12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Maybe you are a loser. And maybe you’re not—but if you are, you don’t have to continue in that mode. Maybe you just have a bad habit. Maybe you’re even just a collection of bad habits. Nonetheless, even if you came by your poor posture honestly—even if you were unpopular or bullied at home or in grade school—it’s not necessarily appropriate now. Circumstances change. If you slump around, with the same bearing that characterizes a defeated lobster, people will assign you a lower status, and the old counter that you share with crustaceans, sitting at the very base of your brain, will assign you a low dominance number.” 

Peterson’s outlook is ultimately optimistic. He believes in a person’s capacity for change. In this example, he asserts that a simple change of body language will turn into improvements both in self-image and in external valuations and respect. The comparison to lobsters is an organizational framework throughout the entire chapter. They are humanity’s metaphorical cousin in the examples of self- and community-worth, but they also apparently share literal similarities with humans under stress and in triumph.

“Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering.” 

The binary pair of order and chaos is an extremely important concept in the entire book. Order is familiar and comfortable, and chaos is uncertain and anxiety-provoking. In this excerpt, however, Peterson reveals that order is also stable and chaos holds possibilities in its disorder. He advocates a balance between the two, so a person can continue learning new skills and habits, but not at such a rate or with high enough stakes that discomfort inhibits the learning process. The two categories are also not fixed. That which starts as chaotic might be ordered through learning and familiarization processes. 

“You are important to other people, as much as to yourself. You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself.” 

This statement is in the chapter that instructs, “Treat yourself as if you were someone you were responsible for.” In this example, Peterson decenters the individual to stress the larger circumstances of a person’s life that might lead him or her to value their own life and wellbeing as much as, for example, their innocent dog’s. Peterson explains in the chapter that people devalue themselves, believing themselves to be worthless and selfish transgressors, but he instead frames an individual as an essential part of a larger whole, reframing self-care not as a choice, but as an obligation.

“People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it.” 

Peterson talks a lot about pattern-breaking and pattern-making. Humans are pattern-makers and act according to habits, and bad habits produce more bad habits (or more of the same bad habits). Again, though, Peterson stresses the possibility of change through learning. He insinuates in this statement that a person can acquire new tools, and he goes on to provide examples of that type of triumph. 

“If you surround yourself with people who support your upward aim, they will not tolerate your cynicism and destructiveness. They will instead encourage you when you do good for yourself and others and punish you carefully when you do not. This will help bolster your resolve to do what you should do, in the most appropriate and careful manner.” 

Peterson stresses the importance of having the right type of friends. He insists that friendships should be reciprocal and helpful in the way outlined above: True friends elevate the value of the group. They don’t, for example, merely go along with every random (or destructive) whim just to have fun or receive instant gratification. This reciprocal arrangement also requires every person to, in turn, be the right type of friend, rewarding their friends’ good behavior and punishing them for bad behaviors.

“You can’t fool your implicit perceptual structures. Not even a bit. They aim where you point them. To retool, to take stock, to aim somewhere better, you have to think it through, bottom to top. You have to scour your psyche. You have to clean the damned thing up. 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.” 

Part of improving one’s life, Peterson says, is learning to see beyond the immediate concerns and assumptions that govern everyday life and trying instead to set and reach goals beyond that immediate realm. He stresses in this passage that that process is difficult and requires some rewiring of a person’s modes of thinking. He frames the worthy practice in terms of being responsible. He contrasts the responsibility of improving one’s thinking with the stupidity of refusing to do so. He also contrasts it with feelings and characteristics of pain, arrogance, deceit, and resentfulness. Those negative qualities are, apparently, where people remain if they fail to alter their perception of the world and the possibilities before them.

“Pay attention. Focus on your surroundings, physical and psychological. Notice something that bothers you, that concerns you, that will not let you be, which you could fix, that you would fix. You can find such somethings by asking yourself (as if you genuinely want to know) three questions: ‘What is it that is bothering me?’ ‘Is it something I could fix?’ and ‘Would I actually be willing to fix it?’” 

At multiple points in the book, Peterson stresses the importance of paying attention, an ability he suggests most people don’t routinely display. This passage stresses that point and presents a practical guide to paying better attention in order to identify areas for improvement in a person’s life and forge a plan to make the improvements. If a person answers “no” to any of the questions, Peterson recommends aiming lower and finding something more manageable to correct.

“Every child should also be taught to comply gracefully with the expectations of civil society. This does not mean crushed into mindless ideological conformity. It means instead that parents must reward those attitudes and action that will bring their child success in the world outside the family, and use threat and punishment when necessary to eliminate behaviours that will lead to misery and failure.” 

Chapter 5 is most centrally about parenting, and this is one of the main pieces of advice that Peterson gives to parents about disciplining their children’s behavior. He cautions parents against being too lenient or friendly to kids who are misbehaving. He bases notions of what is right and wrong off of societal norms, as illustrated in this passage. He repeats throughout the book that he does not believe in the value of social revolution or locating societal problems in the big-picture. He always advocates change only at the individual level. He insists that while many parents raise children to reject and criticize society, parents should adhere to societal traditions and conventions to teach kids how to interact with the larger world.

“Parents have a duty to act as proxies for the real world—merciful proxies, caring proxies—but proxies, nonetheless. This obligation supersedes any responsibility to ensure happiness, foster creativity, or boost self-esteem. It is the primary duty of parents to make their children socially desirable. That will provide the child with opportunity, self-regard, and security. It’s more important even than fostering individual identity. That Holy Grail can only be pursued, in any case, after a high degree of social sophistication has been established.” 

Peterson elevates socialization above all else in childrearing. He insists in this paragraph that the most important determinants in a person’s life come through their level of social acceptance. He explicitly rejects pursuits of individuality over goals of socialization. In saying that parents must act as “proxies,” he is saying that parents need to enforce the same socialization standards that a child will experience outside of the home. He says nothing about whether such social judgement is fair, but he insists that it is beneficial in opening opportunities. This passage also contains one of the many Biblical allusions that characterize the writing. He often expresses positive forces and worthy goals in terms of Heaven, God, Christ, or related imagery (here, the “Holy Grail”), whereas he equates negative forces or bad behaviors with Hell, Satan, or sin. 

“Cain’s sacrifices are rejected. He exists in suffering. He calls out God and challenges the Being He created. God refuses his plea. He tells Cain that his trouble is self-induced. Cain, in his rage, kills Abel, God’s favourite (and, truth be known, Cain’s idol). Cain is jealous, of course, of his successful brother. But he destroys Abel primarily to spite God. This is the truest version of what happens when people take their vengeance to the ultimate extreme.” 

Peterson draws a link between resentment at life and murder—even mass murder, as he references the disdain for life that the Columbine school shooters expressed in 1999 when they murdered 12 fellow students and a teacher. Peterson says that in these cases, destructiveness targets God. In this passage, he insists that the “truest version” of the link between vengeance and murder is the Cain and Abel story from the Bible. He does not explain the story in great detail, but references the story, in the Book of Genesis, in which the two sons of Adam and Eve (the first man and woman), make sacrifices for God. God prefers Abel’s sacrifices and in anger at God’s preference, Cain murders his brother. The murder and destruction, Peterson explains, was not fundamentally directed against the victim, but against God. Peterson extrapolates from this story to suggest that serial killers act similarly, and that is why people cannot let themselves fall into patterns of hating life and blaming a higher power for their suffering.

“The ancient Jews always blamed themselves when things fell apart. They acted as if God’s goodness—the goodness of reality—was axiomatic, and took responsibility for their own failure. That’s insanely responsible. But the alternative is to judge reality as insufficient, to criticize Being itself, and to sink into resentment and the desire for revenge.” 

Peterson previously discussed the plights of the Old Testament Hebrews in the chapter. They faced unimaginable struggles and tyranny in Biblical stories, but they continually rebuilt themselves and honored God. Peterson calls this behavior “insanely responsible” in this passage. Peterson does not subscribe to the idea that things might fall apart outside of people’s direct control. He instead says that things fall apart when people don’t pay attention and prepare. Facing adversity with the conviction that it was strictly human error, he says, allows people (like the Hebrews) to rebuild and move on without disruptive resentment. Imagining adversity as outside of one’s control leads, Peterson argues, to “resentment and the desire for revenge.” As he previously articulated (see above quote), that revenge targets bystanders, though it is truly conducted to spite God or fate. He does not comment on whether these victims were, in some way, responsible for the fate that befell them, or whether the reader should understand their suffering to be outside of this conventional mode of failures to prepare and act as things start to fall apart. 

“Our ancestors acted out a drama, a fiction; they personified that force that governs fate as a spirit that can be bargained with, traded with, as if it were another human being. And the amazing thing is that it worked. This was in part because the future is largely composed of other human beings—often precisely those who have watched and evaluated and appraised the tiniest details of your past behavior. It’s not very far from that to God, sitting above on high, tracking your every move and writing it down for further reference in a big book. Here’s a productive symbolic idea: the future is a judgmental father.” 

This passage recaps some of the ideas that were central to Peterson’s first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. Humans invented stories and acted them out in order to navigate the world of chaos and convert portions of it into order. Each culture’s stories and mythologies—their belief systems—are morality tales that inform people how they should act. Peterson explains in his Overture, “Our ancestors portrayed the world as a stage—a drama—instead of a place of objects” (xxvii). In this passage, Peterson draws on that formulation to explain the interpretation of a monotheistic and judgmental God. With that guiding image, Peterson suggests, people can establish a productive moral structure that can hold together a society—a feat that is difficult among the inevitable pain and chaos of what Peterson describes as “Being.” 

“Meaning is the ultimate balance between, on the one hand, the chaos of transformation and possibility and on the other, the discipline of pristine order, whose purpose is to produce out of the attendant chaos a new order that will be even more immaculate, and capable of bringing forth a still more balanced and productive chaos and order. Meaning is the Way, the path of life more abundant, the place you live when you are guided by Love and speaking Truth and when nothing you want or could possibly want takes any precedence over precisely that.” 

Meaning is a very important concept in the book. Peterson connects it here to the book’s other central concepts: order and chaos. Meaning is the valuable reward of navigating chaos and order intelligently and productively. He likens it to religious goals, like “the Way” that Taoism emphasizes as the governing and ordering force of nature and to Judeo-Christian values that he has already explored at length in the text, like Love and Truth with capital opening letters. He also presents finding meaning as finding contentedness (not complacency) with life and the world, because the moral obligations to prioritize values like Love and Truth supersede any other personal desires that might instead be selfish or unproductive.

“Some reliance on tradition can help us establish our aims. It is reasonable to do what other people have always done, unless we have a very good reason not to. It is reasonable to become educated and work and find love and have a family. This is how culture maintains itself. But it is necessary to aim at your target, however traditional, with your eyes wide open. You have a direction, but it might be wrong. You have a plan, but it might be ill-formed.” 

The assumption that many people are aimless and lost shapes the rules that Peterson presents. In this passage, he advocates navigating the uncertainty and pain of life by looking to tradition and following suit unless a person senses harm in doing so. Even with the baseline reliance on tradition and emulating the path that others have taken before you, a willingness to adjust is critical to a lifelong pursuit of improvement and meaning. Peterson advises thoughtful adherence to norms, not mindless following. 

“For the big lie, you first need the little lie. That little lie is, metaphorically speaking, the bait used by the Father of Lies to hook his victims. The human capacity for imagination makes us capable of dreaming up and creating alternative worlds. This is the ultimate source of our creativity. With that singular capacity, however, comes the counterpart, the opposite side of the coin: we can deceive ourselves and others into believing and acting as if things are other than we know they are.” 

Peterson thinks that telling the truth versus skirting the truth or outright lying represent general approaches to life. Lies lead to other lies, he insists, and a tendency that appears on the surface to be benign and minor—like telling “white lies” for example—can lead to deep and destructive deception of self and others. People can distort their own sense of reality through the lies they tell themselves. They can also intentionally or unintentionally manipulate others. The best way to avoid that negative path is to avoid lying altogether.

“People think they think, but it’s not true. It’s mostly self-criticism that passes for thinking. True thinking is rare—just like true listening. Thinking is listening to yourself. It’s difficult. To think, you have to be at least two people at the same time. Then you have to let those people disagree. Thinking is an internal dialogue between two or more different views of the world.” 

This quote appears in the chapter that is most concerned with communication and conversation. Parts of communicating and conversing are listening, thinking, and dialogue. In this passage, Peterson defines some of those terms and concepts. He denounces any internal monologue as thinking. He says instead that real thinking involves dialogue and disagreement. It’s an honest and complicated internal conversation, not a series of rationalizations or passive reflections. He stresses the difficulty of this practice and also emphasizes listening in it—listening to the different viewpoints that a person can produce and weigh.

“The final type of conversation, akin to listening, is a form of mutual exploration. It requires true reciprocity on the part of those listening and speaking. It allows all participants to express and organize their thoughts. A conversation of mutual exploration has a topic, generally complex, of genuine interest to the participants. Everyone participating is trying to solve a problem, instead of insisting on the a priori validity of their own positions. All are acting on the premise that they have something to learn. This kind of conversation constitutes active philosophy, the highest form of thought, and the best preparation for proper living.” 

This is the type of conversation that Peterson prizes above all others. He previously stressed the importance of reciprocity in friendship, and he stresses it again here in terms of conversation. He also highlights the complexity of a reciprocal conversation centered on careful thought, listening, and learning. He notes that a topic is likely to be complex—something that would be difficult to talk through quickly or without disagreement. He insinuates that life will require this type of conversation, because he calls it the “best preparation” for the right type of life. This type of conversation requires the effort of multiple people; It is not something a single person can achieve on his or her own. 

“Everything is intricate beyond imagining. Everything is affected by everything else. We perceive a very narrow slice of a causally interconnected matrix, although we strive with all our might to avoid being confronted by knowledge of that narrowness.” 

Perception is an important concept in the book because perception—how people see and understand what they confront—shapes their worldviews and strategies for life. People’s initial interpretations of the world around them cannot possibly reflect the complexity and various intersection contexts that shape the moment. Since people want to understand the world and exert control over their lives, this limited scope of perception is an uncomfortable reality. Peterson maintains that by paying attention and making careful observations, people can train themselves to think more wholly and productively about their immediate circumstances and open up their scope of perception.

“When things fall apart, and chaos re-emerges, we can give structure to it, and re-establish order, through our speech. If we speak carefully and precisely, we can sort things out, and put them in their proper place, and set a new goal, and navigate to it—often communally, if we negotiate; if we reach consensus. If we speak carelessly and imprecisely, however, things remain vague. The destination remains unproclaimed. The fog of uncertainty does not lift, and there is no negotiating through the world.”

The passage illustrates the chapter title, “Be Precise in your Speech.” Precision in articulation matters because words have the power to clarify circumstances. It is through precise observations and statements that people make decisions and plans. Silence or vagueness prevent a person from articulating a clear direction or plan, and without those things, it is impossible to make productive and meaningful forward progress. As the subtitle of the book insinuates, this rule—to speak precisely—is an “antidote” to chaos because it manages and eliminates uncertainty.

“Human beings are, after all, seriously remarkable creatures. We have no peers, and it’s not clear that we have any real limits. Things happen now that appeared humanly impossible even at the same time in the recent past when we began to wake up to our planet-sized responsibilities.”

Though Peterson is highly critical of the general public for failure to carefully pay attention, overcome cynicism, and appreciate their lives, he also credits humans with amazing capabilities. In this paragraph, he is referring to largely physical activities—he mentions Olympic performances in track and field and gymnastics. The purpose of this chapter is to discourage anti-human behaviors, summed up in the image of bothering skateboarders by policing the spaces they want to skate in and rendering those places un-skateable. He credits people with voluntarily taking on feats of daring and danger and succeeding. This positive valuation of humankind helps a person to avoid disdain for life.

“It is to women’s clear advantage that men do not happily put up with dependency among themselves. Part of the reason that so many a working-class woman does not marry, now, as we have alluded to, is because she does not want to look after a man, struggling for employment, as well as her children. And fair enough. A woman should look after her children—although that is not all she should do. And a man should look after a woman and children—although that is not all he should do. But a woman should not look after a man, because she must look after children, and a man should not be a child. This means that he must not be dependent.” 

Peterson states a lot of rules for relationships, which he nearly always expresses as marriages. He also always states these rules in terms of heterosexual marriages between a man and a woman, and the rules nearly always concern children centrally, as well. In this chapter more generally, Peterson riles against criticisms of patriarchy by insisting that gendered norms in Western society (though he does not identify the scope of society he discusses) are useful. That logic is in this passage. In it, he says that the behaviors that men enforce among each other in social settings—like being “strong” in every conceivable way—benefit women and do not hurt men. He is speaking against accusations that peer pressure to “toughen up” are toxic and harmful in producing aggression and self-consciousness. He says “too-weak” young men should be self-conscious and shape up to societal values. He also says in this chapter that people should not criticize aggression to the extent that they do, because it can lead to personal success. The gendered arguments in the book are among the most controversial statements to Peterson’s critics. 

“Hating life, despising life—even for the genuine pain that life inflicts—merely serves to make life itself worse, unbearably worse. There is no genuine protest in that. There is no goodness in that, only the desire to produce suffering, for the sake of suffering. That is the very essence of evil. People who come to that kind of thinking are one step from total mayhem. Sometimes they merely lack the tools. Sometimes, like Stalin, they have their finger on the nuclear button.” 

Peterson has previously drawn a link between disdain for life and mass murder. In this passage, he says that hating life leads people to want to produce suffering for its own sake. He then equates that impulse with Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, who was responsible for the death of millions of people through execution, forced labor, deportation, and other totalitarian violence. Peterson acknowledges that life is full of pain and suffering, but he insists that that reality cannot justify disdain for it. 

“Once you are aligned with the heavens, you can concentrate on the day. Be careful. Put the things you can control in order. Repair what is in disorder, and make what is already good better. It is possible that you can manage, if you are careful. People are very tough. People can survive through much pain and loss. But to persevere they must see the good in Being. If they lose that, they are truly lost.” 

The image of aligning one’s self with the heavens references faith. The author draws on Matthew 6:34 and the larger Sermon on the Mount story in which Christ tells his followers to have faith in God. With that faith—or some other grounding force that fundamentally appreciates and values life—a person can focus on their immediate circumstances instead of emotionally crumbling under the weight of all of life’s pain. Confronting a smaller and more immediate scope of being will help a person negotiate life’s struggles and successfully transform life.