12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

Peterson opens with a story of a city denying impressive skateboarders places to skate by installing physical barriers. This image serves as a metaphor for people acting anti-human either for malicious or misguided reasons: “Beneath the production of rules stopping the skateboarders from doing highly skilled, courageous and dangerous things I see the operation of an insidious and profoundly anti-human spirit” (290).

This long chapter is full of personal anecdotes relating to the author and people he has known throughout his life. He gives the example of a friend named Chris, for example, who was so consumed with guilt from large forces of history (he names colonialism, the Cold War, and environmental destruction, specifically (291)) that he “[became] anti-human […] to the core” and eventually killed himself (294-95).

Peterson focuses on gendered issues for much of the chapter. He denounces the idea that patriarchy creates undue suffering. He draws conclusions based on conversations with women whom he knows that, for example, “the market defines the work” available for people and rejects the idea that women lawyers leave their jobs because of frustrations with male-favoring policies and practices (300-01). He explains that “any hierarchy creates winners and losers,” but insists that people win and lose based on their relative merit, not power derived from basic categories like gender or race (303, 313).

He also disagrees with altering the cultural norms and expectations of girls versus boys. Peterson expresses the belief that people are trying to turn “boys into girls” by calling for more sensitivity and less strength-based competition (317). He instead presents the alternative idea that compassion can be a vice, noting that many of his female clients suffer from being “not aggressive enough” (318). “If you think tough men are dangerous,” he says, “wait until you see what weak men are capable of” (332). Wanting to intervene in what he considers natural patterns of gendered dynamic and socialization patters is, according to Peterson, anti-human. 

Peterson opens the chapter by saying that he likes dogs as well as cats. One’s relative affinity for either dogs or cats seems to evoke strong emotions and judgments from the general public, so Peterson addresses the dog-cat divide and places himself in both camps to try to win his reader’s favor. This opening is intended to be humorous. He drops the animal examples until the end of the chapter, but the ultimate take-away is that cats represent small positive moments in every day. Petting a cat on the street allows a person to slow down and briefly connect with a cute, funny little creature. This is a version of the old “stop and smell the roses” idiom.

Peterson discusses the limitations of human existence. The limits of a person’s circumstances, especially when something like a disease or misfortune creates them, are hard to accept emotionally, but should not send a person into nihilism. Nihilistic reflection of life’s limits and suffering would suggest that “Perhaps the limits required by Being are so extreme that the whole project should just be scrapped” (345). Peterson counters that limitations do not render people or relationships useless. Misery and struggle can bring people together in profound ways.

Much of the chapter is devoted to the story of Peterson’s daughter, Mikhaila, who suffered in childhood from juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. This disease created excruciating pain in her joints and required years of experimental medicine that sometimes created harmful side-effects. This situation presented the tragedy in Peterson’s life that could have turned him into a nihilist. The family, however, continued to seek treatment, aim for improvement, cope productively with their struggles, and persevere without hating life. They managed to find some effective treatments that drastically improved Mikhaila’s quality of life. He ends the chapter by noting that as he drafted the book, Mikhaila met a great doctor that conducted an easy adjustment that corrected several alignment problems in her leg, got married, and had a girl. Those positives illustrate the image of the ebb and flow of tragedy and triumph in life.