Jordan B. Peterson’s Self-Help Book for Misanthropes Part 2

An examination of Jordan B. Peterson's book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

Part One can be found here: https://moira-j-moore1.dreamwidth.org/433646.html

In the following chapters, Peterson reveals his general perspective of life, which is that it's horrible. He reveals a dark understanding of friendship, which is that it is a trade agreement from which you get as much as you can while giving back as little as possible. His view of generosity is that you should avoid it if you can. You're probably only doing it to feed your own narcissism, and your default position should be that the victims of misfortune probably brought it on themselves by being lazy. Unless that generosity results in your getting a reputation for generosity, which you can use as a tool.

He repeats himself, contradicts himself, and ignores a lot of facts in an attempt to strengthen his argument.

Rule 3: Make Friends with People Who Want the Best for You
Or, How to Screw What You Need Out of People Without Giving Anything in Return.

Don’t try to help people, because it’s likely that you’re acting out of narcissism or that they don’t deserve it. Maybe you’re hanging out with people in trouble purely because their messed-up lives make you feel better about yours.

He’s not claiming this is always true, but he does seem to think it’s much more common than people who are genuinely nice, which makes me wonder what kind of people he’s been hanging out with.

Then, this gem:
“Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble. You shouldn’t merely assume that he or she is a noble victim of unjust circumstances and exploitation. It’s the most unlikely explanation, not the most probable. In my experience – clinical and otherwise – it’s just never been that simple. Besides, if you buy the story that everything terrible just happened on its own, with no personal responsibility on the part of the victim, you deny that person all agency in the past (and, by implication, in the future as well.) In this manner, you strip him or her of all power.” (page 80)

Hey, you’re hit with cancer? You must have done something to bring that on. A child being beaten? They must have deserved it. You got fired because your company got shut down? Maybe you should have worked 20 hours a day instead of just 16.

He goes on:
“It is far more likely that a given individual has just decided to reject the path upward, because of its difficulty. Perhaps that should even be your default assumption, when faced with such a situation. That’s too harsh, you think. You might be right. Maybe that’s a step too far. But consider this: Failure is easy to understand.” (page 80)

Failure is easy to understand. It’s hilarious that he thinks believing in the goodness of people is simplistic while dismissing them as lazy is somehow wise or complex. And that’s what he spends the next paragraph saying. You fail because you’re lazy.

You know how the title of this chapter is Make Friends with People Who Want the Best for You? Obviously, this guy isn’t one you should be choosing as a friend. He doesn’t want the best for others. He wants to cross them off as lazy. Sure, everyone is worthy of respect, he claims, just not from him. Everyone is worth taking care of themselves, just make sure no one else has to be aware of it. You might put them in the unhappy position of deciding whether you’re a deserving victim or lazy.

Well, ok, maybe you can help. (But make sure it’s not just about your own ego!) But not too much. Only if your “friend” is just a little bit badly off. If they’re in serious trouble, screw ‘em.

After a few pages of saying how wrong, wrong, wrong it is to try to help people, he writes:
“And none of this is a justification for abandoning those in real need to pursue your narrow, blind ambition, in case it has to be said.” (page 82) CYA statement.

The last bit in this chapter is called A Reciprocal Arrangement. It’s about choosing people who will help you do your best, instead of those who might undermine you, like offering you a beer when you’re on the wagon. It says nothing about what you owe them.

Reciprocal, was it?

This is definitely the approach to charity and kindness I would expect from someone who thinks only the naïve can believe in the qualities of Jesus. (More on that later.)

Rule 4: Compare Yourself to Who You Were Yesterday, Not to Who Someone Else Is Today
Or, Ignore Everything I Said About Lobsters in the First Chapter and Don’t Try to Take Someone’s Stuff Through Establishing Superiority and Dominance

“We might start by considering the all-too-black-and-white words themselves: ‘success’ or ‘failure.’” (page88) You know, the words he’s been casually throwing around up to now.

Now he’s admitting there are complexities and degrees between pathetic and dominant.

How you can improve your life by changing your thoughts – All you need is the right attitude! – and your behaviour, but don’t you dare try to change the system.

Bible stuff. People need religion in order to have structure. (Male order.)

Apparently, atheists don’t exist. You may think you are one, but you’re wrong. You need to look at how you act, not how you think, to determine what you are. And I bet Peterson thinks that any positive attribute a person has is because of Christianity.

These gems from page 103:
“You are too complex to understand yourself.”

“You don’t understand anything.”

“You don’t even know that you were blind.”

Hey, remember that chapter when he talked about improving your opinion of yourself? Calling yourself too dumb to understand yourself, what you think, and the world around you is surely the first step of doing that.

Bible stuff.

Peterson talks about the god of the Old Testament, and how god is sometimes thought of as cruel. (Um, because he was?) God didn’t care what people at the time thought of him. That’s why abstaining from worshipping other gods and taking his name in vain deserves two of only ten commandments. God punished people when they did things he didn’t like, because he didn’t mess around. He was a force of nature.
When the concept of nature is male, it’s ok that it attacks humans.

You should stand up to bullies, but only some bullies. Not the ones that commit genocide.
New Testament god is Jesus, who was all kind and loving and forgiving, but who is naïve enough to buy that? He quotes Nietzsche, who “considered New Testament God the worst literary crime in Western history.” (page 105)

We’re supposed to fear god, while worshipping him at the same time. Damn, that’s unhealthy.

Only faith can keep hatred at bay.

Here’s a corker:

“You might start by not thinking (emphasis his) – or, more accurately, but less trenchantly, by refusing to subjugate your faith to your current rationality, and its narrowness of view. This doesn’t mean ‘make yourself stupid.’ It means the opposite. It means instead that you must quit manoeuvring and calculating and conniving and scheming and enforcing and demanding and avoiding and ignoring and punishing. It means you (page 107) must place your old strategies aside. It means, instead, that you must pay attention, as you may never had paid attention before.” (page 108)

Seriously, put faith, by definition belief without evidence, at least in the religious sense, above rationality, but, at the same time, pay attention to what’s going on around you. Unless we’re talking about paying attention to the lives of women, people of colour, or studying sociology, anthropology, or English literature. It’s fine to be willfully blind about all of that.

Listen, I agree with what he says about examining your own life and seeing if there’s something you can do to make it better, but his basic premise is still don’t look at someone else and decide you want what they want, but blind yourself to what they have, and believe in god, because that will show you the true path. This is a blatant contradiction to his endless ramblings about lobsters dominating each other while providing the blueprint for all hierarchies ever.

Rule 5: Do Not Let Your Children Do Anything That Makes You Dislike Them
Or, Some Generic Advice You Can Find Everywhere

I don’t have kids.

I also get annoyed when I’m in a group with adults and kids and the kids dominate the conversation. Yes, I will acknowledge it when I agree with what he’s saying. It’s just rare.

He seems to be suggesting that mothers spoiling their sons is a significant reason there is a lack of respect for women. This is an argument he hits relentlessly.

“Our society faces the increasing call to deconstruct its stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people who do not or will not fit into the categories upon which even our perceptions are based. This is not a good thing.” (page 118)

Tangent: I remember a situation that completely turned my opinion about a certain tradition. If anyone is reading this, and they’re not Canadian, they’ll need to know that lawyers wear robes to court. They look like this: https://www.google.ca/search?q=court+robes+images&rlz=1C1CHZL_enCA717CA717&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjhkard8YLaAhVIzVQKHTEICcYQ7AkISg&biw=1366&bih=637#imgrc=rZZN3caiGuk9AM:

Students being called to the bar must wear them during the ceremony, which looks like any typical graduation ceremony.

This is a tradition we inherited from England, and there are those who think we should ditch the robes, but I won’t go into those arguments.

In 2015, an Indigenous student, Christina Gray, asked the then Law Society of Upper Canada if she could wear a garment from her culture. This garment include imagery that was relevant to law. Initially, the law society refused, but they changed their minds. I was against this, largely because of the tradition behind the robes. And a single sentence hit me in the stomach. That these traditions were not designed with the Indigenous in mind.

And of course not. It’s such an obvious fact, yet one I’d missed my whole life. It changed my perspective on traditions.

Unfortunately, I can’t find the article that has that line, but here’s one about the situation: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/law-student-plans-to-wrap-herself-in-first-nations-heritage-at-graduation/article25051736/

The traditions Peterson is demanding we uphold were designed to protect the interests of straight, white, Christian – but only some kinds of Christian – men. Of course, a precious, fragile, straight white Christian male is stamping his feet because sometimes, occasionally, someone who isn’t a straight, white, Christian man gets to be included.

He doesn’t like the “liberalization” of divorce in the 60s. What a shock. He doesn’t say why beyond, “Think of the children!” Let’s see what divorce laws prior to the 60s looked like?

Prior to 1968, provinces had different family regimes, but a lot of them took inspiration from a UK model of 1857. (Yes, that’s the right century.) This model, “permitted a husband to obtain a divorce on the grounds of his wife’s adultery, and a wife to do so provided she could establish that her husband had committed incestuous adultery, rape, sodomy, bestiality, bigamy, or adultery coupled with cruelty or desertion.” See the double standard there? The “liberalization” made divorce equally accessible to men and women. Https://lop.parl.ca/content/lop/Resea... Oh, the horror.

He has a section called the Ignoble Savage in which he talks about how some thought of the Indigenous as “pre-civilization” and perfect, like children before culture screwed them up. And this is wrong. Not the comparison of Indigenous to children part, the belief that the Indigenous are perfect part. He doesn’t have a problem with the term ‘savage,’ either.

No, I’m not saying the Indigenous were or are perfect. No one is.

His basic argument is that discipline is necessary for raising decent children, which I agree with. He says parents are afraid to discipline their children, or are too lazy to do so. I can’t speak to that beyond my experience with watching parents interact with children, and they all seem pretty adept at discipline. Aside from letting them children take over conversations.

He’s criticizing the dominant behaviour in children that he praises in chapter one. So train it out of them when they’re young – which I agree with – but then train them to act that way when they’re older? The exact behaviours might vary, but the will to dominate, which he considers positive – at least in the beginning of his book – will be the motive.

Rule 6: Set Your House in Perfect Order Before You Criticize the World
Or, Life is Hell and It’s All Your Fault

Peterson seems to view the world as a very dark, cruel place. At an earlier point of the book, he talks about being surprised when he saw people being kind to each other. I’ve always been shocked by cruelty, not decency. But then, he is intentionally contributing to the darkness and cruelty, and he is clearly unable to break free from his own narrow mindedness.

On page 149:
“But human control is limited. Susceptibility to despair, disease, aging and death is universal. In the final analysis, we do not appear to be the architects of our own fragility. Whose fault is it, then?”

This is in direct contradiction to what he suggested earlier, that almost everyone has done something to cause their own misfortunes. That’s why you should do anything you can to justify not helping them, right?
This is all about finding someone or something to blame when things go wrong. Apparently, saying “Shit happens,” isn’t an option.

He talks about school shootings in the US, and they are caused by people who hate life, who think all people are evil and should be eradicated. He doesn’t talk about guns at all in reference to the shootings, that guns should be harder to get, but it’s interesting that he does when referring to Leo Tolstoy, who was apparently suicidal. According to Peterson, Tolstoy hid his guns from himself and wouldn’t carry a rope, in case he hanged himself.

In other words, he sought to make the means of killing himself difficult to access.

He mentions a boy who, at the age of five, was put in one of the Residential “schools,” funded by the government and run by religious organizations, who was brutalized but managed to pull himself together as an adult. Peterson does this without calling the “school” by the proper label, Residential, or admitting that the goal of these “schools” was cultural genocide, turning Indigenous children into submissive little Christians even if it took killing them to do it.

He’s talking about how people who have experienced horrific things might become horrific themselves, either broken down or seeking revenge, or might rise above it and become kinder, more productive people.

Noah and the Flood, and a suggestion that the Hebrews would sin, be punished, repent for a while, then start the cycle all over again. Basically, people don’t pay attention to history, they fail to pay attention to what’s going on around them, so tragedy strikes, and they don’t know who to blame.

Hey, Peterson, remember the Nazis, who wanted women kept in the home, and anyone they didn’t like murdered? Maybe we should learn something from that.

Here’s a doozy. He addresses the hurricane in New Orleans. People knew that the city was vulnerable to flooding. “Willful blindness and corruption took the city down…..A hurricane is an act of God. But failure to prepare, when the necessity for preparation is well known – that’s sin. That’s failure to hit the mark. And the wages of sin is death.” Reference to Bible. (page 157)

Wow. The victims of the New Orleans hurricane, including the ones who had no control over what government agencies such as U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were doing, deserved to die. How is that for victim-blaming?
Some generic advice about examining your own life – Which you’re totally too dumb to do, remember? – and make changes to fix it. But never hold influences completely outside your control responsible for anything, got it?

Rule 7: Pursue What is Meaningful (Not What is Expedient)
Or, Life is Hell, Part Two

“Life is suffering.” (page 161)

That’s the first line in this chapter.

And we’re suffering because Adam and Eve did a naughty thing and god is punishing all of us for the rest of time.

“What in the world should be done about that? …. The simplest, most obvious, and most direct answer? Pursue pleasure. Follow your impulses. Live for the moment. Do what’s expedient. Lie, cheat, steal, deceive, manipulate – but don’t get caught.” (page 162)

His definition of pleasure, his sole definition here, is hurting other people without getting caught. Earlier in the book, when he’s talking about selfcare, he talks about going out for coffee, or whatever small pleasures you have, to reward yourself for doing a task.

Sometimes he writes as though the Bible is just fiction describing what is natural and what we should learn, but other rhetoric suggests that he firmly believes what happened in the Bible, what with women being punished by excruciating and possibly fatal childbirth and men having to learn to dig and use ploughs because Adam and Eve ate an apple. He quotes passages from the Bible in a way that doesn’t make sense if he doesn’t believe every word is true.

Lengthy elaboration on the concept of short-term pain for long-term gain.

Sharing isn’t giving something to someone without getting something back, it’s the initiation of a trade process. “A child who can’t share – who can’t trade – can’t have any friends, because having friends is a form of trade.” (page 168)

Maybe this is late in the game, but he’s really starting to freak me out. A relationship is merely a possession, friends are no more than trading partners. What a cold, horrible view of friendship.
By the way, when you meet someone, ask them for something, not with the idea of eventually giving them something in return, but because once they’ve given you something, they’re more likely to give you more stuff in the future. You can start using them right away!

This is manipulation, but it’s ok when men do it.

Oh, and it gives them a chance to feel good about themselves, and you’ll owe them one, and the favours will go back and forth, because the accumulation and payment of debt is the best foundation for any relationship. Not, “Hey, can I help you with that?” Because, remember, helping someone is rarely a good idea. No, it’s “Can you help me with this?” and hoping the other party hasn’t read Peterson’s book.

All this after going on about short-term pain for long-term gain. Don’t waste time getting to know this person to find out whether you actually want to spend time with them. It’s, “Hi, I’m Bob.” Shake hands. “Say, could you do me a favour?” Seeking instant gratification, a reward for doing nothing.

Being generous for its own sake isn’t of value. Having a reputation for being generous is. He says that such a reputation is reliable and lasts.

Except he’s saying you should be generous only to certain people, only to those who can repay the debt. Does he think no one will notice he’s being “generous” only to those who need it the least?

Add sharing and generosity to the words to which Peterson applies an unique interpretation. Nothing is to be done without an ulterior motive.

“The basis for an articulated morality has been put in place. The productive, truthful (Unless you say, “Hey, I’m talking to you in order to manipulate you,” upon that first meeting, you’re not being truthful.) sharer (Except not a person who’s sharing) is the prototype (page 168) for the good citizen (Manipulation isn’t good), and the good man.”(page 169)

Not a good person. A good man.

Earlier in the chapter, Peterson talks about the sacrificial offerings of Cain and Abel, and that god favoured Abel over Cain. Peterson says that the Bible doesn’t make clear why Abel was god’s favourite. Maybe god was just in a bad mood.

Why do I bring this up? Because Peterson does, saying the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful is that the successful give successful sacrifices. Not just any kind of sacrifice will do, and, according to the Cain and Abel, it may be impossible for the unsuccessful sacrifice to know why their course of action isn’t working, or how to fix it.
Bible stuff.

Now it’s ok to say, “Shit happens.”

He repeats stuff he said earlier.

Bible stuff, including that it’s Mary’s fault Jesus ended up suffering because she chose to have him. Like she had a choice. Is he going to mention all the men with their torturing and driving in the nails and stabbing and all that?

“Pain and suffering define the world.” (page 172) And always have, according to Peterson. These are attributes he assigns to chaos. So if the human condition is chaos, and always has been, what’s this order that he keeps saying we’re straying from?

Stuff about Socrates, but the only thing that matters is this sentence. “Then he took his poison, like a man.” (page 173) Like a man. Can you tell I’m rolling my eyes here?

“Socrates rejected expediency, and the necessity for manipulation that accompanied it.” (page 173) So now it’s a bad thing to manipulate others, even for men.

Peterson talks about the evil of a human attacking another human. “And what is it, precisely, that motivates such evil?” (Page 177) Wanting to be higher in the hierarchy? Wanting their stuff? Like the lobsters in the first chapter? With the hierarchical order that provides the blueprint for all hierarchies ever? And it was perfectly acceptable to kill other lobsters because you want their territory and their other property? And all the girls?
Was that last sentence redundant?

Abel gave the right sacrifices and was favoured by god, but he was still evil, because that’s what humans are.

Bible stuff. Jesus is suddenly relevant because he resists temptation, including the top rank on the hierarchy.

Now he’s bashing dominance. “Such expansion of status also provides unlimited opportunity for the inner darkness to reveal itself. The lust for blood, rape and destruction is very much part of power’s attraction.
It is not only that men desire power so that they will no longer suffer. It is not only that they desire power so that they can (page 183) overcome subjugation to want, disease and death. Power also means the capacity to take vengeance, ensure submission, and crush enemies.” (page 184)

Peterson’s in a powerful position. He’s using it to attack everyone who’s not exactly like him. So he should know all about power creating monsters.

I have to give him this: He has quite the extensive vocabulary when it comes to describing how awful life is. You might think I’m addressing this point too often, but it’s a fraction of the number of times he does.

Despite all the cracked ideas he’s proposed so far, this one, on page 186, is the first one to literally make my jaw drop:
“The Christianity doctrine elevated the individual soul, placing slave and master and commoner and nobleman alike on the same metaphysical footing, rendering them equal before God and the law.”

What the hell? What version of the Bible, Christianity, history, and the law has he been looking at? Does he just make stuff up and then convince himself it’s true?

Talk about failing to pay attention to what’s going on around you.

Then he claims the influence of Christianity is why slavery ended while ignoring the fact that Christianity supported slavery for most of the last two thousand years. And the oppression of everyone who wasn’t, for most of that time, a property-owning heterosexual man of the “right” spiritual beliefs.

Another jaw dropping moment on page 187. Peterson claims slavery degraded slave owners as much or even more than the enslaved.

“That is not to say that Christianity was without its problems.” (page 187) A CYA statement, given no problems were described in the paragraph, only false claims about the good it did, such as, “It insisted that women were as valuable as men.” (page 187)

Peterson really likes quoting from the Bible, so I’ll do so here. This is from the Old Testament, the part of the Bible Peterson prefers. "A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent" (1 Timothy 2:11-12).

Maybe when he says “valuable,” he means how many goats a prospective wife was worth.

Peterson says Christianity solves problems, and after a while, the fact that those problems existed in the first place is forgotten. He seems to imply that the forgetting part is a good thing. No learning from history here. Maybe that’s why he’s so confused about how history and the law operated (and operates) in the real world.

Endless Bible stuff.

He says one of the consequences of the death of god in the West was communism. You know how communism has been used? As a source of order. Peterson likes order. But since Christianity isn’t imposing the order, the order is bad.

Peterson seems to believe that you can either be a Christian, orderly and moral, or a nihilist, believing life is meaningless. Nothing in between. Earlier in the book, he rejected black-and-white thinking, but he sure has no problem engaging in it himself.

Ideas are alive, facts are dead. Hey, at least he admits he doesn’t like facts. That’s a lot more than other oppressive people are willing to admit. I’m not saying ideas aren’t valuable, but shouldn’t they be formed by facts? Real facts, not alternative facts, or claims that because lobsters had hierarchies based on dominance, hierarchies based on dominance are the natural state. Except when they’re not.

“… socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists.” Maybe he needs to look up ‘capitalism,’ too. “They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish. This is simply untrue.” (page 196)

Most socialists don’t believe societies can be perfect. They just believe that it’s possible to make life better, by shifting some of the money from the handful of people who control it to the rest of society. By making them pay taxes, for a start. It’s what allows for universal healthcare, public schools, cops and firefighters, streets that occasionally don’t have potholes. Those aren’t improvements?

Of course, he’s using a strawman argument here. Socialists believe redistribution of wealth makes a perfect society, and because that’s impossible, they’re fools.

Repeating himself.

Contradicting himself.

Behaviour is not a fact. Since when?

Gotta give him some props for pop cultural references.

Repeating himself. Was the original draft of the book too short? Is he padding this?