Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in 12 Rules for Life, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Order, Chaos, and Meaning
Suffering, Evil, and Responsibility
Truth
Knowledge and Wisdom
Character-Building and Hierarchy
Gender and Relationships
Summary
Analysis
Jordan Peterson opens by stating that 12 Rules for Life has both a short history and a long history, and that he’ll start with the short history. In 2012, he began posting on the website Quora for fun, contributing answers to questions about happiness, aging, and the meaning of life. By far his most popular contribution was a list of maxims in response to the question, “What are the most valuable things everyone should know?” His list of sayings, some serious and some tongue-in-cheek, generated a surprising number of upvotes and shares.
Peterson begins by giving readers some background on his book. Quora is a social website where users can submit, edit, and comment on one another’s questions and answers. In 2012, Quora would have only been a couple of years old, and Peterson built an early and enthusiastic following there. The response to his Quora list of life advice anticipates the response to his later teaching and writing—a broad, everyday audience seemed to find his ideas accessible, entertaining, and helpful.
Themes
A few months earlier, Peterson had been approached by a literary agent who’d heard him speak on a radio program in which he criticized the idea that happiness is the goal of human life. Peterson had spent decades reading about the horrors of Nazi Germany and Soviet labor camps and had concluded that life must hold a deeper meaning than happiness. In reading “great stories of the past,” he’d come to believe that life’s meaning has more to do with “developing character in the face of suffering” than with happiness.
Long before he developed his “rules for life,” Peterson had been thinking about life’s meaning—especially in light of the fact that, as history amply demonstrates, life is often difficult, even horrifying. Here, Peterson assumes that many modern people take it for granted that the point of life is to be happy. Yet a great many people, both now and throughout history, have evidently not found happiness. Peterson believes that a lack of happiness, or the presence of suffering, doesn’t make a person’s life meaningless; therefore, life must have a different, deeper meaning—one that undermines modern assumptions about what makes a life worthwhile.
Themes
Peterson spent almost 15 years (1985–1999) working on his book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. He also taught this book’s contents at both Harvard and the University of Toronto. Eventually, he decided to film his lectures and put them online. These videos became very popular, and some of that popularity was due to a political controversy—but that’s a story for another time.
Peterson touches on his previous work, both for academic and popular audiences. The controversy he alludes to is probably a 2016 debate at the University of Toronto over the use of preferred pronouns and compelled speech; video of the debate went viral and raised Peterson’s profile significantly. However, he doesn’t directly address the controversy in this book.
Themes
In Maps of Meaning, Peterson argued that history’s great mythical and religious stories had primarily moral meanings, not descriptive ones. In other words, they were mainly concerned with teaching how a human being should act. Peterson had come to believe that our ancestors didn’t look at the world primarily as a place filled with objects, but as a stage on which human beings enact a drama. The most important elements in that world weren’t material things, but order and chaos.
Peterson’s earlier writing focused on the ethical meanings found in the world’s mythical and religious literature. Based on his research, Peterson had concluded that pre-modern humans were much more concerned with meaning than with tangible things. Across cultures, Peterson finds the relationship between order and chaos to be a recurrent theme in human attempts to grasp life’s meaning—a key point of 12 Rules as a whole.
Themes
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For Peterson, “order” means that the people around you act according to predictable social norms. Order includes “social structure, explored territory, and familiarity.” It’s usually symbolically portrayed as masculine.
Understanding Peterson’s view of order and chaos is essential to understanding the “rules” he will expound later. “Order” is predictability, stability, and the familiar. In myths, these qualities are typically portrayed through masculine symbolism of some kind. As Peterson will explain later, this gendered symbolism shouldn’t be taken to mean that traits like stability are exclusively masculine; it is, however, a generalized, cross-cultural observation based on his analysis of literature.
Themes
“Chaos,” on the other hand, is when something unexpected happens—“the new and unpredictable suddenly emerging in the midst of the commonplace familiar.” Chaos is both creative and destructive, and as order’s antithesis, it’s symbolically portrayed as female.
“Chaos” is order’s opposite, but that doesn’t mean it’s universally negative. It can be out of control and threatening, but it can also be something that generates new life. As Peterson will point out later, this might be why chaos often gets associated with the feminine in myths.
Themes
The Taoist yin-yang symbol portrays order (white) and chaos (black) as two intertwined serpents. The white contains a black dot, and the black contains a white dot, indicating the possibility of one transforming into the other. Taoists believe that walking the border between order and chaos is “the divine Way,” and Peterson believes this way is better than happiness.
Peterson uses the yin-yang symbol as an especially clear example of the interplay between order and chaos, with one always potentially turning into the other. From Taoist teaching, Peterson adapts the idea of traversing the border between order and chaos—a idea that will form the basis of his idea of a meaningful life.
Themes
Peterson and the literary agent discussed the idea of him writing a more broadly accessible version of Maps of Meaning. The agent suggested a guide to what a person needs “to live well.” She felt that Peterson’s Quora list could be adapted for this project, so he began developing a book proposal around that list. It turned out that he had much more to say about each rule than he’d expected.
Peterson returns to the short history of his book he began discussing earlier. His Quora list, targeted to a popular audience, ended up coalescing with the more academic presentation he’d spent years developing for the book Maps of Meaning.
Themes
This was partly because, in the course of writing his first book, Peterson studied a great deal of history, mythology, psychology, and literature (the Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Faust, and Dante’s Inferno), among other subjects. He’d done all this in an effort to understand the nuclear standoff during the Cold War: why were people willing to risk the world’s destruction in order to protect their belief systems? He realized that belief systems allow people to understand one another, and that those systems are about more than just belief.
Peterson’s earlier research for Maps of Meaning gave him lots of material to work with in expanding on his 12 rules. The research drew on a wide variety of world literature and other sources of meaning about human life. But he applied this older, often ancient material to a very modern question. The Cold War was an ideological and nuclear standoff between broadly capitalist (U.S. and western) and communist (Soviet) worldviews. The conflict would have been the backdrop for Peterson’s youth, so in context, it makes sense that he would have been preoccupied by its ethical implications.
Themes
When people know what to expect from one another, they can live together peacefully. A shared belief system “simplifies” people in their own and others’ eyes, allowing them to work together to “tame the world.” This simplification is crucial. Peterson says it isn’t so much that people will fight for what they believe. Rather, it’s that they will fight “to maintain the match between what they believe, what they expect, and what they desire”—between expectations and actions. When expectations are violated—like when someone’s lover betrays them, for instance—a person experiences chaos and terror, which sometimes leads to open conflict. It’s no wonder people fight to avoid that.
Peterson explains what he came to understand about the Cold War. He concluded that beliefs function on more than a surface level—they shape human interaction profoundly. They provide stability, which allows people to “tame the world”—or, to transform chaos into order. When chaos erupts into order, it’s deeply destabilizing for people and communities. In Peterson’s view, this is why people fight so hard to maintain order—even to the point of standoffs that otherwise make little sense. People will simply go to great lengths to avoid the pain of chaos.
Themes
Peterson says that a shared cultural system is also stabilizing in that it helps people prioritize things. Without the ability to prioritize this way, people can’t act—they can’t even set goals. And without the ability to progress toward something, people’s lives lack positive value. They lack anything “to set against the suffering that is intrinsic to Being.” Without positive value in life, the pain of existence becomes overwhelming, leading to hopelessness and despair.
Cultural systems aren’t simply neutral things, in Peterson’s view. Rather, they help organize people’s lives by giving them something to strive for—ideally, something to counteract life’s unavoidable suffering. In a footnote, Peterson cites his reliance on 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who conceived of the idea of “Being” as, in Peterson’s summary, “the totality of human experience.”
Themes
Of course, different value systems conflict. Thus, on one hand, there’s the problem of a chaotic life lacking shared beliefs; on the other hand, there’s the problem of inevitable conflict between groups with different beliefs. Peterson notes that in the West, identification with group-centered beliefs (like traditions, religions, and nations) has been declining, in part for fear of conflict between groups. But the alternative is meaninglessness.
Though Peterson holds that people need values to organize their lives around, there’s the obvious problem that not everyone holds the same values. Perhaps because of the previous century’s history of violent conflicts, people in the West often tend to shy from identifying too strongly with value-centered groups. Peterson suggests that conflict is worth the risk, though, since the alternative is aimless, undirected lives.
Themes
As he wrote Maps of Meaning, Peterson also realized that we can’t afford conflict—at least not on the horrifying scale seen throughout the 20th century. But he also believed we couldn’t abandon our value systems. While wrestling with this problem, he dreamed of being suspended beneath the dome of a great cathedral. Peterson pays attention to dreams because they shed light on areas that reason can’t yet reach. Because of his study of Christianity, he knew that cathedrals are cross-shaped. He understood that the cross is viewed simultaneously as a sign of the greatest suffering, of transformation, and of the world’s symbolic center. In his dream, Peterson didn’t want to be there. He somehow got down and returned to his bedroom. But, nightmarishly, he kept being blown back toward the cathedral.
Since the 20th century’s violent, often ideologically motivated conflicts prompted Peterson’s inquiry into the meaning of life in the first place, he’s sensitive to the dangers of competing value systems. His experience with this dream suggests that there are other ways to access truth than strictly through rational thought. As a student of symbolism, Peterson sees the cross standing for both suffering and the transformation of suffering—but the dream’s nightmarish aspect reflects the fact that this intersection isn’t a comfortable place to be.
Themes
It took Peterson months to understand this dream. He believes the dream placed him at the center of “Being” itself, and he couldn’t escape. As he reflected on this, he realized more completely that the “great stories” constantly place the individual at the center. The center is marked by the cross, which symbolizes suffering and transformation that must be voluntarily accepted. From this, Peterson learned that it’s possible to avoid both “slavish adherence to the group” and nihilism—to find “sufficient meaning in individual consciousness and experience.”
Peterson’s interpretation of the dream suggests that, somehow, suffering—and the possibility that suffering can be transformed—is indeed at the heart of Being, or reality. By “great stories,” Peterson refers to the myths, religious writings, and other classical literature he has studied over the years. While these differ widely across times and cultures, Peterson thinks they share an emphasis on the individual—an emphasis that avoids the individual getting swallowed up in either group conformity or in nihilism (the attitude that nothing has meaning).
Themes
Peterson had come to believe that the answer to the dilemma between social conflict and social dissolution was “the elevation and development of the individual, and […] the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path.” Each person must assume as much of that responsibility as they can by telling the truth, fixing what’s broken, and doing whatever is possible to reduce suffering in the world. While this is asking a lot, it’s far better than authoritarianism, chaos, and lack of purpose. And Peterson knows he doesn’t have all the answers about Being—he’s just offering the best he has.
Peterson argues that by emphasizing the improvement of the individual, he can find balance between conflicting group values and social breakdown. In a sense, he’s suggesting that there’s no foolproof way to avoid social problems on either end of the spectrum. Instead, they can only be meaningfully addressed on the level of the individual. If everyone does their part by facing up to the hardships of Being, then that effort will benefit humanity as a whole, too.
Themes
Each of the 12 rules in this book offers a guide to living on the dividing line between order and chaos. On that line, people find the meaning behind life and suffering. If we learn how to live properly, then we might be able to bear fragility and mortality without turning resentful or seeking shelter in totalitarianism. He believes that if individuals live properly, humanity will collectively flourish.
Peterson sums up the Overture section by returning to the concepts of order and chaos. Traveling the boundary between order and chaos, he suggests, is how to find meaning in life without either surrendering one’s individuality or coming to resent the world because of suffering. Finding meaning in life, in turn, helps one face the challenges of life with greater strength and a greater capacity to help others.
Themes
