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
When humans look at the world, we only perceive enough to allow us to get by. We live within the boundaries of this “enough.” We unconsciously simplify the world in order to survive, and we mistake that simplified version for the world itself. But when we look at things, we don’t actually see objects, but their “functional utility.” That’s why it’s so important for us to be “precise in our aim.” If we don’t do that, we’ll be overwhelmed by the world’s complexity.
Earlier in the book, when discussing Rule 4 (“Compare yourself to who you were yesterday…”), Peterson touched on the human necessity of staying narrowly focused, lest the world get too overwhelming. We look at things in terms of their value to us, he believes, and —most of the time—this works well.
Themes
Our illusion that we perceive the world sufficiently only works as long as life goes according to plan. When things are going okay, we see accurately enough, and it’s not worth it to examine things in greater detail. For instance, to be a good driver, you don’t have to understand a car’s inner mechanisms. But if the car quits working, the resulting uncertainty becomes a source of anxiety. When any kind of crisis occurs, that’s when we realize “the staggeringly low-resolution quality of our vision.”
Peterson continues to expand on the idea that most of the time, an illusory, limited view of the world works well enough. It’s not worth the effort to understand the inner workings of things most of the time, unless something goes wrong. But when that happens, we’re often shocked to recognize how little we really know and understand.
Themes
When life breaks down, you suddenly become aware of what you’ve safely ignored before. Chaos rushes in, and you realize what precise aim normally protects you from. For example, when there’s been spousal infidelity, even the past is no longer what you once assumed it to be. When our vision proves insufficient, where can we look?
When life suddenly becomes chaotic, Peterson believes, your vision necessarily widens, and this throws a lot of uncertainty into life. In the example of spousal infidelity, for example, memories you took for granted might suddenly look different, throwing much into doubt.
Themes
When the world falls apart, we see chaos, like the biblical abyss out of which God originally created everything. It’s “emergency,” the sudden manifestation of something unknown. Our bodies react faster than our minds do, thanks to instincts honed over millions of years. First, you freeze, and then your body floods with adrenaline, and you draw on physical and mental resources that—if you’re lucky—you’ve been saving up for just such an emergency. Before the known and familiar can reappear, you have to piece together the chaos.
In the Bible, Genesis describes the earth as “without form and void,” or shapeless and empty, which is what life feels like when we’re thrust into chaos. Peterson’s discussion of the physical reaction to an emergency echoes his discussion of lobsters all the way back in Rule 1: humans who are secure in life are able to store up the bodily and mental resources to weather emergencies. If someone isn’t lucky enough to do that, then they’re likely to be plunged deeper into chaos instead of reasserting order.
Themes
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Peterson says that, often, chaos wants to be noticed. It happens, for instance, when resentments pile up over a long time, but they’re ignored, because talking about them would bring up painful emotions. And from moment to moment, that’s easier, but meanwhile, the “dragon” keeps on getting bigger in the background. But one day, it shows up in a form that nobody can ignore and shakes the foundations of your life. Peterson says we should never “underestimate the destructive power of sins of omission.” In reality, there are many things, especially in a marriage, that are worth short periods of miserable conflict for the sake of truth in the long run.
Peterson portrays chaos as a sentient force, like a dragon, that is trying to gain our attention. It’s easier to keep pushing potentially chaotic elements into the background with the excuse that we’ll deal with them later—but like he has argued many times throughout the book, Peterson suggests that long-term peace is threatened when we don’t deal with problems as we go. This is what he means by “sins of omission”—things we push out of sight that ultimately come back to bite us later.
Themes
Peterson says that all a couple has to do to ensure that their marriage fails is “nothing”—just passively avoid confronting chaos. People avoid conflict because they don’t want to face the “monster” lurking beneath it. It’s more comfortable to refuse to think about things. But that doesn’t mean they go away. You’re just trading knowledge of your specific flaws for a longer, unspecific list of your potential flaws. But this isn’t worth it, because when you know reality, you can master reality. Of course, facing reality might mean getting hurt—but that doesn’t mean it’ll be fatal.
Peterson explains that passivity is lethal to relationships, especially marriages. It’s natural to not want to know about our problems—but vagueness, while maybe more comfortable in the short term, is much more dangerous than specific knowledge of our problems. In other words, you can’t fix what you refuse to know about.
Themes
Specifying what a problem is makes the problem solvable. But to specify a problem, you have to admit that it exists. It opens you up to pain, but you’ll learn from the pain, instead of drifting through life with a vague sense of failure. People also refuse to specify because if they don’t define success, they won’t have to define failure, either, and face the pain of it. But that doesn’t work, because you’ll still feel disappointed in Being. Sorting through the mess of the past, present, and future might nearly kill you, but it’s necessary if you hope for rebirth. You have to “separate the particular details of […] specific catastrophe from the intolerable general condition of Being.” After all, everything didn’t fall apart—specific beliefs and actions failed. How can these be fixed? Unless you look at them specifically, you’ll never figure it out.
Here, Peterson further breaks down the problem of lack of specificity. Problems are obviously painful to deal with, so people avoid them. But avoiding your problems does nothing to make you happier. Short-term pain for the sake of improving Being in the long run, in Peterson’s opinion, is far preferable to the vague, uneasy comfort of postponing conflict indefinitely. When you postpone conflict, it’s also easier to fall back on an unspecified excuse like “everything fell apart”—but this keeps you from diagnosing the specific things that actually failed. And if you don’t identify those, there’s no hope of fixing them.
Themes
When things do fall apart, it’s possible to reestablish order through our speech, if we speak precisely. Once you’ve sorted things into their proper places, you can set a new goal and figure out how to get there. If you don’t, the fog never lifts.
Peterson returns to the idea of precise speech here. Speaking precisely is about sifting through your problems so you can identify them and figure out how to go about solving them—reestablishing order, in other words.
Themes
Both the soul and the world are organized through communication. Even when things collapse, the possibility of new order exists, but “courageous clarity of thought […] is necessary to call it forth.” You do this by admitting the problem as early as possible. It’s only by sorting through the chaos that we and the world can be transformed. Precision is powerful because it separates what’s actually happened from what might happen. For example, if you hear something in the forest but can’t see it, it might be a tiger. But if you turn and look, you might discover it’s only a squirrel. As long as you refuse to look, it might as well be a dragon. Actual fears can be faced, even when they’re terrible, but fears in the imagination can’t.
Sorting order out of chaos is difficult work that demands courage. Here, again, Peterson points out that the earlier you face a problem, rather than postponing it, the easier it is to transform chaos into order. Precision is a powerful tool in this process, because it distinguishes the scary “tiger” from the harmless “squirrel.” The longer you keep your fears nonspecific, though, the scarier they have the chance to become.
Themes
If you avoid the responsibility of confronting chaos, even small doses of chaos, then reality will become more and more chaotic. Therefore, Peterson says, it’s important to search for the correct words about yourself. When you speak clearly about present realities, the future can be better. If you don’t, you rob yourself of your future. But if you choose to identify things carefully, you can make those things “viable, obedient objects”—you simplify them, making them useful things that you can live with. If you don’t do this, then everything remains vague and undistinguished, and your world will remain unmanageably complex.
Again, precision is powerful because it makes chaos manageable, more fixable, and therefore less scary. By postponing this, you only make the future scarier and more chaotic. Therefore taming chaos is one of the best things you can do, not just for the present, but for the sake of a happier, more effective future.
Themes
Peterson says that one reason couples stop communicating is because they don’t define the topic of a conversation. Thus conversations become about everything, and that’s just too much. Every argument becomes about everything that’s ever been wrong between them or might be wrong in the future. But if you can identify precisely what you’re unhappy about and what you want—using precise speech to do so—the chaos can resolve into order.
Turning to a very practical application of this rule, Peterson points out that precision is especially vital for communication between couples, as a single argument potentially spirals out of control when issues aren’t carefully defined. But by speaking precisely, there’s hope of taming chaos and finding order, even if it’s painful.
Themes
