Jordan Peterson
Jordan Peterson is the author and narrator of 12 Rules for Life. Peterson grew up in rural Canada and has worked as a clinical psychologist and as a professor at Harvard University and the…
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Solzhenitsyn was a survivor of the Soviet gulags, or labor camps, and the author of The Gulag Archipelago. Peterson mentions Solzhenitsyn several times as an example of someone who, though he may have been…
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Chris
Chris was a friend of Peterson’s while the two were growing up in rural Alberta, Canada. Peterson uses Chris as an example of someone who fails to take responsibility for Being, or existence…
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Minor Characters
Viktor Frankl
Viktor Frankl was an Auschwitz survivor, psychiatrist, and author of Man’s Search for Meaning. Peterson cites Frankl’s insistence that lies are a precursor to totalitarianism.
Jacques Derrida
Derrida was a French postmodern philosopher whose ideas gained academic prominence in the 1970s. His work focused on hierarchical structures as means of exclusion and oppression.
Mikhaila Peterson
Mikhaila is Peterson’s daughter who was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis in early childhood. Watching Mikhaila fight through many years of debilitating pain and difficult treatments forced Peterson to grapple with the problem of human suffering and the meaning of life like nothing else did.
