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
Most people don’t think about lobsters very often, but Peterson thinks they’re well worth considering. Because of lobsters’ relatively simple nervous systems, scientists understand their brains and behavior very well, and this knowledge can help scientists understand the behavior of more complex animals, too—like human beings.
As Peterson begins to explain his 12 rules, he starts with a surprising illustration—lobsters. This is a good example of how Peterson applies his interest in evolutionary psychology, extrapolating lobsters’ primitive biology and behavior to much more advanced humans. Sometimes readers have to take Peterson at his word that he’s going somewhere relevant!
Themes
Like lobsters, wrens are very territorial creatures. As a child, Peterson once recorded a backyard wren’s song and played the song back, getting repeatedly dive-bombed by the tiny bird as a result. Birds that occupy prime territory lead a less stressed existence overall and are less likely to die if an avian disease sweeps through. Securing territory is a big deal, then, and often leads to conflict.
With wrens, Peterson gives an example that’s probably a bit more accessible to most readers than lobsters. His point is that creatures of all kinds, whether lobsters or tiny backyard birds, have good reason to be territorial—securing prime territory has huge benefits for a creature’s long-term thriving and survival, and that’s why they’re so defensive about it.
Themes
Animals who must share territory with other animals have learned tricks to establish dominance while minimizing damage to themselves. Lobsters are the same way. When lobsters encounter each other on the ocean floor while they’re exploring unknown territory, they start to dance around, mirroring each other, and waving their claws. They also shoot streams of chemicals at one another that reveal information about themselves, like health and mood. Sometimes that’s enough to get the weaker lobster to back down. If not, the two lobsters will repeatedly advance at each other and retreat until one of them backs down. If that doesn’t work, the two lobsters actually start to grapple, until one of them is flipped over. If neither lobster wins, then they advance to the riskiest and potentially fatal level of combat: rushing at each other and trying to tear off a leg, antenna, or other body part. This usually solves the conflict.
Here, Peterson describes lobsters’ struggle for dominance in detail, as each level of conflict escalates to the next, deadlier level. The point of this passage is basically to show that lobster fights—and, implicitly, struggles for dominance more generally—are serious business. As he'll soon explain, becoming the victorious, dominant lobster versus the defeated lobster can have life or death consequences and directly shape the way each lobster lives the rest of its life. Readers are meant to keep this in mind later, when Peterson talks about human society.
Themes
The loser of a lobster conflict has different brain chemistry from a victor. A winning lobster has high levels of the chemical serotonin and low levels of the chemical octopamine. This is reflected in the lobster’s strutting posture: serotonin causes the lobster to extend its arms and legs to look more dangerous.
Peterson explains that winning and losing lobsters actually have differing brain chemistry that reflects their respective status in the lobster world. Their brain chemicals govern their behavior after the fight: a winning lobster continues to act like a winning lobster as it struts about threateningly.
Themes
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The opposite chemical ratio—high octopamine and low serotonin—marks the losing lobster, which droops and skulks. These chemicals also regulate a lobster’s tail-flick reflex, causing a defeated lobster to retreat backwards more readily. This is sort of like a heightened startle reflex in someone who’s suffering from PTSD.
In contrast to the winners, losing lobsters behave in a submissive manner. Octopamine is associated with what’s known as the “fight-or-flight” reflex, so it makes sense that high levels of the hormone cause wary lobsters to scuttle backwards more readily. The comparison to someone who’s suffering from the effects of a past traumatic event is a good illustration of how insights from the biology of even primitive animals can find parallels in human psychology.
Themes
A defeated lobster is more likely to lose the next time it attempts to fight, whereas a winning lobster is more likely to win again. This “principle of unequal distribution” applies in the human world, too—it’s reflected in wealth distribution, and in the tiny number of people who publish or produce most prolifically. This principle is also known as Price’s law, and it applies to every society that has been studied. To return to lobster society, this principle helps create a stable hierarchy, with dominant lobsters at the top and weak ones at the bottom.
The way lobsters react to a past fight affects how they relate to other lobsters in the future. It’s not hard to guess how Peterson might be setting up an argument about human behavior. For now, he simply points out that what happens in lobster society happens in human societies, too, with just a small number of people dominating in most areas. He implies that an upside of this structure, while it excludes most people from the top, is that it promotes social stability.
Themes
Female lobsters are attracted to the dominant male lobster (something that holds true for other species, too). Female lobsters linger around the dominant male’s territory until they successfully charm the male into mating with them. Pretty soon, the male will have fertilized multiple female lobsters. This is another reason, besides territory, that it’s great to be the dominant male lobster. Peterson says that because the lobster has been around for hundreds of millions of years, we can see that dominance hierarchies have been a more or less permanent feature of the natural world.
In highlighting the reproductive advantages for dominant male lobsters, Peterson is being slightly humorous. But his bigger point with the entire lobster illustration is that social hierarchies are nothing new. By establishing parallels between lobster society and human society, therefore, he suggests that hierarchies in human society aren’t inherently bad, either—at least, they’re not unnatural.
Themes
Peterson notes that biology is conservative—while new elements get added, the basic features stay the same for a very long time. While natural selection is usually cited to account for this, that concept raises certain questions—like what, exactly, is “nature,” anyway? People refer to nature and the environment as if they’re static, but they’re actually dynamic. This brings Peterson back to his point that nature itself is both static and transformative all the time—that chaos and order are simultaneous.
Natural selection is part of Charles Darwin’s concept, part of his larger evolutionary theory, which says that nature selects for those traits that allow a species to dominate its rivals. This is why certain biological features, like dominance hierarchies, seem to be pretty set in stone. However, Peterson points out that nature is actually changing all the time, even if we’re not aware of it—it, too, is characterized by order and chaos.
Themes
Peterson says that people tend to think of evolution as “a never-ending series of linear improvements,” of progress in a fixed direction toward a destination. But nature is more like a musical score, so the environment—and what it “selects” for—varies all the time. Thus, natural selection is more like an ongoing dance than a process by which things come to match a template ever more closely. Nature, too, is really different things, nested within one another, that change at varying rates—chaos nested within order.
Peterson expands on the idea that nature is filled with examples of order and chaos, if one only knows where to look. It’s a variable process, not a smoothly mechanized one. This suggests that human life, too, isn’t a “series of linear improvements,” but more akin to an ever-changing “symphony.”
Themes
It’s also a mistake to think of nature as somehow distinct from culture. Things like dominance hierarchies, though they’re often dismissed as particular cultural expressions (like the military-industrial complex, or patriarchy, for example), have been around for much longer than human beings: “There is little more natural than culture.” That’s why a defeated person behaves much like a lobster who’s lost a fight. The neurochemistry is similar, too—low serotonin levels mean less confidence and a more stressful existence.
Peterson suggests that another mistake people make is to assume that there’s an easily identified dividing line between the natural world and what we call “culture.” Peterson isn’t necessarily saying that specific cultural expressions of dominance hierarchies are desirable, but that the impulse to form hierarchies is deeply embedded in who humans are and how they live (culture), so their recurrence shouldn’t be surprising.
Themes
Within each of us, Peterson says, there’s a “primordial calculator” that knows our exact societal position. This specialized part of our brain constantly assesses how we’re treated by others and assigns us a status based on that. If your status is low, your brain makes less serotonin available, which makes you more reactive to your circumstances—more stressed. Stress—the constant state of emergency preparedness—uses up a lot of energy and resources and wears a person down both psychologically and physically.
Peterson explains how this whole discussion of lobster neurochemistry applies more specifically to human life. Like lobsters, humans are keenly aware of where they stand in society. Like defeated lobsters, low-status humans’ brain chemistry is impacted by their status, which in turn puts them in a constant state of anxious alertness that makes life harder in the long run.
Themes
A person who feels secure, on the other hand, has the luxury of assuming they’re safe and supported, meaning that change doesn’t feel like a potential threat all the time. Such a person has plenty of serotonin, so they feel calm instead of constantly on alert, and they can plan for the future because they aren’t scrambling for resources. They’re even able to be a more engaged citizen.
It's very different when someone has enough serotonin available. Like a lobster that knows it’s not going to be threatened by rivals, a high-status human can relax, enjoy life, and look forward to the future. A person in this position can even benefit those around them more than someone who’s simply scrambling to survive.
Themes
The “counter” can malfunction, though, from poor eating and sleeping habits, or if routines get thrown off. When predictable habits go missing, the body’s delicately interrelated systems can get thrown off. This is why Peterson always first asks his patients about the consistency of their wakeup time, since circadian rhythms are closely tied to well-being, and encourages them to eat breakfast. Consistency in these habits alone can go a long way toward reducing anxiety. Positive feedback loops (like drinking to overcome a hangover, which might lead to alcoholism) or trauma (like being bullied in childhood) can cause the status counter to malfunction, too.
Even high-status people aren’t guaranteed smooth sailing in life, though, because our brains are obviously impacted by daily physical habits or even by past traumatic events. Even the perception of low status, triggered by things like this, can have similar effects to an accurately calibrated “status counter.”
Themes
Sometimes people get bullied because they can’t stand up for themselves, but sometimes, they simply won’t. Peterson says that, for example, naïve people who believe that people are basically good and reject all use of force will often put up with abuse for far too long. Sometimes such people find it shocking to become aware of their own capacity for anger and even monstrous behavior (like with new soldiers experiencing PTSD). It’s only when people come to terms with their own dangerous capacities that they become capable of resisting these capacities in themselves and others.
Peterson is basically talking about helplessness here. Being an innocent, nonconfrontational person might seem good in a lot of ways, but Peterson suggests that overly trusting, submissive behavior actually enables other people’s bad behavior. Peterson suggests a rather surprising thing to counteract it—realizing one’s own capacity to inflict harm, even if it's only theoretical. Basically, it’s difficult to resist evil if you don’t have at least a theoretical understanding of it and the reality that, on some level, most human beings can inflict it, or at least are tempted to.
Themes
Even if a person is “a loser,” that doesn’t mean they have to slump around in a posture signaling low status for the rest of their life. If a person acts like a defeated lobster, they’ll be treated that way, and they won’t produce enough serotonin, with all the negative outcomes an anxious, stressed life can bring. Peterson points out that positive feedback loops don’t have to cause a person’s life to spiral into chaos. Instead, things like positive body language can impact the way a person feels and is regarded by others.
If a person starts acting like a defeated lobster, it can be very easy to keep behaving that way, producing a positive feedback loop (basically, a positive feedback loop is when the results of an action cause the original action to happen more). But a positive feedback loop doesn’t have to be bad: instead, small changes can produce positive results that reinforce the changes.
Themes
Peterson acknowledges that standing up straight with your shoulders back isn’t enough to transform the circumstances of life at the bottom. But it’s also not simply a physical gesture, because people aren’t just bodies. Standing up straight also “demands standing up metaphysically” and “accepting the burden of Being.” When a person chooses to meet life’s demands, the nervous system reacts differently—“you respond to a challenge, instead of bracing for a catastrophe.”
Throughout this chapter, Peterson has emphasized the close interrelationship between bodies and minds. That’s especially true here, when he recommends adopting a confident physical posture. Choosing to stand confidently can change the way you think about the inevitable burdens of life. And when your nervous system reacts accordingly (like a strutting, victorious lobster instead of a droopy, defeated one), you’re encouraged to maintain such posture—a positive feedback loop.
Themes
Standing up straight with your shoulders back means taking on the responsibility of transforming chaos into order. This is why it’s important to maintain good posture. The more you do this, the more people will take you seriously. This helps you be less anxious, a better communicator, and better equipped to embrace and improve Being—even strengthening those around you when you and they are tempted to despair. In this way, it’s possible to find joy even while carrying the “terrible burden of the World.”
Peterson ties Rule 1 back to his discussion of order and chaos. It’s foundational in that it illustrates the attitude that a person should take toward life in general—one of bearing responsibility instead of shrinking from it. This attitude helps you bear difficult things in a way that benefits others as well as yourself, as you help turn chaos into order. Such a task might not always be fun, but it does, according to Peterson, help a person find meaning.
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