12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

This chapter opens with an explanation of a common pattern: People in dire health circumstances will not take medicine to protect themselves, yet they will carefully monitor the health of a pet, apparently prizing the animal’s worth and wellbeing well above their own. Peterson then transitions into the chapter’s central example that he thinks explains this dark and “perplexing question” about human behavior: the Book of Genesis in the Bible (33).

Genesis tells the Christian story of the creation of the cosmos, the Earth, and mankind, starting with the first man and woman: Adam and Eve. Peterson sees in this story the development of self-consciousness and even self-loathing that people suffer today. He again points to order and chaos in the world around us. He defines chaos as “unexplored territory” and likens it to “the monster under the bed […] the despair and horror you feel when you have been profoundly betrayed,” but also to “the formless potential from which the God of Genesis […] called forth order” (35-36). The potential in the unknown remains an important theme in the chapter. Peterson then explains order as “explored territory […] the warm, secure living-room where the fireplace glows and the children play” (36). It is the comfortable opposite of chaos.

Peterson discusses symbolism of order and chaos expressed through masculine/male (ordered) imagery and feminine/female (chaotic) imagery. He locates the sex binary as an ordering principle of nature, calling it “our most basic category” (40) (there is no discussion of where intersex beings would fit into this framework). He claims that “the primary hierarchical structure of human society is masculine” and cites the sexual behaviors of chimpanzees as support for the claim (40). “Chaos is mater [mother],” he asserts, because it is “the substance from which all things are made,” like the ”mysterious realm of gestation and birth” (41). He continues to cast the symbols of order and chaos in material terms through general claims about sexed behaviors (for example, “Women are choosy maters” (41); “women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time” (48)). He insists, though, that utilizing this framework—male and female, order and chaos—helps us to “consciously understand the world” and see “many things […] fall into place” (43).

He ultimately champions a balance between chaos and order in a person’s life, a “need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering” (44). That approach, he says, creates meaning.

Adam and Eve became self-conscious and miserable after they broke a promise to God. People ever since have been self-critical to a fault, believing themselves irredeemably flawed. Pets, by contrast, people view as “harmless, innocent, unselfconscious” (53). Peterson suggests instead that humans are “miraculous” in their capacity to be everyday-heroes and hold together society. “We deserve some respect,” he says (62). With that alternative view, a person may be more willing to truly care for him or herself.

This chapter opens up with a description of what the author casts as a rather limited and sad upbringing in rural, freezing Alberta, Canada. The setting is bleak because of the 40-below temperatures, long hours of darkness, and what the author recognizes as a tendency among people he knew to “[go] nowhere at all” (73). He talks specifically about a friend he calls Chris and Chris’s cousin, Ed. The three were friends in youth, but the author left his small town to attend college and live in a larger city. Years later, the author heard that Ed had moved to the same city and invited him over, but when he came, it was with a “useless bastard” friend and they were both high on drugs (74). The author kicked them out. He then reveals that Chris suffered mental illness and committed suicide. Peterson explains these sad realities by saying, “Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth—or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives—they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past” (75). They never manage to surround themselves with more positive influences and it contributes to their demises. “Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better—so they don’t go looking for it,” he explains (75).

The author then discusses friendships, both problematic and healthy, in more detail, ultimately prescribing a way to feel worthy of better and seek improvement. He cautions against friendships that emerge out of a desire “to rescue someone” (76). Often cast as a naïve or kind impulse, that tendency, Peterson asserts, “is often fuelled by vanity and narcissism” (76). He again brings up the figure of Christ as “the archetypal perfect man” and then says, “And you’re you. How do you know that your attempts to pull someone up won’t instead bring them—or you—further down?” (78). He advises the reader to “assume first that you are doing the easiest thing,” or perhaps something to make one’s self feel validated and empowered, not some difficult or noble pursuit (79).

What he ultimately champions is reciprocity. “It’s a good thing, not a selfish thing,” Peterson explains, “to choose people who are good for you” (82). Good friends will challenge, support, and altogether “encourage you when you do good for yourself and others,” but they’ll also “punish you carefully when you do not” (82). This framework of friendship, Peterson says, truly invites improvement and the betterment of self and society.