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Books
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos and Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson
B.V.E. Hyde ponders the point of Jordan Peterson.
For the majority of his career, Jordan Peterson was, like most academics, a relatively minor public personality. He started to appear sporadically on local television about twenty years ago, and his first book, Maps of Meaning (1999), barely sold a hundred copies. His rise to fame came in 2016 when he began to publicly criticize the Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code (Bill C-16), passed by the Parliament of Canada to introduce ‘gender identity and expression’ as prohibited grounds for discrimination. Peterson argued that it constituted compelled speech (though some legal scholars denied this interpretation). Compelled speech, Peterson was convinced, was a step too far towards totalitarianism. As Neil McLaughlin argues in Society (vol. 58, 2021), what caused his fame to last were the six different roles he came to play in the public eye: political provocateur, academic researcher, media entrepreneur, therapist, father figure, and spiritual leader. Peterson’s two recent books, presenting in total twenty-four ‘rules for life’, are only incidentally related to his rise to prominence. It was his fame that made the books, not the other way around. This is not to say that the books are no good, only that the world of publishing is complicated. However, each of the rules might be traced to one of his six personas, and his lasting popularity has more to do with his books than with his initial rise to fame.
Both books are something like self-help books, but in this regard they are most unusual, for they are too philosophical to fit comfortably in that genre. The first book is subtitled An Antidote to Chaos (2018), the second is titled, Beyond Order (2021), and these show the major respect in which they differ. The former focusses on the dangers one faces from too much chaos (which is feminine), and the latter on the malign effects of excessive order (which is masculine). For Peterson, who is at heart a Jungian psychologist, both order and chaos are fundamental elements of human experience, and an individual’s psychology is determined by the balance between them. Pathologies result from their imbalance. The overall problem Dr Peterson tackles in his work is that of existential nihilism and its psychological effects, such as angst, dread, and most importantly, depression. Suffering is, he thinks, an unavoidable part of the human condition: “Suffering is built into the structure of being”, he says (in this respect he is quite Buddhist). He also thinks that “we all have a palpable sense of the chaos lurking under everything familiar” and that, if it goes unchecked, “the forces of tyranny expand inexorably.”
Too much focus on the problems he tackles will inevitably result in a pessimistic view of Peterson. That is possibly why in the Los Angeles Review of Books (8 March 2018), Houman Barekat describes Peterson’s work as “an ugly, mean-spirited treatise against human kindness.” Indeed, what is positive about his work is not his picture of the human condition – it is what we are capable of achieving despite it.
In fact, Peterson’s general concern is the same as the French-Algerian philosopher and novelist Albert Camus, who opened his book The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) with the assertion that “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” When faced with the meaninglessness of the world, Camus said we have three choices. First, we could succumb to the absurdity of it all and kill ourselves. However, this, he thought, was contradictory, for it is to admit that life is too much, and so affirm the very absurdity you’re trying to escape from. Instead, we might take a Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’, and believe in spite of it all that life is meaningful. But this, according to Camus, is ‘philosophical suicide’. Finally – and this is the route endorsed by Camus – we can revolt against the absurdity by affirming life. Revolting is ‘the contrary of renunciation’, and it is through this that Camus says that we can ‘give life value’.
Peterson says the same thing. In his opinion, it is a “suicidal gesture” to shrink away from the absurdity of life; moreover, we are in dire need of “the meaning inherent in a profound system of value, or the horror of existence rapidly becomes paramount” (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos). So it is existential meaning, that is, a profound system of value, which prevents us from falling into hopeless despair. Our only choice, then, is to revolt against the absurdity of existence. To continue to live in the face of the meaninglessness of life is what it means to be a tragic hero. And our everyday heroism in the face of suffering makes us “low-resolution versions of God” (ibid).
A vital connexion between personal responsibility and existential meaning is drawn by Peterson in one of his rules: to “stand up straight with your shoulders back” is to “accept the terrible responsibility of life”. So once again like Camus, Peterson finds meaning in our choice-making, asserting that “free choice matters” in our striving towards meaning. “Everyone falls short of the glory of God”, he further says: nevertheless, “you have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world” (ibid). That role is to “help direct the world… a bit more toward Heaven” – which is achieved by balancing order and chaos, predictability and unpredictability. Then you may find “Meaning, with a capital M”, which will “well up from the most profound depths of your Being” and you can once again “walk with God in the Garden”, for it is by living well that we can “atone for our sinful nature” (ibid).
Peterson is clear that meaning comes from striving, not obtaining, and says that “to have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want”. But by meaning he does not mean happiness. “Happiness is a great side effect. When it comes, accept it gratefully. But it’s fleeting and unpredictable. It’s not something to aim at – because it’s not an aim. And if happiness is the purpose of life, what happens when you’re unhappy? Then you’re a failure” (ibid). If a person is to achieve happiness at all, they must first pursue meaning, for which they must “conduct his or her life in a manner that requires the rejection of immediate gratification, of natural and perverse desires alike” (ibid).
Peterson maintains that these facts of life can be observed in chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis, “a narrative sequence almost unbearable in its profundity.” Peterson, views the Garden of Eden as representing order, and the Serpent as chaos. That there was evil even in the Garden shows that “nothing can be completely walled off,” for “we have seen the enemy, after all, and he is us… No walls, however tall, will keep that out” (ibid). Nevertheless, the prelapsarian world was too orderly, in that man was not yet conscious of himself. Ignorance is the price of such order. To be human is to be conscious: in the Fall man became fully human. It catapulted us “out of infancy, out of the unconscious animal world, into the horrors of history itself.” For Peterson the Fall was not wholly bad, for a world without evil, without strife, represents “permanent human infantilism and absolute uselessness.”
Eden by Jan Breugel and Peter Rubens 1615
Peterson does not write in philosophic proofs or mathematical formulae, but in metaphors and analogies. His books stand out as being genuinely interesting to read, rather than merely having interesting ideas. The ideas that he does advance in them are, ultimately, optimistic. He has been misrepresented as pessimistic and political but when he is political, he is sensible. He’s not the ‘far right favourite’ Cynthia Miller-Idriss makes him out to be in Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (2020). But that his self-help advice is almost commonsensical is really what accounts for the appeal of his books. He writes forcefully for self-development propositions which are largely unremarkable, and, at bottom, totally agreeable. That is not to detract from the excellence of his work; on the contrary, it is his realism about the human condition, his optimism about how to transcend it, and the simplicity of his injunctions that provide a route to a psychologically healthier place, at a time when the world itself seems to have gone mad in its complexity. This makes Jordan B. Peterson a significant contemporary intellectual.
© B.V.E. Hyde 2025
B.V.E. Hyde is a researcher in philosophy at the University of Bristol and Bangor University. A prolific reviewer of books, he has written more than sixty for academic journals and magazines.
• 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Jordan B. Peterson, Allen Lane, 2018, 448 pp., £25.00 hb
• Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, Jordan B. Peterson, Allen Lane, 2021; 432 pp., £25.00 hb