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
Peterson says that when more people lived in small towns, it used to be easier for individuals to stand out. But now that more people live in cities and are digitally connected to so many others, it’s much rarer to stand out. What’s more, we all have a critical internal voice that knows just how pathetic we are compared to our friends and doesn’t shut up about it. Of course, high standards are important, sometimes having life-or-death consequences. And it’s true that only a very small number of people achieve great things.
Peterson opens this chapter by suggesting that today, it’s especially easy to feel down on oneself. In effect, the world has gotten much bigger, so it’s much easier for even talented individuals to feel lost in the shuffle. Things like social media make it easier to compare ourselves to others and feel lacking. High achievement is worth celebrating precisely because it's so rare.
Themes
But Peterson offers a different solution than deluding oneself about one’s potential. Maybe the internal critic’s chatter, even if it has an element of truth to it, just isn’t that important. Maybe it’s okay to stop listening to it. If it’s true that there will always be people better than you, then a wise response isn’t to decide that nothing matters and give up, but to realize that it’s always possible to choose a framing within which nothing matters and to choose a better framing instead.
Many people respond to this landscape either by convincing themselves they’re better than they are, or else by harshly criticizing themselves. The latter, especially, can lead to apathy. But Peterson suggests it’s better—and more realistic—to accept that even though we probably won’t be the best at something, we should adjust our perspective instead of giving up.
Themes
Peterson says a good start is thinking about what “success” or “failure” mean. It sounds like there’s no middle ground between these two things. Actually, though, there are many degrees of success or failure. And there are many different things at which to succeed or fail. If one thing doesn’t work, you can always try something different. And everyone has multiple things going on in their lives, from family life to work to hobbies. If you’re middling or bad at some things, you’re probably good at others. And if you’re winning at everything, it might mean you’re not trying anything very challenging.
Peterson suggests that success and failure aren’t a zero-sum game, even though that’s how people customarily think of it. It's actually rare to attain either perfect success or complete failure. Furthermore, people’s lives are multi-faceted. Nobody is good at everything—and, Peterson suggests, if someone thinks they’re good at everything, it probably means they just haven’t pushed themselves enough yet. Success and failure are always relative to some degree.
Themes
Finally, each person’s individual circumstances are so unique that it doesn’t make sense to compare oneself to others. We tend to place too much value on what we don’t have and too little on what we do have. And we don’t always know the full stories of people we admire.
Even though it’s a very human instinct to compare ourselves to others, it’s good to recognize that when we do this, we’re always working with incomplete information. We make assumptions about what we can see, but there’s much that we don’t see. We also tend to have a mindset that “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,” instead of appreciating what’s good about our own circumstances.
Themes
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The internal critic picks an arbitrary point of comparison, as if it’s the only thing relevant. Then it contrasts you with someone who truly stands out in that area. It can also undermine your motivation by fixating on this comparison as evidence for life’s injustice. Early in life, it makes sense to rely on comparison, since we haven’t yet developed our own standards. But as we get older, our lives become more individual and unique. Before you can express your own standards, you have to develop a mature understanding of who you are and what you value. While there is an element here of obligation and what one “should” do, it’s also important to understand what you really want. Otherwise, you make yourself and others into tyrants.
Peterson points out that our inner critics are quite biased and have a very narrow perspective on reality. They tend to focus on what’s weakest about us and most exceptional about others. If we’re not careful, this can lead to resentment and bitterness. Furthermore, Peterson suggests that comparison does have its uses, especially while we’re figuring out who we are and what we value. Others’ standards give us something to build off of. But if we follow those standards too closely without establishing our own, we’re effectively making others into tyrants over us. Peterson will return later to this idea of tyranny on both an individual and societal level.
Themes
Peterson says you should instead “dare […] to be dangerous” and honest with yourself about what you want. It’s especially important to watch for resentment, arrogance, or deceit, which Peterson says are responsible for much of the harm in the world. In the case of resentment, a person either has to summon the maturity to get over it or to speak up against genuine tyranny.
In a way, letting others’ standards govern our choices can feel safer than asserting what we really want. But Peterson suggests that the “safe” alternative is more dangerous, because of the damaging ways human beings sometimes react to life under tyranny—resentment being a major one.
Themes
As you grow up, to an extent you have to differentiate yourself from your parents and learn how to blend in with everyone else. Once you’ve done that, you then have to learn how to be “just the right amount different from everyone else.” By this time, your life is a unique web of interwoven circumstances. For that reason, you should be careful when comparing yourself to anyone else.
Growing up is difficult for everyone regardless of their circumstances—it’s a delicate balance between conforming to parental and social expectations while also figuring out your own uniqueness. Because this looks so different for each individual, Peterson suggests that it’s silly to compare yourself too much to anyone else.
Themes
Because of humanity’s hunting-and-gathering background, we are always aiming at things. We’re always both at point “a” and moving toward point “b” (which we believe will be better than point “a”). We’re always looking for ways to improve our situation. We even envision hypothetical worlds where present problems can be solved. While this is a positive tendency, it can also mean instability and discomfort—you might face disappointment and discontentment with life.
Peterson introduces the idea of “aiming at things” that will recur throughout the book. In short, because of their evolutionary history (which required hunting and gathering for survival), people are continually pursuing new goals. This process, too, is a delicate balance between establishing a stable situation and moving toward a hypothetically better one. Readers should recognize the pattern of order and chaos here—the balance between the stable and familiar (order) and the changing and unknown (chaos).
Themes
Peterson suggests that the first step is to take stock of your life. While your internal critic might be good at this, listening to it can be demoralizing. Peterson suggests that you negotiate with yourself as if you are someone who is difficult to get along with. Instead of denigrating yourself, be humble and focus on your desire to reduce unnecessary suffering in your life. Sometimes you can negotiate with yourself by promising yourself something nice as a reward (and really following through on that reward). It’s best to focus on small decisions and actions that, by your own standards, will set you up for a better day tomorrow: “compare your specific personal tomorrow with your specific personal yesterday.” Start small, and your baseline of comparison will gradually get higher. After a few years of this, you’ll aim higher, and “what you aim at determines what you see.”
While figuring out what to aim at sounds like a daunting prospect, Peterson suggests that it can be broken down into manageable steps. Assessing one’s life can be especially dangerous ground for a self-critical person, but it can be more effective to focus step by step on making life a little better for oneself—even rewarding yourself for small successes. As you identify small, gradual improvements you can make in your own life, you’ll focus less on fruitless comparisons with others. This can lead to slow, steady improvements in your life, and as you practice “aiming” at such goals, your overall outlook will become clearer, and you’ll focus less on other people.
Themes
Peterson points out that “vision is expensive”—human eyes triage all the time. Everything else fades into the background. This is how we deal with the world’s complexity in general: we focus on our own narrow concerns and the things that move us toward our goals while ignoring the rest. The price of this specificity is that we’re “blind” to most of the world. That’s okay when things are going well, but when we’re in crisis, and nothing is turning out as we wish, the world we’ve ignored can be overwhelming. The upside is that the world includes a lot of possibility.
It makes sense that, most of the time, people’s vision is pretty narrowly focused. Otherwise, life is so complicated that it would become difficult to survive. But Peterson suggests that when life falls apart, the things we’ve necessarily filtered out for survival’s sake come rushing back into our field of vision and threaten to overwhelm us. But recall that such “chaos” isn’t just a threat, but a possibility for positive change.
Themes
Sometimes, what we need is right in front of us, but because we’re so narrowly focused, we miss it. This leads to a difficult price that has to be paid before we get what we want. We each have deep-seated, habitual ways of looking at the world that have served us well, but sometimes, to keep moving forward, we have to let these go. At such times, you might have to come to terms with the truth that “life doesn’t have the problem. You do.” This being the case, maybe it’s your values that need to be retooled, not life itself. Maybe you’re holding onto your desires so tightly that you’re blind to what you really need—what will really make life better.
When a crisis occurs, this sometimes requires us to adjust our finely-honed vision. This can be painful, because it might require us to give up ways of looking at the world that were effective in the past but no longer serve our present circumstances. At such times, we might be tempted to blame the outside world. Peterson suggests that this is when we need to be especially thoughtful about what’s truly best for us—to look inward instead of outward.
Themes
When you’re able to realize this and accept it, you can move forward on a different trajectory. Your preconceptions were blinding you to what “better” really means for you, but once you gradually began to see what “better” could be, you could choose to want it. Choosing to retool and take stock of your life in this way means taking on a lot of responsibility. The more you aim at “better,” the more information your mind is able to gather—the more you’ll “see”—and your idea of “better” will become elevated accordingly.
When you adjust your aim at a different possibility of what could be “better,” your vision broadens, and you’re better equipped to move forward on a different path (even when this entails embracing chaos). It’s much easier to keep moving forward in familiar grooves; but this can lead to getting stuck (too much order). Peterson suggests that taking responsibility for this kind of growth is a key marker of maturity.
Themes
Because human beings have many and often conflicting desires, we have to be able to articulate and prioritize them. As we organize desires into hierarchies, they become values, and values form a moral structure. The study of morality is called ethics. Even older than ethics is religion, which isn’t just concerned with right and wrong but with good and evil themselves.
Peterson extrapolates from prioritizing among our desires to figuring out what we most value, and how those values make up our moral outlook. He sees religion as a step beyond, or behind, this ethical framework; in other words, ethics is how you behave, and religion reflects on why you should behave in some ways and not in others.
Themes
Religious adherents are concerned about behaving properly and being “a good person.” The western Enlightenment objection to religion has traditionally been that just obeying religious rules isn’t enough to be a good person. While that may be true, Peterson says we’ve forgotten that at least obedience is a start: “You cannot aim yourself at anything if you are completely undisciplined and untutored.” Eventually, if you can’t aim at anything, you’ll conclude that there’s nothing to aim for.
Broadly speaking, the Enlightenment (and much subsequent modern thought) tended to downplay religious rules as an insufficient framework for leading an ethical life. Peterson counters this perspective by suggesting that rules provide a useful framework for people’s lives, and a basis from which they can begin to aim at other worthwhile goals.
Themes
For this reason, Peterson concludes that it’s necessary for religions to have a “dogmatic” structure—at least as a starting point. If you’ve learned through obedience to be a disciplined person, you’re at least “a well-forged tool.” When there’s vision in addition to obedience, then that “tool” can be used for a purpose. This all means that one’s religious beliefs determine what one sees—and that’s true even if someone claims to be an atheist. That’s because nobody is an atheist in their actions, and it’s a person’s actions that reveal what they most deeply believe.
Peterson’s view of religion’s value is essentially utilitarian. That is, it’s basically a means to becoming the most effective version of oneself. Obviously, plenty of religious believers would not agree with this perspective! However, most would agree with Peterson that their religious beliefs can and should determine what they see and aim at. And when Peterson says that nobody acts like an atheist, he means that nobody lives as though their existence is totally meaningless (which would basically mean not living at all).
Themes
Everything we want and everything we see has been shaped over billions of years. Human beings have been “watching themselves act” and telling stories about it for many thousands of years, in an effort to understand what we believe. Part of this knowledge is gathered into religious writings, and in the Western world, the Bible is foundational. Therefore, careful study of the Bible can tell us a lot about what we believe, how we act, and how we should act.
Peterson draws on his interest in evolutionary psychology here. He sees religious writings as an attempt to interpret human actions through storytelling. Though he's not religiously observant in a traditional sense, Peterson simply upholds the Bible as the foremost and foundational work of religious literature in the Western world—and for that reason, it’s worth reckoning with.
Themes
When people read the Old Testament today, they often say they could never believe in a God as “harsh” and “judgmental” as the God depicted there. But God has never cared much what people think about Him, then or now—and there were always serious consequences for disobeying Him. Peterson says that the Old Testament authors were “realists.” When they suffered, they figured that God must have His reasons for what He was doing. He was not to be trifled with. Peterson says that survivors of the 20th century’s horrors shouldn’t be shocked that ancient people thought God was justified in sending people to Hell.
When Peterson says that God has never cared much what people think of Him, he means that the Old Testament simply doesn’t conform to modern expectations for what God should be like. But the Old Testament’s authors had a different perspective. They suffered greatly, and attributing their suffering to God’s doing was how they made sense of it. Peterson suggests that this way of thinking isn’t really so foreign to us, or shouldn’t be—recent history is horrific in ways that challenge modern pretenses of being more enlightened.
Themes
Peterson says that the New Testament portrayal of God seems more loving and gentler, but also less believable “in a post-Auschwitz world.” Yet, while such a God seems totally implausible to someone who can’t see, someone with opened eyes can understand Him perfectly.
Peterson basically means here that after the Holocaust, people should actually be more shocked by God’s loving and gracious attributes as portrayed in the New Testament than by His seeming harshness in the Old. But someone who’s aimed at a higher goal for Being will be able to understand this portrayal.
Themes
If your aim is fixed on something petty, such as resentment, then the world itself will seem petty. On the other hand, if you decide to assume at least some responsibility for your own unhappiness, then you can start to see—to change your perspective and look for something different. And that’s not all: as you start to aim for a better life, you also want a better life for the people around you. As your aim gets higher, you are able to see and work toward better possibilities—and to see how these improvements can benefit the lives of those who live long after you.
Earlier, Peterson said that what you aim at determines what you see; here, he builds on that idea. As long as someone is stuck in resentment, they won’t take responsibility to make the world any better. But if someone chooses to aim for a better life, their outlook will gradually change to encompass bigger and broader changes. The higher people aim, the more effective they can be.
Themes
At this point, maybe you start to aim at the “Improvement of Being” more generally. In that light, maybe you rethink your reaction to the Old Testament God—even to decide that, perhaps, He isn’t altogether different from the New Testament God—“to act as if existence might be justified by its goodness.” This is what allows you to overcome petty attitudes like nihilism and resentment. Such “faith” isn’t the same thing as believing in magic. It’s not closing your eyes to evil, but believing that evil must be counterbalanced by essential goodness. Peterson says a person can only do this by refusing to make faith subservient to rationality. It doesn’t mean denying reality, but “paying attention” as you never have before.
Peterson is a little confusing here. Basically, he is saying that it’s possible that there’s enough goodness in the world to outweigh the world’s undeniable horrors. He suggests that embracing this belief is really the only way to cope with life’s suffering. And it’s not mere denial, because it doesn’t pretend that there’s no such thing as evil or ignore the necessity of using one’s reason. Rather than stubborn blindness, such a mindset requires the courage to look at the world honestly.
Themes
Peterson says that paying attention means noticing your surroundings, both physical and psychological. When you notice something that bothers you, you should ask yourself if it’s fixable, and if it’s something you’re willing to fix. If you answer “no” to these questions, then you should aim lower for now. Keep searching until you find something that is fixable today. Sometimes, this can be as little as deciding to spend a few minutes working through a stack of paperwork you’ve been neglecting, instead of tackling the whole thing at once. As you break such problems down into parts, they become less daunting. It’s also key to reward yourself for whatever you achieve.
For Peterson, “paying attention” means noticing when something is wrong, not ignoring it. But when you notice something that needs fixing, you need to be realistic about it. There’s not much point in focusing on something that you can’t or won’t change right now. It’s better to adjust your aim until you’re able to settle on a goal that’s actually feasible for you to tackle. That way, you can actually start a process of gradual, steady change instead of getting discouraged and giving up.
Themes
Establish the habit of asking yourself daily, “What could I do, that I would do, to make Life a little better?” Then, you can keep that habit for the rest of your life. Importantly, you aren’t insisting on a specific definition of “better”—you aren’t “being a totalitarian, or a utopian” to yourself.
Realism is key to this rule. Setting unrealistic goals is a sure way to backfire; modestly aiming at “better” actually helps you make sustainable changes. Perfectionism is both oppressive and ultimately unattainable.
Themes
Peterson says he thinks this is the culmination of the Western ethical canon. It’s how to transform rules (like the Ten Commandments’ “Thou Shalt Not”) into a “positive vision.” Paying attention in this way is much different from acting like a tyrant or a martyr; you’re negotiating with yourself and the world instead of trying to manipulate. It teaches you to be patient instead of getting frustrated, to figure out what you really want, and not to worry so much about other people. So, “compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.”
This rule is basically Peterson’s answer to the Enlightenment critique of religion. That is, he shares the critique that religious rules can become wooden and limiting; but, instead of rejecting them, he thinks they provide a framework for taking gradual, realistic steps to change one’s world. When you have an ethical framework like this, you don’t have to worry about other people’s standards or their progress in reaching them—you can set your own goals for improving Being and get there little by little.
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