a higher goal, of transcending desires to do good.
(Shortform note: In one interpretation, these temptations are different paths for Jesus to become a Messiah by demonstrating supernatural powers. He can easily alleviate physical hardships; he can relieve Roman oppression by seizing the kingdoms. Jesus rejects these options - he wants to undergo his trials without powers that ordinary humans don’t have, in effect becoming a practical role model for humans. Instead of making bread for everyone, he sets an example of a practice that can forever solve the problem of hunger for everyone - rejection of immediate gratification and the temptations of evil.)
Despite its tremendous influence, Christianity had a few problems that limited its reach in the modern day:
Nietzsche argues that humans killed God, and they would have to invent their own values in the aftermath. However, ideologies like fascism and communism filled the void instead.
In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson argues that the individual must be constrained and molded by a disciplinary structure before she can act freely and competently. As secularism rose, a void in disciplinary structure grew; filling it was nihilism and susceptibility to new utopian ideas, like fascism. Hence he wrote this book to provide a reworked structure for people to follow.
Chaos is unexplored territory. It’s the things and situations we don’t understand. It’s where you go when you get fired; it’s the threatening stranger on the street; it’s the scary audacious goal you’ve wanted. It’s also the realm of possibility and where new ideas form.
Order is explored territory. It’s stability and structure. It’s your plan for the next day, the comfort of tradition, the customs we use to treat each other. Yet it also can mean concentration camps, fascism, and, less extremely, personal stasis and lack of growth.
We like being in Order. We don’t like when we are forced to leave Order for Chaos, like when tragedy strikes, when you’re cheated on by your partner, or when you’re fired.
But Order isn’t enough - there are still vital things to be learned. The ideal place is to be right in the middle. To have enough Order to feel tethered, but enough Chaos to be challenged and learn new things. This is where meaning is to be found.
This rule discusses not only lying to others, but also lying to yourself and obscuring your personal truth. Instead, you need to develop your personal truth, then act consistently with it. This chapter is fairly abstract, but try to see if its principles resonate with a specific problem you have in life.
Day to day, you may lie to the outside world to get what you want and to avoid pain. You tell lies to appear more competent, to gain status, to be well-liked, to prevent conflict. This is you manipulating the world.
On a deeper level, you may lie to yourself about what you want. You might have a dream life envisioned by your younger self, without probing carefully into whether you really want it (career and retirement goals are common examples here). You may entertain ideas about what you really want, but deceive yourself into thinking they’re impossible to reach or undesirable after all. You then act in ways that you paper over with more lies, but deep down you know it’s inconsistent with your beliefs, and you feel unsettled.
Beware of the big lie (in Hitler’s terms) something so large and audacious that you cannot accept someone would intentionally fabricate it. This could be about who to blame for your faults, or what you should do with your life.
You may not be actively misleading other people, but merely lying by omission. This isn’t any better. If your boss does something you dislike, not confronting her about it is still lying - you’re acting inauthentically, not in accordance with your beliefs. If you habitually avoid conflict, don’t complain when mistreated, and suppress your own ideas, you’re still lying to yourself. This makes you feel weak, because your existence has little real meaning. You’ve become a tool to be used, obliterating your independence.
Even worse, on a meta level, you may be in denial about lying to yourself. You may believe that your truth is the only truth, and that no amount of new knowledge can change what you believe. That all important facts have been discovered, and that everything will work out perfectly.
Your lie may begin with protecting yourself from reality. You may believe reality is intolerable and must be distorted. You want to avoid that short-term pain. But after a certain point, the lies take on a life of their own.
All the lying may work in the short term, but ultimately you will run into failure. If you betray yourself, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character. If you have a weak character, adversity will bulldoze you. By failing to react the first time, you’ve already trained yourself to tolerate things you disagree with.
This leads to bitterness. Because you are avoiding pain and fabricating your world, you are likely to avoid personal responsibility for your failures. You will blame the world as unfair, and other people as getting in your way. It’s not hard to take this one step further to believing “they must be stopped,” and another step further into revenge.
All this applies to many levels of existence. You may be lying to yourself:
Clearly telling lies to yourself leads to bad outcomes and misery. What do you do?
Figure out what you really want and why. If you don’t know what you want, you can start with tradition and work from there. Your truth is truly personal to you, based on you and your circumstances.
Ambitions based around developing character and ability are better than status and power. You can lose status, sometimes in ways out of your control; but no matter what happens, you carry character wherever you go.
(Shortform note: because people have different truths, naturally people should have different goals. And as we learned in Rule 4, this means comparing yourself to other people is pointless.)
Confronting the idea that you’ve been lying to yourself will likely be painful. Error requires sacrifice to correct it. The larger the error, the larger the sacrifice you need. This may mean accepting weaknesses you didn’t want to confront earlier. It may mean having conflicts with people you were lying to before. This is the cost of getting on the right track, but it’s worth it.
Once you develop a personal truth, it gives you a destination to travel toward. It gives you a personal code of conduct to act by. Having a personal truth reduces anxiety, because having either everything or nothing available are far worse options.
Speak in a way that makes you feel strong, not weak. Act only in ways that your internal voice does not object to. A lie spoils all the truth it touches, like a tiny drop of sewage in a bottle of wine.
Are you doing anything you know is wrong? Stop it today. Stop when you feel an inkling that you should stop. Stop saying things that make you feel ashamed and cowardly; start saying things that make you feel strong. Do only those things about which you would speak with honor.
Stand up for your beliefs. If you say yes when you want to say no, you weaken your resolve and become habituated to violating your beliefs. You will lack the strength when you really need it. Instead, when you say no, you transform yourself into someone who can say no when it needs to be said. Nietzsche said that “the strength of a person’s spirit” is “measured by how much truth he could tolerate...to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened.”
Be willing to learn from what you don’t know. While tradition is a good start, it may no longer apply if the circumstances have truly changed. Putting yourself in new situations will literally grow your brain. Transform your values as you progress.
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Again, all of this applies to many levels of existence.
What do you do when you don’t know what to do? Tell the truth. At the very least, you will be trusted for being honest, and you’ll feel the strength that comes with authenticity.
Learn to stop lying to yourself and others. Develop a personal truth to live by.
When recently have you felt you told a lie, to others or to yourself? Describe what happened. How did that make you feel? (Remember: this might not be literally telling a lie in conversation, but more generally telling a lie means acting in a way that contradicts your beliefs.)
For this example, develop your personal truth. What is the rule you want to live by? Acting by this truth should make you feel strong.
The next time you run into the situation above, how will you act differently?
We’ve all been in situations where someone seems to be talking endlessly, and we’re tempted to disengage.
But take a more generous view of the situation. People talk because this is how they think. They explore past events, discover how they feel about it, simulate the world, and plan how to act in it. They can figure out what stupid things they shouldn’t do, then not do them. They formulate the problem they are struggling with, before designing a solution. You’re doing them a favor by listening.
Some people are capable of thinking alone and have internal conversations with themselves. This is more difficult than talking out loud with another person - it requires you to model other points of view (in effect being multiple people at the same time), have the models disagree, and resolve the disagreement. This is demanding, requiring you to tolerate conflict and adjust your perceptions of the world internally.
Thus, many people prefer to talk to a listener. They organize their brains with conversation.
Thus rises the classic stereotype in how men and women treat conversation differently. Women want to converse as a mode of thinking, going over their day and struggles they’ve faced. In response, men want to design efficient solutions and move on. Rushing this process robs the speaker of their ability to think, and it signals that you dismiss the importance of what the speaker has to say. Instead, the speaker feels a need to formulate the problem in conversation. They need to be listened to and questioned to ensure clarity in the formulation. Only then is there a problem that is solvable.
As a listener, you are helping the other person think. True listening is paying attention and accepting what the person has to say.
In effect, we stay sane by talking to other people. People who listen and engage in conversation help us figure out our problems.
If you listen without premature judgment, people will tend to trust you and tell you everything they’re thinking.
Listening to someone else can often be helpful in improving your own life. It’s far better to learn from another person’s experiences and mistakes than to suffer them yourself.
Therefore, approach each conversation with the belief that your current knowledge is imperfect. After all, if your life isn’t perfect right now, this must be true - you must not have all the answers.
Therefore, go into every conversation with the idea that you have something to learn from this, that the other person’s experiences are valuable. Without genuinely believing this, you will find it difficult to carry a fulfilling conversation.
(Shortform note: this is why conversations with certain people can always feel frustrating - neither party believes they can learn anything from the other, so it’s just two people trying to talk over each other.)
The best conversations occur when all parties are listening to each other, trying to solve a problem together, and build to a synthesis greater than what each person started out with. All act with the premise that they have something to learn. This constitutes active philosophy. Everyone leaves with an improved worldview and better knowledge of their conversation partners.
As a comparison, these are common examples of poor listening that lead to lack of connection and synthesis:
Sound familiar? We all do this at one point or another, often to great discontent.
Here is the most effective listening technique: summarize the person’s message. Say something like, “let me make sure I have this right - what I’m hearing is __.” This has very helpful effects:
Assume that your conversational partner has reached careful, thoughtful conclusions based on her own valid experiences. Assume that they want to engage with you as a voice of reason, not oppress you. Reflect their viewpoints back to them, and only then share your own viewpoint.
A tip for resolving arguments: When you argue with someone and reach a dead end, take time to separate and sit alone. Each person should think, “What have I done to contribute to what we’re arguing about? I made a mistake somewhere, even if it’s small or far away.” Then when you get back together, admit your mistakes.
Good lectures are actually conversations that happen to be given to many individuals at once. As a public speaker, you should talk with individuals. Make eye contact with a specific person, note her confusion or acceptance, and modify your conversation accordingly. Then switch to another audience member.
When you have a problem, there is often the temptation to paper it over, to think the problem will go away by itself. It’s easier to keep the peace and avoid the anxiety, despair, sadness that will come with confronting your problems. It’s easier to pretend the problem doesn’t exist than to admit it does and the pain that accompanies it.
Maybe you hate going into work everyday. Maybe you can’t stand the way your partner chews. Maybe you stare blankly at the ceiling each morning, unable to drag yourself out of bed. Maybe you feel a simmering level of rage throughout the day. You don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s more pleasant not to think too hard about it and try to get through another day.
Left unaddressed, this will gradually build until it leads to a catastrophic failure. You will regret not having acted sooner.
Specificity turns chaos into a thing that you can deal with. If you have a vague unease, you will struggle with it until you define it explicitly and give it a concrete form. Once you precisely identify the issue, you will likely realize that you were far more afraid than you should have been, and you now have a specific target to confront.
If you have a cancer somewhere in your body, wouldn’t you want to know where and what it is as soon as possible, so you can do something about it? Why don’t you treat every other problem in your life with the same urgency and clarity?
Give structure to the chaos through specific speech. If you speak carefully and precisely, you can make order from the chaos, develop a new goal, and navigate to it.
Precision sorts out the uniquely terrible thing from all the other, equally terrible things that did not happen. If you have a pain in your abdomen, you start with a vague set of terrifying possibilities. Then you go to the doctor, who collapses the possibilities into a single, clear diagnosis. You feel less anxiety, certain now that it’s addressable, and you laugh at your previous anxiety. Why are your other concerns and problems any different?
You cannot move in life without aiming at a direction. Random wandering will not move you forward. It will make you disappointed and frustrated and resentful.
Be precise. What is the problem, exactly? What do you want, exactly? Why, exactly?
Endure the sharp pain of specificity and confrontation instead of the chronic vague dull ache of negligence. Once you identify it, things will get better.
Many issues of this sort have to do with interpersonal relations, particularly with your romantic partner. Communicating what you really think risks immediate negative emotion - resentment, jealousy, frustration, hatred. So it’s easy just to pretend you’re a saint, try to move on, that “it’s not worth fighting about.”
In a marriage, there is little that is not worth fighting about. Do you really want an annoyance tormenting you every day of your marriage, for the decades? All it takes to invite disaster is to do nothing.
The longer you wait, the more the little problems form a thick interrelated cobweb. Each small unresolved resentment piles onto the next one, aggregating into a ball of hate. Sometimes the person you resent is totally unaware that you’re resentful. You behave poorly, which makes the other person react poorly, thus perpetuating a vicious cycle. Each argument becomes difficult to extricate from all the other problems - hence the stereotypical couple’s argument digging up grievances from years past.
Instead, specify exactly what is bothering you. Share this with the person. It’s far better to do this earlier than later. If you let everyday resentment gather, it may eventually bubble up and destroy everyone.
Focus the argument only on the specific thing that is bothering. Both people should promise just to solve just that one issue - the other problems will have their due time, so don’t unearth them or get distracted.
One by one, you reveal and solve each issue. You clear the cobweb that was once impenetrable.
(Shortform suggestion: As you discuss, keep asking why. You can’t clean out a dental cavity without digging out all the rot from the very bottom. Maybe she finds his laugh annoying (why?), because she doesn’t want him to be happy when she isn’t (why?), because she thinks he held her back from her ambition when they agreed to focus on his career, but she now regrets it (why?), because she saw how it ate at her mother and ruined her parents’ marriage, and now she feels guilty about not being stronger as a person.
Now she sees it’s not really about his laugh, but about far deeper issues. These issues are hard to fix and take time - but it’s far better to know what the issue is, than to ignore it and try to pretend it doesn’t exist.)
We have a tendency not to dig into things because it makes our lives easier. Day to day we perceive the world with vast simplifications, happily unaware of the complexities underlying the surface. We perceive only what is enough for our plans to work and for us to get by.
When everything works according to plan, we don’t need to peer under the surface. We drive a car, indifferent to how an engine transmits power to the wheels, the labor that produced the car, the electricity that powers the street lamps. We just care that the car functions to get us from point A to point B. We abstract away the world to simplify our lives, because there is too much complexity to understand in ways that aren’t immediately useful.
When the world doesn’t work properly, you have to peer into this complexity. This is chaos. Chaos provokes anxiety. When your car breaks, you have to figure out what’s wrong, find a mechanic who can fix it, think about how to just a mechanic, figure out how much the unexpected cost will eat into your financial plans. You may plunge further into chaos: are drivers more dangerous now? Am I incompetent as a driver? When the simplified world breaks down, the complex world that was hidden away becomes obvious.
This happens with relationships too. In a stable romantic relationship, both people have their roles and identities, their history, their conception of the future. If one partner cheats on the other, all is shattered. How could this possibly have happened? Who is this person I’m living with? How could she have done this? What part of the happy past needs to be rewritten?
Precision of aim and careful attention protect us when things break down.
Give your problem specific form, and it becomes easier to deal with.
What is a vague problem you have that you’ve been avoiding? Describe it and how you feel about it.
Confront the problem and acknowledge it exists. Think specifically about what the problem is. Define it exactly. Ask yourself - why do you feel this way? Keep asking why until you can’t answer any more. Write down each new thought you have.
Now that you’ve defined the problem with more clarity, what can you do about it?
(Shortform note: Depending on your viewpoint, this can be a controversial chapter as Peterson bemoans the “postmodernist” interpretation of gender as a social construct. He criticizes the assertion that biological differences between men and women do not exist.)
This chapter is meandering and confusing, but the main point is this: modern society desires gender equality. When gender equality means equal opportunity, rights, and treatment, this is good.
However, it can be taken too far - like denying any biological difference between males and females, and insisting that behavior and outcomes be equal in every way. This idea of literal, complete quality is not supported by biology, and it could be counterproductive because it forces people against their nature. For example, we might raise boys to “feminize” them, erasing their biological tendencies and making them less independent and more agreeable. This is counter to their nature and can cause unintended consequences.
Some postmodernist thinking claims that all of gender is entirely a social construct, that it was popularized by men to oppress women. This began with roots in communist ideals that all people should be equal, that the rich exploited the labor of the poor, and that social structures were put in place by the rich to oppress the poor. When implementing this idea largely failed in the Soviet Union and China, the Marxist ideals were rewritten, from the idea of oppression of the poor by the rich, to oppression of everyone by the powerful.
When extended to its logical conclusion, this promoted skepticism that every cultural construct and hierarchy was merely constructed by the powerful to continue their oppression - science benefits only the scientists, gender classification benefits only the males, management benefits only the managers, measurement of skill benefit only the skilled. As the thinking goes, every hierarchy is an artificial construct made up to selfishly benefit the powerful and to exclude others. This means everything in the world is largely up to interpretation.
Peterson decries the nihilism in this approach, the rejection of all categorizations as done only for power reasons. Surely power and corruption play some role in hierarchies, but they aren’t necessarily the only role or even the primary role. And believing this idea may be counter-productive, if it limits cooperation and contravenes biological roots evolved over millions of years.
The idea of complete equality itself is flawed. In general, pursuit of any valued goal produces a hierarchy - some people will be better and some will be worse. In modern well-functioning societies, the hierarchy is based on competence and ability, not power. (Peterson argues the best predictors of long-term success in Western countries are IQ and conscientiousness.)
Take the most diehard egalitarian, and when she gets sick, see if she wants to find a more reputable, more skilled doctor. See then if she believes in a hierarchy of skill that is not merely an artificial construct.
To demand absolute equality between all people in all situations would require sacrificing value itself.
There is a perverse logic to the argument that all hierarchy is socially constructed. Its believers desire for all inequalities to be eliminated, on the basis of fairness. But - IF some inequalities are hard-wired into our genes, or have functional purposes (like identifying the spectrum of skill), or result from free will (females may, given completely equal environmental treatment, just enjoy nursing more than males do), THEN proposing obliterating these would sound unreasonable. It would mean opposing free will, or overwriting biology.
In other words, find someone who insists that all hierarchies are artificial constructs, and you’ll see someone who cannot stomach the idea of inequality in any sense.
Instead of bemoaning a narrow hierarchy, instead celebrate the complexity of culture that allows for a large number of games and successful players. Different people can have very different levels of success in different dimensions, and so one’s outcomes can’t be compared to anyone else's outcomes. Trying to compress everyone into completely equal outcomes - regardless of biology, behavior, and personal preferences - may be destructive.
Within gender, Peterson maintains there are clear biological differences between men and women - men tend to be more interested in things while women are more interested in people; men are more disobedient and women are more agreeable. The variation among individuals is very high - the most [adjective] of one gender is more [adjective] than the average person of the other gender (for instance, the most aggressive female is more aggressive than the average male), but by and large, the general trend is true.
And in societies with more social freedom (like Sweden) the gender imbalance in certain professions is magnified. For instance, the imbalance of males and females in engineering is greater than it is in the Middle East, where there is less social freedom. The implication is that when given freedom, people do what they naturally want to do.
When it gets down to it, even with equal opportunity, what if women really just want to nurse and teach more than men, and men really want to design bridges more than women? Should we force equality in ways that wouldn’t naturally arise, like forcing a 50-50 gender split in every single profession? What are the costs and benefits of this type of policy?
The idea that gender is a construct used to exert power has led to continuous (Peterson calls unfair) attacks on men. Men’s accomplishments are considered unearned due to their privilege by being born males; their ambitions make them plunderers. Men are attacked as oppressors, when there is little historical evidence that the patriarchy was deliberately designed by men to subjugate women and assert dominance.
Instead, Peterson considers another biological possibility - that women, by nature of sexual specialization, have to bear children; and that when they get pregnant, they need more protection than usual. In a time when humanity faced many more existential threats, with a higher probability of death and higher risk inherent in unwanted pregnancies, different legal treatments of men and women may have arisen.
Peterson wants society to be amenable to the idea that boys and men want to prove their competence, to friends and to romantic partners. Boys want to skirt at the edge of danger, where life is challenging enough to grow. This is why friends tease each other and have hazing rituals, subjecting newcomers to social stress - they are evaluating character and determining who can be trusted, who has a strong spine, who is entertaining.
Peterson decries the neutering of male independence for the sake of gender equality. Instead of being independent, boys raised this way become socially weak and dependent on parents. Still, their natural urges remain, and they’ll lash out in other ways, like adhering to violent, fascist ideologies. “Men have to toughen up. Men demand it, and women want it.”
Modern parental overprotection robs men of this opportunity. Don’t remove risk from life - let children optimize for it and improve their competence. Let boys push against authority and toughen up and do some seemingly dangerous things. Hence his rule: “Leave children alone when they’re skateboarding.”
(Shortform note: while he discusses men and independence, Peterson doesn’t complete the argument to discuss how society should raise girls to suit female natural instincts.)
Suffering in life is guaranteed. This idea is present in every major religion, and it’s obvious from everyday life. Outcomes are unequal. People are born with different abilities. Some people get worse treatment than others. Peterson’s daughter suffered from unexplained juvenile rheumatoid arthritis for decades, enduring years of chronic pain and risking amputation. There is little more to question the sanity and justice of the world than having an ill child. What kind of god would allow this to happen?
One response to this, as stated above, is to hate your god or the universe for these outcomes. Stretched to its extreme, this becomes hatred of existence, and the desire to destroy existence itself. When practiced, this leads to genocide and mass murders. Clearly this is evil, causing suffering in the name of suffering, and not the right response.
Another response, which only partially mitigates the suffering, is to acknowledge that limitation is critical to making existence meaningful. When Superman was created as a comic book character, he had infinite powers and could overcome any situation. This became boring. There was nothing for him to struggle against, so he couldn’t be admirable; no lesson for him to learn, so he couldn’t grow. In response, the writers had to make him weak to kryptonite to make his stories interesting.
Peterson could have wished for his daughter to have an indestructible metal skeleton, or an inhumanly high threshold to pain. But then his daughter would be changed to a different person, even a monster. What can be loved about a person can’t be separated from their limitations.
There are also coping mechanisms for dealing with suffering. Promise yourself that you’ll only worry about a problem at a specific time of day (not at night, or else you can’t sleep) then promise not to think about the problem outside these scheduled times. This conserves your strength and allows you to deal with the rest of life, which doesn’t care what problems you’re facing.
Finally, notice little bits of goodness that make existence tolerable, even justifiable. See the girl splash happily into a puddle with her rain boots. Enjoy a particularly good coffee or book or conversation. Pet a cat when you run into one.
Reflect on what you learned from 12 Rules for Life.
What is your biggest takeaway from 12 Rules for Life?
What’s your commitment to taking personal responsibility, and making your life a little better?