12 Rules for Life: Rule 11 Summary & Analysis

Peterson recalls watching kids skateboarding on the steps of a University of Toronto building and admiring their bravery. The kids’ main priority wasn’t safety; it was competence, which “makes people as safe as they can truly be.” One day brackets were placed along the edges of the concrete plant boxes the kids liked to skate on. It reminds Peterson of the time Toronto hastily removed playground equipment from its elementary schools out of fears over insurability. Instead, the more daring kids started playing on the roof of the local school. If things become too “safe,” then kids start looking for ways to make play dangerous again. Though risk tolerance varies among people, in general, people like living on the edge, because chaos helps them grow.

Depth psychologists like Freud and Jung believed that everything has a shadow side, even actions that appear selfless. If you stand for something, that means you must also stand against something. Peterson cites Jung as saying that if you don’t understand why somebody did something, then look at the consequences and infer their motivation from that. It doesn’t always work, but it’s often revealing. Even if people claim to have good motives, that doesn’t mean you should take them at their word—especially if they’re out to change other people, without first focusing on changing themselves.

Peterson brings up his friend Chris, whom he mentioned earlier. Chris was plagued by guilt. Growing up, he moved around Canada a lot, and he often got into fights with Native kids. But he wouldn’t fight back. He believed the Native kids’ anger was justified, since white people had taken their land. Gradually, Chris’s guilt drove him to withdraw from the world. He hated his own masculinity, which he saw as being linked with the evils of colonization and nuclear war. Influenced by Buddhism, he came to believe that he—and others—were ethically obligated to negate their own Being.

Peterson recalls Chris drifting in and out of his life in adulthood, sometimes coming to stay, sometimes temporarily patching his life together, but always deeply troubled, bitter, and “anti-human” in his spirit. The night before Chris’s 40th birthday, he called Peterson with good news about getting some of his short stories published. The next day, he took his own life.

Peterson points out that we’re only starting to develop the tools and technologies to help us understand human life. So, it’s understandable that humans are destructive sometimes. Life is hard, and hard to understand. It’s only in recent centuries, after all, that human beings have increasingly gained wealth and education, overcome deadly diseases, and begun to live longer.

In light of these difficulties, we can understand why some people will conclude that human beings are “a failed and corrupt species”—a logic that proceeds to the point that anyone who rids the planet of this “plague” or “cancer” is a savior. Such resentment-filled people will even kill themselves to demonstrate the “purity” of their belief. In the modern world, it’s unacceptable to declare that we’d all be better off without a certain race, ethnicity, or religious group. So why is it acceptable to denounce humanity as a whole and say that we’d be better off with fewer human beings?

Peterson thinks that today, young men are especially pressured by this mindset. Their patriarchal privilege makes them suspect, and they’re beginning to fall behind girls academically. Boys also tend to be more interested in things than people, and more inclined to competition and disinclined to obedience, and the modern schooling system doesn’t accommodate this well. In addition, girls can gain status both within the terms of the girls’ hierarchy and the boys’, whereas boys can only gain status within the boys’ hierarchy. They lose status, both among boys and girls, for valuing what girls value. And even higher education, especially the humanities, is increasingly becoming a “girls’ game.” The same holds for the fields of healthcare, psychology, and education.

This actually isn’t great news for women, either. Stable, long-term relationships have become more and more elusive for women in higher education, even as statistics show it’s what most women (and fewer men) desire most. Peterson wonders who decided that high-powered careers—and the sacrifices they demand— are worth more than love and family. If it is worth it, why? While a minority of men are hyper-competitive and will be driven to succeed in such work, most people won’t, and most people aren’t made happier by lots of money, at least once they’re able to pay their bills.

Over the past 15 years, statistics suggest that once women have established themselves in high-pressure careers, such as law, they tend to drop out in their thirties. This is because women develop other interests and want room for those things in their lives.

Meanwhile, the shortage of university-educated men poses a problem for women because, across cultures, women generally seek to marry “up,” or seek a partner of greater or equal status. (Men are generally more content to marry “down.”) This, along with the loss of high-paying blue-collar jobs, means that marriage is increasingly becoming a “luxury” that only rich people can afford.

One of the reasons women tend to seek high-status partners is because, when women have children, they naturally (even biologically) desire a partner who can help support those children. They don’t want to have to look after children and an unemployed partner. When there isn’t a father present in the home at all, children are far more statistically likely to be poor, to abuse drugs and alcohol, and to be depressed or suicidal. Peterson says that the universities’ turn toward “political correctness” has only made these problems worse—at the same time that whole academic disciplines have turned increasingly hostile to men.

Peterson says that culture has always been “an oppressive structure.” That’s because culture is a “universal existential reality.” All that we inherit from the past is out of date and must be thoughtfully reshaped. At the same time, culture is also filled with gifts from our ancestors. To focus only on the oppressive aspects of culture is ungrateful. And that’s not to say that culture should never be subject to criticism.

Peterson also says it’s worth considering that any hierarchy creates winners and losers. In any given collective pursuit, some people will be better at it and some worse. And it’s the pursuit of goals that gives life so much of its meaning. The formation of hierarchies is the price. If we instead sacrificed the pursuit of goals in favor of pursuing perfect equality instead, life would lose much that makes it valuable.

Peterson says it’s also “perverse” to think of culture as having been created by men. Culture is “archetypally” male, which is what makes the idea of patriarchy plausible. But culture has always been the creation of humankind more broadly. Even if women’s contributions were negligible prior to the feminist movement in the 1960s (which Peterson doesn’t believe), then their contribution in terms of raising boys and freeing up a very small number of men to sustain and lead humanity is incalculable.

Peterson offers an alternative theory: throughout history, both men and women struggled, but women struggled more because of the additional burdens of reproduction and having less physical strength. When considering the different ways men and women were treated up until the technological revolutions of recent centuries (including the birth control pill), it’s important to keep these different experiences in mind rather than simply accepting as fact that men tyrannized women.

Peterson says we might instead look at what’s been characterized as sexist oppression as “an imperfect collective attempt by men and women […] to free each other from privation, disease and drudgery.” He names the doctor who introduced the use of ether during childbirth, the inventor of Tampax, and the inventor of the birth control pill (all of whom are men) and questions whether they should be considered part of a “constricting patriarchy.” But increasingly, Peterson says, academic disciplines regard men as inherent oppressors and fail to distinguish political activism (of a specific stripe) from education.

Peterson points out that all these academic disciplines ultimately draw from Marxist humanists like Max Horkheimer and other thinkers in the Frankfurt School whose development of critical theory in the 1930s aimed at social change instead of just intellectual understanding. More recently, French philosopher Jacques Derrida was the most prominent of the 1970s postmodernists. Derrida characterized his views as a radicalized form of Marxism. Peterson argues that while Marxist ideas tend to be attractive to utopians, when put into actual practice, they’ve yielded terrible corruption, suffering, and death, as in the killing fields of Cambodia.

It made sense that when the Soviet Union was established after World War I, people were hopeful about utopian collectivism. There was a huge gap between rich and poor, labor conditions were horrific, and the war had been traumatic. The rest of the world was often confused about the Soviets, especially because they opposed fascists. Furthermore, the Spanish Civil War distracted the world from what was happening in Russia, as the Soviets brutalized and exiled two million kulaks (wealthy peasants) and murdered tens of thousands, simply because this class of people was deemed “parasitical” and “enemies of the people.” Because the kulaks were generally among the country’s most productive farmers, mass starvation resulted, with six million dying in Ukraine. Yet, in spite of all this, communism still enjoyed respectability among some Western intellectuals (though there were exceptions like Malcolm Muggeridge, George Orwell, and of course Solzhenitsyn). 

In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn argued that the Soviet system was sustained only by tyranny and slave labor, as well as by individual and public lies. In other words, it wasn’t simply a personality cult, but an expression of communist philosophy. While intellectuals generally declined to stand up for communism after this, Peterson suggests that some simply changed tactics slightly—for example, Derrida stopped focusing so much on the repression of the poor by the rich and instead focused on the “oppression of everyone by the powerful”—basically exchanging money for power.

Derrida saw hierarchical structures as means of including some and excluding (and oppressing) others. Such structures, he claimed, are even built into language—the word “women” benefits men by excluding women, and the terms “males and females” benefit the majority by excluding a small minority of biologically androgynous people. Derrida went so far as to argue that “there is no outside-text,” which Peterson glosses as “everything is interpretation.”

Peterson deems that this is a “nihilistic and destructive” philosophy because it “puts the act of categorization itself in doubt.” It only views distinctions, even biological ones like sex differences, in terms of power. Things like science and competence-based hierarchies then become just examples of games of power, benefiting those who make them up.

Peterson notes that there’s some truth to Derrida’s account. Power does motivate people, but it’s one among many motivations. In other words, just because it plays a motivating role “does not mean that it plays the only role, or even the primary role.” It’s also true, as Peterson discussed earlier, that when we observe the world, we necessarily take some details into account and leave out others. But that doesn’t mean that everything is just interpretation. “Beware of single cause interpretations—and beware the people who purvey them.”

Not all interpretations are equally valid: some hurt others and put you at odds with society. Others simply aren’t effective. Some are built into us due to evolution, and others emerge due to a lifetime of socialization and learning. There are endless interpretations but a very limited number of viable solutions. As an example, Peterson believes that wealth inequality is a threat to society. However, there’s no obvious solution, because we haven’t figured out how to redistribute wealth without causing new problems. Western countries have tried many different approaches, and because of differences in history, population, and other areas, it’s difficult to compare results. But a utopian approach of forced redistribution is, according to Peterson, “a cure to shame the disease.”

Peterson holds that there simply isn’t evidence for many of the claims being asserted in “radical” academic disciplines. For example, in well-functioning societies, it’s competence, not power, that primarily determines status, and the main personality traits predicting success are intelligence and conscientiousness. These statistics are well-supported in studies. So, it’s not appropriate to teach “ideologically-predicated” theories about gender or hierarchy.

It’s certainly true that science can be biased or evidence skewed by powerful interests. But that’s not the same thing as saying that science is just about power. So why assert it? Peterson suggests it’s because “if only power exists, then the use of power becomes fully justifiable.” If everything is interpretation, then there’s just opinion and force. And postmodernism’s moral imperative is that “society must be altered, or bias eliminated, until all outcomes are equitable.” Since equitable outcomes are the foundation of this viewpoint, then differences between genders must be regarded as socially constructed, or else the whole view would seem too radical. It’s just “camouflaged” ideology, not logic. Peterson uses the “equal pay for equal work” argument to give examples of the difficulty of determining what constitutes “equal work.” Besides, bureaucratic racial and ability categories don’t adequately capture people’s uniqueness—no group identity does.

Yet, Peterson says, postmodern and Marxist thinkers don’t address such complexity. Instead, their systems rotate around a fixed ideological point—an unprovable point, like the idea that all gender differences are socially constructed. An argument like this is neither provable nor disprovable because, after all, it’s true that cultural pressure can bring about stark differences between people (for instance, studies of separately adopted twins have shown that differences in family income can make a huge difference in IQ points). Peterson notes this in order to suggest that we could perhaps minimize differences between boys and girls, if we were willing to exert the right kind of cultural pressure. But doing this would in no way ensure that either boys or girls were becoming freer to make their own choices.

Peterson says that one of the outcomes of a social constructionist outlook is the theory that boys should be socialized like girls. This theory is based on the assumption that aggression is learned, and that teaching boys to follow traditionally feminine standards of behavior (like sensitivity, nurturing, and cooperation) will reduce aggression. But this is all wrong, Peterson insists, because aggression is present from the beginning—“ancient biological circuits […] underlie defensive and predatory aggression,” operating in the most primitive parts of the brain. It also appears that about 5 percent of little boys are temperamentally aggressive, and that this is typically dealt with by teaching them to channel those tendencies in “virtuous” directions, like competition. Kids who don’t succeed in doing so tend to become social outcasts. But this doesn’t mean that aggression can have no positive social value.

Peterson says that many of the female patients he sees struggle because they are not aggressive enough. They are highly agreeable, do too much for others, are naïve, and are conflict-avoidant. While such self-sacrificing behavior might sound admirable (and can be), it can also be self-defeating. Such people don’t stand up for themselves enough. When this goes on for a long time, such people become resentful.

Peterson says he teaches such patients to look for the reasons behind their resentment: are they simply immaturely refusing to accept responsibility, or are they being taken advantage of by someone? If it’s the latter, then they need to prepare to confront the person at fault. While unpleasant, such conflict is the only way to get the attention (and hopefully respect) of the person you’re confronting. In a scenario like this, it’s also critical to know what you’re wanting out of the situation and be prepared to articulate that—and be specific. The key is to give them a reasonable request whose fulfillment would satisfy you, so you’re offering a feasible solution and not just voicing a problem.

“The Oedipal mother” is the epitome of the agreeable, conflict-averse, embittered person Peterson describes. She silently makes a pact to do everything for her children so that they’ll never grow up and leave her. An example is the witch in the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. A naïve and too-cooperative person might ask if the witch’s gingerbread house was too good to be true, but the desperate children fall for the kindly old woman who gives them whatever they want.

The witch is the archetypal “Terrible Mother, the dark half of the symbolically feminine.” In the late 1800s, a Swiss anthropologist named Johann Jakob Bachofen looked at human history in terms of feminine archetypes. Although he offered no historical evidence, he envisioned a primordial matriarchy that gradually gave way to a dominating patriarchy (the present stage). But Jung and his colleague Erich Neumann saw this as a psychological reality, not a historical one. In every person, consciousness (always symbolically masculine) struggles painfully toward maturity, while being constantly tempted to sink back into excessively sheltered dependence. Such is Freud’s “Oedipal […] nightmare,” which Peterson sees being embodied more and more in social policy.

The “Terrible Mother” archetype shows up in lots of places, like the chaotic, devouring dragon-deity in the ancient Mesopotamian Enuma Elish, and Maleficent in the Disney version of Sleeping Beauty (where Princess Aurora, sheltered too much from danger, remains unconscious at maturity and must be rescued by the prince, or masculine spirit). It’s not really the point whether a woman needs a man to rescue her. It is true, however, that a woman needs consciousness (symbolically masculine) to be rescued, even if that takes the form of a woman’s own “wakefulness, clarity of vision, and tough-minded independence.”

Peterson says that the relationship between the masculine and the consciousness also shows up in Disney’s The Little Mermaid. The tentacled Ursula tricks Ariel into giving up her voice, ensuring that the heroine will be trapped underwater (unconscious, immature) forever. Eventually, Prince Eric shows up and helps Ariel destroy Ursula. This illustrates how a mature woman must form a relationship with a masculine consciousness in order to confront the world.

Peterson returns to the point that men traditionally don’t put up with much dependency among themselves. This is for good reason, because a man shouldn’t be a child who needs to be looked after. Furthermore, when softness and harmlessness become too socially acceptable, then hardness and dominance become attractive. So, if men are pressured to be too feminine, they might in response become too interested in harsh, fascistic ideology. This is why men must toughen up. They do this by pushing themselves and one another, which sometimes manifests in daring, boundary-pushing behavior. That doesn’t mean that such behavior (like skateboarding) is necessarily criminal.

Healthy women want men who are tough enough for them to contend with and who offer something they can’t provide for themselves. But there often aren’t enough of such men around for strong women to find as mates. So, anything that interferes with boys growing up into men is unfriendly to women, too. The same mindset will stop little girls from growing up into women. It’s “antihuman, desirous of failure, jealous, resentful and destructive.” So, “leave children alone when they are skateboarding.”