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
The most fundamental truth is that life is suffering. God tells Adam and Eve this before barring them from the Garden of Eden. The easiest, most obvious response to this is to “do what’s expedient”—to live a life of self-gratification. After all, if life is meaningless, then it just doesn’t matter what you do.
Peterson delves into the problem of suffering more deeply in this chapter. He acknowledges first of all that when people encounter pain, the most natural response is to do whatever makes you happy in the moment. Of course, readers are already primed to expect that Peterson will reject this approach.
Themes
Or perhaps there’s an alternative. Peterson says that our ancestors have thought about this question for a long time, but to this day, we still don’t understand the answers. This is because we still understand them more or less symbolically—in myth and ritual—and can’t articulate them explicitly. Humans are a lot like pack animals, who go along with the routines and behavior patterns we’ve followed for millennia without really understanding them. Eventually, at a relatively recent point in human history, we started noticing and telling stories about the way we act; but we still don’t really understand it all.
Peterson says here that we still don’t really understand suffering, even though humanity has thought about the problem for millennia. For nearly as long as humans have experienced suffering, they’ve tried to interpret its meaning, and many of those interpretations (like myths and religious rituals) have endured to this day. But the persistence of these interpretations still doesn’t really get to the underlying meaning of it all.
Themes
One such story is the Genesis narrative of Paradise and the Fall. In the Garden of Eden, human beings were sinless, and they weren’t yet conscious. After eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, learning about death and vulnerability, and turning away from God, humans faced a laborious mortal existence. Over time, people learned that they could gain God’s favor through sacrifice, averting his wrath.
Peterson turns again to one of the stories most familiar to western readers—the opening narratives of the Old Testament’s book of Genesis. By “conscious” Peterson means that initially, human beings weren’t yet aware of suffering and mortality; he reads the “fall” of humanity as a story of how humans gained that awareness. Once they did, humans looked for ways to avoid suffering. Religious sacrifices became one method.
Themes
Peterson says that ancient religious sacrifice was a way of enacting a proposition: “that something better might be attained in the future by giving up something of value in the present.” Sacrifice is closely related to work. Like sacrifice, work is a form of delaying gratification. When human beings figured this out, they were discovering time and causality at the same time. In other words, they were realizing that “reality […] could be bargained with.” Behaving well now can bring future rewards—something that encourages people to control their impulses (collectively, to organize society) in hopes of better things tomorrow.
Peterson looks at religious practice as a psychologist, not a theologian. So he looks for evolutionary or cultural reasons why a practice, like sacrifice, might have taken hold and endured. In this view, sacrifice is basically a tradeoff that gives something up now in hopes of better things in the future. People were figuring out how to manage time and circumstances in more advantageous ways. Notably, this view of sacrifice doesn’t need God in the picture.
Themes
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So, Peterson continues, our human ancestors personified fate as a being that can be bargained with. And this worked! It was like seeing the future as a “judgmental father.” People first had to figure out what and how much to sacrifice in order to bring about the best possible future. This is reflected in the story of Cain and Abel, which comes right after the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. Unlike their parents, Cain and Abel live their whole lives having to work and sacrifice. God accepts Abel’s sacrifices, but He is displeased with Cain’s (though the Bible doesn’t say exactly why).
In Peterson’s view, once people figured out the mechanism of sacrifice, then they personified the force they were bargaining with, and that’s how the idea of God came about. He reads the Cain and Abel story in Genesis in this light—as Cain and Able trying to figure out how best to sacrifice to God in order to get the response they want from Him.
Themes
Peterson says it’s difficult to understand how two major human achievements—delayed gratification and building a stable society—emerged around the same time. However, he suggests a theory. Early on, kills produced lots of excess meat, which led to forming the idea of “saving for later.” “Saving for later” eventually led to the idea of storing and sharing excess food to benefit neighbors and build one’s reputation—the social contract. Thus, sharing isn’t simply giving up something you want, but initiating a trade. Establishing the idea of generosity, in turn, helped lay the groundwork for morality.
Peterson also looks at the idea of sacrifice and the emergence of society from an evolutionary historical perspective. He suggests that early people discovered that saving up wasn’t just personally prudent, but a way of building beneficial relationships with neighbors, which in turn led to the emergence of ethics. (Recall how Peterson views religion as sort of an overlay that explains the “why” of ethical behavior.)
Themes
Putting all this in evolutionary terms, Peterson suggests that maybe the newly discovered ideas of delay and exchange were conveyed metaphorically through myths and rituals, “as if” there were a divine figure in the sky. It was understood that if you sacrificed and shared, life would tend to go well for you—or God would be pleased with you. This was basically a way of noticing, and articulating more clearly over time, that those who delay gratification tend to be successful.
Peterson connects these emerging social behaviors to emerging religious practices. Basically, he claims, the idea of God was invented as a way of explaining why humans should behave ethically, thus helping motivate people to do so.
Themes
Over time, people noticed that sometimes life seems to demand huge sacrifices—even what human beings love most. This reflects the truism that sometimes life doesn’t go well. And sometimes life doesn’t go well because human values have gotten off kilter and need to be reexamined. To get back on track, sometimes it’s even necessary to let go of what you love most. The story of the patriarch Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his beloved son, Isaac, illustrates this.
People easily noticed that life doesn’t fit neatly into a mechanistic structure of sacrificing and therefore benefiting. Humans needed to come up with an explanation for why life seems to go terribly wrong sometimes. Peterson reads the Genesis story of Abraham being asked to sacrifice Isaac (and being reprieved at the last moment) as a way of grappling with this disturbing reality.
Themes
We also see it in Christ offering himself on the cross to God and for the world—“the archetypal story of the man who gives his all for the sake of the better.” At the same time, God sacrifices His son. Peterson says that because this is a story of both self-sacrifice and sacrifice of a child, it is “a story at the limit”—nothing can be imagined beyond it.
Unsurprisingly, Peterson also reads the story of Christ’s self-sacrifice (and God the Father willingly giving up His Son) in the same way—a story of the greatest imaginable sacrifice to fix the way the whole world has gone awry.
Themes
Everyone knows that life is filled with suffering, and that sacrifice can alleviate suffering. So, the person who wants to attain the greatest good possible will sacrifice everything—“will forego expediency”—to find it. While the example of Christ is best known, Peterson says there are others—like Socrates. When Socrates was put on trial for crimes against the state, he couldn’t stomach defending himself or running away, so he began to think about his trial differently. Accepting his fate helped him to face death with less fear and even see it as a blessing. He “rejected expediency” in favor of pursuing what’s meaningful. Peterson suggests that Socrates can teach us to live by our conscience. This allows a person to live nobly and with integrity even when threatened with suffering and death.
Having established the idea that sacrifice can counter suffering, Peterson digs deeper into the idea of giving up what seems easy or desirable in pursuit of something greater. For example, while the Greek philosopher Socrates (470–399 B.C.E.) could have sought an easier out from the trial he was facing, he rejected that path and sought deeper meaning instead (choosing to die with integrity). Socrates models what it looks like to place meaning above ease or pleasure, even when doing so means accepting suffering.
Themes
But tragedy isn’t the only reason human beings suffer; there’s also the problem of evil. Peterson returns to the Genesis narrative. He explains that once humans understood that they were vulnerable—that they could suffer pain—they also came to understand how to cause pain in other people. In the story of Cain and Abel, Cain becomes understandably bitter when God rejects his sacrifice. When God places the blame for Cain’s suffering squarely on Cain himself, Cain kills his own brother Abel—to spite God, humanity, and existence as a whole. Life on Earth gets exponentially worse from there.
Peterson acknowledges that it’s one thing to grapple with suffering, but another to confront evil that’s clearly undeserved. He looks again to the Bible to understand how humans have tried to make sense of this problem over millennia. He reads Cain’s murder of his brother Abel as an example of reacting to seemingly arbitrary suffering with bitterness or, worse, with revenge, lashing out at others to make them suffer, too.
Themes
Peterson has observed that human beings are generally tough enough to take on all sorts of tragedy, but that human evil compounds the world’s misery. Thus, life’s central problem isn’t just how to sacrifice in order to reduce suffering, but how to reduce evil—“the conscious and voluntary and vengeful source of the worst suffering.” In the Cain and Abel story, Abel couldn’t overcome evil, leaving him an incomplete hero. It took many more thousands of years for humans to solve the problem of evil.
Peterson defines evil as suffering that’s intentionally and vengefully inflicted on others. When he says that Abel couldn’t overcome evil (being murdered by his brother Cain), he means that Abel was defeated by his suffering. He implies that while this made Abel an “incomplete hero,” a complete hero was still to come who would be capable of defeating suffering.
Themes
This happens in the story of Jesus. Peterson sees Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness as a restatement of the story of Cain. Cain, in his jealous resentment, “enters the desert wilderness of his own mind.” To get what he thinks he deserves, Cain decides to use Evil instead. But Christ does things differently. He, too, journeys to Hell in the wilderness. Peterson suggests that anyone who’s lived through the 20th century can do the same. Peterson says it’s here that the idea of Christ taking on humanity’s sins as His own starts to make sense. When Christ meets Satan in the wilderness, He “determines to take personal responsibility for the full depth of human depravity.” He is willing to face the very worst of human nature and evil.
Peterson views Jesus, in the New Testament gospels, as Abel’s greater counterpart in that He was a hero capable of overcoming evil. Moreover, he sees Jesus as accomplishing what Cain, in his jealous rage, could not. When Cain suffered, he responded by inflicting suffering on someone else. But when Jesus suffered at Satan’s hands in the desert, he responded not only by resisting evil, but by taking responsibility for all evil. Reprising a point he's made before, Peterson suggests that nobody who's witnessed the past century’s atrocities should have trouble acknowledging the reality of evil.
Themes
Satan refuses to sacrifice; he is all arrogance, cruelty, and hatred, the archetype of Evil. In Christ, he encounters the archetype of Good. He tempts Christ, who is fasting, to turn stones into bread. But Christ refuses to take the expedient path, aiming at a better way of Being instead—one that would ultimately solve the problem of hunger altogether. Through the rest of the gospels, Christ Himself is a source of sustenance. Peterson sees this as a way of suggesting that those who live as Christ does will no longer hunger.
Recall that for Peterson, sacrifice means giving up something good for the sake of better in the future. He sees Satan as the opposite—selfishly demanding everything now. In contrast, Christ gives up what he could rightfully demand. Peterson doesn’t really expand on what he means by Christ Himself being the source of sustenance. In the Bible, Jesus calls Himself “the bread of life.” Peterson implies this is a metaphor for living the way Christ lived—that is, willing to sacrifice for the sake of Being instead of choosing evil.
Themes
Next, Satan tempts Christ by telling him to throw Himself off a cliff, essentially treating God as a safety net or magic trick to rescue him. Jesus responds by saying, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” In this Peterson sees Christ’s refusal to cede responsibility for His own life, or to solve the problems of mortal vulnerability for Himself alone.
It's worth noting that Peterson’s reading of Christ’s temptations by Satan doesn’t line up with the way Christians have traditionally interpreted them—he’s very much reading them in light of his own ideas about Being and personal responsibility. That is, he ultimately sees Christ as a model for what humanity can do if they try, not as a human and divine Savior accomplishing something humanity cannot do for themselves.
Themes
In the third and last temptation, Christ is offered power over all the world’s kingdoms. Peterson interprets Christ’s refusal as the belief that, to realize the Kingdom of God on Earth, a person must reject all immediate gratification and all temptation to evil.
Again, Peterson reads Christ’s resistance of Satan’s temptation in fairly human terms—as something human beings can replicate if they make the effort. For him, Christ is an example of rejecting the easy path and embracing suffering as a way of overcoming evil.
Themes
Carl Jung believed that Europeans turned to science after deciding that Christianity had failed to account for human suffering. Peterson says this doesn’t mean that Christianity was a failure—after all, it elevated and affirmed the dignity of the individual soul. To do this, Jung said, Christianity had to be deeply unworldly—to deny that earthly power is a sign of God’s favor, and hence that salvation could not be earned. Peterson sees this dignifying of the soul as a miraculous change within history, one that led to the downfall of slavery-based societies. In fact, it’s hard to emphasize just how radical this viewpoint was. It was so radical that, today, we tend to look at the desire to enslave as requiring explanation—the opposite of most of human history.
Peterson’s interpretations of Christian beliefs are heavily shaped by Carl Jung, and he makes that influence explicit here. His explanations are sometimes challenging to follow. Peterson traces Jung’s critique of Christianity: that it takes a counter-intuitive view of the world, i.e. that earthly success is not proof of God’s favor, that in fact nobody can earn God’s favor; God freely gives it. Peterson implies that this perspective fails to make sense of why people suffer. But the advantage of this perspective is that it uplifts the value of the individual, to a degree that has transformed societies over time.
Themes
Though Peterson says Christianity has its problems, it’s undeniable that the society Christianity produced was far less barbaric than its pagan predecessors. Because it was so successful in granting dignity and rights to the lowly and oppressed, however, the problems it solved tended to drop from people’s view. Then, Western consciousness began to focus instead on the problems that remained, like the problem of material suffering.
Peterson argues that though Christianity isn’t perfect (and recall that he doesn’t really identify as a Christian—he sees it more as a shaper of Western society), it had a transformative effect on societies, especially human rights—to an extent that people increasingly had the freedom to focus on other problems, like the difficulty of eradicating poverty.
Themes
Nietzsche was one of the most passionate critics of Christianity. His first main criticism was that Christianity’s sense of truth undermines itself. That is, Christianity has developed a strong sense of moral and narrative truth, but has not yet figured out how to understand this in terms of objective truth. In other words, now that post-Enlightenment Western Europe understood truth differently, Christianity’s main doctrines no longer seemed credible.
Peterson turns to another critic of Christianity. He says that Nietzsche basically argued that Christian beliefs can’t withstand post-Enlightenment views of reality. In other words, Christianity hasn’t figured out how to interpret its foundational stories in light of modern views of what is true.
Themes
Nietzsche’s second critique was more devastating, though. He rejected Christianity’s teaching that Christ’s sacrifice alone redeems humanity. In his mind, this meant that redeemed individuals no longer had a real moral obligation. He especially blamed the Apostle Paul and the later Protestant Reformers for developing this teaching. He believed it watered down the idea of imitating Christ and was basically an excuse to not do what Jesus taught. He also believed that these core teachings downgraded the significance of earthly life, inclined people to accept the status quo, and allowed believers to excuse themselves from any real moral burden. Dostoevsky develops this position in the story of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov.
Nietzsche’s bigger critique was specifically with the Christian doctrine of Christ’s atonement. He objected to the atonement because he thought it let people off the hook for their wrongdoing. Protestants especially have emphasized that human beings can’t be righteous like Christ was, which is why He had to die for human sin. Nietzsche didn’t buy this—in his eyes, it was just an excuse for keeping people weak and dependent and not trying to improve themselves. Peterson sees Dostoevsky taking a similar line is his famous novel.
Themes
Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky believed that Christian dogma served an important purpose: an individual needs to be disciplined and constrained in order to develop the ability to act freely. It’s like the way a parent disciplines a child so that the child can mature. Nietzsche believed that the Church’s dogma led to the development of a spirit of truth that ended up undermining the Church itself. But that doesn’t mean the dogmatic structure, or “unfreedom,” is unnecessary. It does mean that—at least to the Western mind—dogma is now dead. Critically, it also means that what remains to Western society is something even more dead: nihilism, “as well as an equally dangerous susceptibility to new, totalizing, utopian ideas,” such as Communism and Fascism.
Despite their critiques of traditional Christian teachings, both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky found utility in dogma as a means of training people to live well. Readers might hear an echo of Peterson’s own thought here. Ultimately, Nietzsche went so far as to teach that dogma in and of itself is neither truthful nor useful. But Peterson points out that something needs to take Christianity’s place in Western society, and nihilism, or meaninglessness, is even worse. In his opinion, people have kept trying to impose totalitarian philosophies in Christianity’s place, and as he will discuss later, these have done grave harm.
Themes
Nietzsche thought that after God’s death, people would need to invent new values. But Peterson says this is a weak spot in Nietzsche’s thinking, because people can’t just impose new values on their souls—they cannot simply order themselves to act a certain way. We have to struggle with our individual natures before we can act according to any values, because we aren’t just bare intellects. We have to figure out who we really are before we figure out who we can become.
“God’s death” refers here to the modern belief that religious values no longer work. Peterson doesn’t necessarily disagree. But he suggests that the idea of inventing new values doesn’t account for human nature. People can’t just decide to believe something, in other words.
Themes
Three centuries before Nietzsche, the French philosopher Descartes sought to take his doubt seriously. He decided that “I” (as in “I think, therefore I am”) was the one thing he could be sure about. But Peterson says that people had been thinking about “I” long before—all the way back to the ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians. Descartes just “secularized” the idea into the modern self. This concept is still difficult to define today. It’s actually easier to understand the self as the entity that brought about Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulags. But in looking for the opposite of this evil entity, even rationalists have to conclude, Peterson says, that there’s something godlike about the self. Unlike animals, the human self can form and reject ideas, and keep going when those ideas die.
Peterson demonstrates that humans have been thinking about human nature long before there was a field of modern philosophy. It’s just that Descartes was the first to try to conceptualize the “self” outside of a religious framework. Peterson suggests that thinkers haven’t really progressed too far beyond Descartes, either. Whatever the self is, it’s proven itself to be capable of both terrible evil and enduring good.
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An idea is different from a fact. Facts aren’t alive, but ideas are—they grip people and demand expression in the world. An idea is aiming for something. It’s “a personality” that essentially overtakes a person. Sometimes a person would even rather die than let an idea die, though Peterson says this is usually a bad idea. But when something isn’t going right, then fundamental convictions have to die, or be sacrificed, in order to make the future better. But what is the best way to do this?
Here Peterson explains that ideas are something that human beings create and therefore a big part of what makes us human. They’re not just abstract realities, but somehow an expression of who we are. He further implies that this is why it’s so difficult when people have to sacrifice ideas that aren’t working for them.
Themes
Peterson once went down a similar road as Descartes. He was filled with doubts and thought that Christianity was wishful thinking. He decided that socialism didn’t fix the problems it purported to solve. But he was tormented by the Cold War, wondering if both sides were just equally corrupt. And how had fascism and communism proven to be even more destructive than the old beliefs they claimed to replace? But finally, thinking about the torment of prisoners in Auschwitz concentration camp led Peterson to conclude that some actions—especially those that dehumanize others—are objectively wrong. Suffering was the one thing he couldn’t doubt. Every human being has the capacity to torment another. If such behavior is not good, then there must be an opposite—and that opposite “good” must be whatever stops evil from happening.
Peterson identifies with Descartes’ questions about what we can know for sure about the world. But he returns to the events that were formative for him, like the inexplicable hostilities of the twentieth century. Clearly, he thought, these ideologies, which all purported to be more modern and humane, have done more harm than good over the long run. This led him to believe that the human capacity for evil is indisputable. But he came to the conclusion that if this is the case, then evil must have an opposite.
Themes
From this conclusion, Peterson drew his basic moral beliefs: “Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix.” Also be humble, be aware of your own capacity for evil, and never lie. And if “good” is the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering, then make that the chief goal of life, the top of one’s “moral hierarchy.” Put in terms of archetypes, it’s the choice between acting out the ideas, or the personality, of either Christ or of Satan.
This long digression provides the background to many of the “rules” Peterson expounds in this book. It basically rests on the belief that both good and evil are real, that human beings are capable of both, and that the point of life is to strive for good as much as one can. Even though he doesn’t uphold traditional religious doctrines, he interprets them, especially Christian doctrines, as archetypes of good and evil.
Themes
Expedience is focused on short-term gains. Its opposite is meaning. If someone’s value structure is aimed at making Being better, then meaning is revealed which will be “the antidote for chaos and suffering,” and it will make everything better. The more you act according to such a value structure, the more you pile up meaning in your life. And the more you’ll notice ways you can act to make Being better, in small, everyday ways. This isn’t the same thing as happiness. It’s more like taking responsibility for the evils of history and the potential evil of your own existence. Meaning is the ultimate balance between chaos and order. So, “do what is meaningful, not what is expedient.”
Peterson suggests that striving for what makes us happy in the short term (like Satan) is ultimately not meaningful. On the other hand, putting off short-term gain for the sake of long-term good yields meaning, and that’s what overcomes evil and improves Being. The more a person does this, the more meaning they’ll find. Notice that meaning, then, is different from happiness in Peterson’s view. He would say that meaning is more honest about one’s own capacity for evil and the world’s pain than a more shallow, self-regarding happiness can be. Meaning is what people attain when they navigate between chaos and order.
Themes
