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A review by lpm100
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson
5.0
Book Review
5/5 stars
12 Rules For Life
"Jordan Peterson is the Man of Words that conservatives have been waiting for."
*******
Of the book:
1. 12 chapters (354 pps); 1 coda (14 pps); Foreword (18 pps); Overture (10 pps).
Total: 396 pps
2. Avg chapter= 29.5 pps
3. 207 citations (in endnotes); 1 citation every 1.7 pages.
⚠️ (Abundant New Testament quotes. Unsuitable for a Jewish Home.)
I have listened to Peterson give several speeches on YouTube, and I would have to say that: 1) He is a master of the spoken word; 2)With respect to the written word, much is left to be desired.
His prose is, by turns: fluent/logical/ approachable AND verbose/vague/maddening.
This dichotomy doesn't diminish him in any way. (One of my favorite writers of all time, Eric Hoffer, came across in the most disciplined way on the page - - but he was not a speaker that anyone remembers. Jordan Peterson appears to be the opposite.)
JP is a practicing clinical psychologist, and that makes his perspective one more of asking questions about the fundamental nature of mental architecture that create a certain personality type (in order to explain situations that he sees over and over again in clinical practice) rather than a psychiatrist--who treats mental diseases as a strictly Material thing and is only interested in setting about finding the right pharmaceutical cure. (The psychiatrist couldn't care less about the psychodynamics of anyone's situation.)
The author quotes liberally from the Tanakh/Christian Bible NOT because he is saying that it is literally true, but because it brings across excellent and time-independent ideas by way of narrative.
In a way, JP's prose reminds me of the Tanakh: A *very* large number of sentences, some of which seem obscure to other people but have a profound meaning to others. Or, the same sentence could have a different meaning to the same person at different times in life.
The sheer volume of verbiage is such that everyone can (and should) take away something from this. (In that way, this book also reminds me of ones such as Marx's "Capital" and Ayn Rand's "Fountainhead.")
I don't think that "12 Rules" has anywhere the number of quotable sentences per page as someone like Eric Hoffer / Thomas Sowell/David Berlinski--but it's still not too shabby.
Synopsis of each chapter:
1. ("Stand up straight with your shoulders back.") Hierarchies are several hundred million years old and they don't depend on banalities such as "Capitalism" / "The White Male Power Structure." Being at the bottom of hierarchy is stressful for human beings, and being lower rank can be a negativebut there's no reason that you cannot choose to see yourself in a better way-and through positive feedback, maybe it will make a difference.
2. ("Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.") A self-interested child will eat as much candy as he can, even if the results are not good. A parent will taking interest in the child's health, and limit his consumption. If you don't see yourself from the perspective of an interested outsider, you may consume to excess food/drugs/unsafe sex, but why not modulate your own behavior in the way that an interested parent would?
3. ("Make friends with people who want the best for you.") Avoid people who make friends with you because your dysfunction makes theirs look comparatively better. Avoid people who want to "fix" you as a way to avoid solving their own problems.
4. ("Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not who someone else is today.") One can avoid going between the Scylla of Nihilism ("There are no absolute standards, so who cares anyway?") and the Charybdis of impotent envy ("I'm going to piss away this life for the World to Come where Everyone is Equal and the Rich Pay Their Fair Share")
In reality, there is no place on the planet where people are all equal, and so it becomes meaningless to compare because we don't all start at the same place. Indeed, CANNOT start at the same place.
5. ("Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.") Children are little barbarians that need to be civilized in an orderly way before it is too late. The idiocy of Rousseau notwithstanding (who just dropped his kids off at orphanages - - all five of them), people in a natural state do not create gentle societies. (That was the point of "Lord of the Flies.")
6. ("Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.") A lot of mass movements throw away a lot of lives by selling them the idea that they can change the world. And that is a meaningless / futile goal. It is possible and feasible, however, to change and improve oneself.
7. ("Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.") Delayed gratification / self control is a civilized / civilizing practice--And that is because freedom requires constraint. (If violin strings are installed taut enough to make sound, then one is free to make music with them. Detached strings laying on a table are not constrained, but also not free to make music.) Being a religious person is not only about the escapes of faith and afterlife, but also about the Quest for a more perfect form of Being (with JP's capital "b").
8. ("Tell the truth, or at least don't lie.") To thine own self be true- and the easiest person to fool is oneself. If you live a life that is honest about your surroundings and your own limitations, that is the path to some type of comfort. If you are not honest with yourself, that sets you up to spend an entire lifetime trying to "topple the windmills of your imagination." (p.210). When you lie to others, it's a lot more difficult to maintain the lie all the way through then it would seem. It could be something so simple as an enabling parent shielding their child from reality for some number of decades and NEVER equipping them to deal with reality.
9. ("Assume that the other person you are listening to might know something that you don't.") Conversations with other human beings should be some amount of give and take and not just waiting for the other person to stop talking so that you can make your own points. Listening can be therapeutic (because it gives a speaker a chance to organize his thoughts). When speaking publicly, there are techniques to know your audience.
10. ("Be precise in your speech") Simple problems can become very big ones if you don't precisely address them as they arise. He uses several examples from his clinical practice of marriages that had so many things go wrong over such a long time that when they fell apart it was impossible to point to one single causative agent.
11. ("Don't bother children when they are skateboarding.") This was probably the deepest chapter, and it could have been a book in its own right. Peterson is conscious that the current woke movement is rehashed Marxism and also profoundly misanthropic.
This idea of people having children because they are evil sinners who do not care about Mother Earth finds its logical conclusion in the extermination of mankind. (It's interesting how often school shooters pick up on misanthropic ideas--and you can find these ideas in any of their rambling manifestos, provided you have the patience to fish for them.)
12. ("Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street"). Being of any sort requires reasonable limitation/ if everyday is a sunny day, then what's a sunny day?
Superman became most boring (and almost failed as a franchise) once his powers were unlimited. Where are the challenges for someone who can do anything?
This is true for human beings as well: when we might have health / other challenges, it can make you more appreciate when times are good.
Coda: Do you want to be right or do you want to be smart? Proper Being is a process, and not a state.
*******
New words:
Grapefruit foam
feint
triage
monastic novitate
Diane Arbus
Hieronymus Bosch
Rogerian/Adlerian/Jungian/Freudian/behavioral schools
toque
Zen loan
forMication
*******
Good quotes:
1. "Aristotle defined the virtues simply as the ways of behaving that are most conducive to happiness in life; vice was defined as the ways of behaving least conducive to happiness." (xx).
2. "Our society faces the increasing call to deconstruct stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people who do not or will not fit into the categories up on which even our perceptions are based....... Each person's private trouble cannot be solved by social revolution, because revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous." (p.118).
3. "And after the solution was implemented, even the fact that such problems had ever existed disappeared from view..... The fact that automobiles pollute only becomes a problem of sufficient magnitude to attract public attention when the far worse problems that the internal combustion engine solves has vanished from view. People stricken with poverty don't care about carbon dioxide." (p.187)
4. "Deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism." (p.215).
5. "The faculty of rationality and clients dangerously deprived: all I know is all that needs to be known. Pride falls in love with its own creations, and tries to make them absolute." (p.210)
6. (p.235) "She had no self. She was, instead, a walking cacophony of unintegrated experiences."
7. (p.290) "If you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences--and infer the motivation" (Jung). "When someone claims to be acting from the highest principles, for the good of others, there is no reason to assume that the person's motives are genuine."
Second order thoughts:
1. "If circumstances force you to put all your eggs in one basket.... A son is a better bet, by the strict standards of evolutionary logic, where the proliferation of your genes is all that matters." (p.115) NONONO. Women are the limiting reagent in the reaction of childbearing. Too few men means that some of them just double up on women. (How many black guys do you know that have a stomach for black women that don't have 2~5 in rotation?) Too few women means that a lot of men are going to kill each other trying to get to scarce brides. (They're learning this the hard way in China/India.)
2. In the case of listening to people (Chapter 9): being a good listener is probably a secondary skill to deciding who is likely to even have a conversation worth having. Is it worth sorting through some huge number of ghetto bunnies that can't even read at grade level (such as you might meet from Detroit) to figure out something useful they might have to say? How many ignorant / provincial / neanderthal Haredim is it worth sorting through to find that one who might have read a single English book in his life?
3. (p.268). Peterson appears to have read the Bible in Hebrew. He actually quotes transliterated Hebrew. Also, it appears that he can fly a plane (p.286).
4. Is Western civilization in terminal decline? It might be. Donald Trump was a symbol of a country reacting against toxic Western oikophobia. And we see how it works out for him. You can describe all of the symptoms of a disease and treat them one by one, but a patient ("civilization")has a natural lifetime and that's just it.
This book seems to be selling at a rate comparable to "50 Shades of Gray" (which makes me cautiously optimistic).
Verdict: Recommended.
Much like the Tanakh, this would be one of those books that a person wanted to review over and over and over.
But, there's just not enough time and there are too many other books to read; most readers will probably just take what they can get out of it and let it go.
That's my strategy, after organizing my thoughts on the book with this review.
5/5 stars
12 Rules For Life
"Jordan Peterson is the Man of Words that conservatives have been waiting for."
*******
Of the book:
1. 12 chapters (354 pps); 1 coda (14 pps); Foreword (18 pps); Overture (10 pps).
Total: 396 pps
2. Avg chapter= 29.5 pps
3. 207 citations (in endnotes); 1 citation every 1.7 pages.
⚠️ (Abundant New Testament quotes. Unsuitable for a Jewish Home.)
I have listened to Peterson give several speeches on YouTube, and I would have to say that: 1) He is a master of the spoken word; 2)With respect to the written word, much is left to be desired.
His prose is, by turns: fluent/logical/ approachable AND verbose/vague/maddening.
This dichotomy doesn't diminish him in any way. (One of my favorite writers of all time, Eric Hoffer, came across in the most disciplined way on the page - - but he was not a speaker that anyone remembers. Jordan Peterson appears to be the opposite.)
JP is a practicing clinical psychologist, and that makes his perspective one more of asking questions about the fundamental nature of mental architecture that create a certain personality type (in order to explain situations that he sees over and over again in clinical practice) rather than a psychiatrist--who treats mental diseases as a strictly Material thing and is only interested in setting about finding the right pharmaceutical cure. (The psychiatrist couldn't care less about the psychodynamics of anyone's situation.)
The author quotes liberally from the Tanakh/Christian Bible NOT because he is saying that it is literally true, but because it brings across excellent and time-independent ideas by way of narrative.
In a way, JP's prose reminds me of the Tanakh: A *very* large number of sentences, some of which seem obscure to other people but have a profound meaning to others. Or, the same sentence could have a different meaning to the same person at different times in life.
The sheer volume of verbiage is such that everyone can (and should) take away something from this. (In that way, this book also reminds me of ones such as Marx's "Capital" and Ayn Rand's "Fountainhead.")
I don't think that "12 Rules" has anywhere the number of quotable sentences per page as someone like Eric Hoffer / Thomas Sowell/David Berlinski--but it's still not too shabby.
Synopsis of each chapter:
1. ("Stand up straight with your shoulders back.") Hierarchies are several hundred million years old and they don't depend on banalities such as "Capitalism" / "The White Male Power Structure." Being at the bottom of hierarchy is stressful for human beings, and being lower rank can be a negativebut there's no reason that you cannot choose to see yourself in a better way-and through positive feedback, maybe it will make a difference.
2. ("Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.") A self-interested child will eat as much candy as he can, even if the results are not good. A parent will taking interest in the child's health, and limit his consumption. If you don't see yourself from the perspective of an interested outsider, you may consume to excess food/drugs/unsafe sex, but why not modulate your own behavior in the way that an interested parent would?
3. ("Make friends with people who want the best for you.") Avoid people who make friends with you because your dysfunction makes theirs look comparatively better. Avoid people who want to "fix" you as a way to avoid solving their own problems.
4. ("Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not who someone else is today.") One can avoid going between the Scylla of Nihilism ("There are no absolute standards, so who cares anyway?") and the Charybdis of impotent envy ("I'm going to piss away this life for the World to Come where Everyone is Equal and the Rich Pay Their Fair Share")
In reality, there is no place on the planet where people are all equal, and so it becomes meaningless to compare because we don't all start at the same place. Indeed, CANNOT start at the same place.
5. ("Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.") Children are little barbarians that need to be civilized in an orderly way before it is too late. The idiocy of Rousseau notwithstanding (who just dropped his kids off at orphanages - - all five of them), people in a natural state do not create gentle societies. (That was the point of "Lord of the Flies.")
6. ("Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.") A lot of mass movements throw away a lot of lives by selling them the idea that they can change the world. And that is a meaningless / futile goal. It is possible and feasible, however, to change and improve oneself.
7. ("Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.") Delayed gratification / self control is a civilized / civilizing practice--And that is because freedom requires constraint. (If violin strings are installed taut enough to make sound, then one is free to make music with them. Detached strings laying on a table are not constrained, but also not free to make music.) Being a religious person is not only about the escapes of faith and afterlife, but also about the Quest for a more perfect form of Being (with JP's capital "b").
8. ("Tell the truth, or at least don't lie.") To thine own self be true- and the easiest person to fool is oneself. If you live a life that is honest about your surroundings and your own limitations, that is the path to some type of comfort. If you are not honest with yourself, that sets you up to spend an entire lifetime trying to "topple the windmills of your imagination." (p.210). When you lie to others, it's a lot more difficult to maintain the lie all the way through then it would seem. It could be something so simple as an enabling parent shielding their child from reality for some number of decades and NEVER equipping them to deal with reality.
9. ("Assume that the other person you are listening to might know something that you don't.") Conversations with other human beings should be some amount of give and take and not just waiting for the other person to stop talking so that you can make your own points. Listening can be therapeutic (because it gives a speaker a chance to organize his thoughts). When speaking publicly, there are techniques to know your audience.
10. ("Be precise in your speech") Simple problems can become very big ones if you don't precisely address them as they arise. He uses several examples from his clinical practice of marriages that had so many things go wrong over such a long time that when they fell apart it was impossible to point to one single causative agent.
11. ("Don't bother children when they are skateboarding.") This was probably the deepest chapter, and it could have been a book in its own right. Peterson is conscious that the current woke movement is rehashed Marxism and also profoundly misanthropic.
This idea of people having children because they are evil sinners who do not care about Mother Earth finds its logical conclusion in the extermination of mankind. (It's interesting how often school shooters pick up on misanthropic ideas--and you can find these ideas in any of their rambling manifestos, provided you have the patience to fish for them.)
12. ("Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street"). Being of any sort requires reasonable limitation/ if everyday is a sunny day, then what's a sunny day?
Superman became most boring (and almost failed as a franchise) once his powers were unlimited. Where are the challenges for someone who can do anything?
This is true for human beings as well: when we might have health / other challenges, it can make you more appreciate when times are good.
Coda: Do you want to be right or do you want to be smart? Proper Being is a process, and not a state.
*******
New words:
Grapefruit foam
feint
triage
monastic novitate
Diane Arbus
Hieronymus Bosch
Rogerian/Adlerian/Jungian/Freudian/behavioral schools
toque
Zen loan
forMication
*******
Good quotes:
1. "Aristotle defined the virtues simply as the ways of behaving that are most conducive to happiness in life; vice was defined as the ways of behaving least conducive to happiness." (xx).
2. "Our society faces the increasing call to deconstruct stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people who do not or will not fit into the categories up on which even our perceptions are based....... Each person's private trouble cannot be solved by social revolution, because revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous." (p.118).
3. "And after the solution was implemented, even the fact that such problems had ever existed disappeared from view..... The fact that automobiles pollute only becomes a problem of sufficient magnitude to attract public attention when the far worse problems that the internal combustion engine solves has vanished from view. People stricken with poverty don't care about carbon dioxide." (p.187)
4. "Deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism." (p.215).
5. "The faculty of rationality and clients dangerously deprived: all I know is all that needs to be known. Pride falls in love with its own creations, and tries to make them absolute." (p.210)
6. (p.235) "She had no self. She was, instead, a walking cacophony of unintegrated experiences."
7. (p.290) "If you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences--and infer the motivation" (Jung). "When someone claims to be acting from the highest principles, for the good of others, there is no reason to assume that the person's motives are genuine."
Second order thoughts:
1. "If circumstances force you to put all your eggs in one basket.... A son is a better bet, by the strict standards of evolutionary logic, where the proliferation of your genes is all that matters." (p.115) NONONO. Women are the limiting reagent in the reaction of childbearing. Too few men means that some of them just double up on women. (How many black guys do you know that have a stomach for black women that don't have 2~5 in rotation?) Too few women means that a lot of men are going to kill each other trying to get to scarce brides. (They're learning this the hard way in China/India.)
2. In the case of listening to people (Chapter 9): being a good listener is probably a secondary skill to deciding who is likely to even have a conversation worth having. Is it worth sorting through some huge number of ghetto bunnies that can't even read at grade level (such as you might meet from Detroit) to figure out something useful they might have to say? How many ignorant / provincial / neanderthal Haredim is it worth sorting through to find that one who might have read a single English book in his life?
3. (p.268). Peterson appears to have read the Bible in Hebrew. He actually quotes transliterated Hebrew. Also, it appears that he can fly a plane (p.286).
4. Is Western civilization in terminal decline? It might be. Donald Trump was a symbol of a country reacting against toxic Western oikophobia. And we see how it works out for him. You can describe all of the symptoms of a disease and treat them one by one, but a patient ("civilization")has a natural lifetime and that's just it.
This book seems to be selling at a rate comparable to "50 Shades of Gray" (which makes me cautiously optimistic).
Verdict: Recommended.
Much like the Tanakh, this would be one of those books that a person wanted to review over and over and over.
But, there's just not enough time and there are too many other books to read; most readers will probably just take what they can get out of it and let it go.
That's my strategy, after organizing my thoughts on the book with this review.