If you cannot bring peace to your own household, how dare you try to rule a city?” Don’t reorganise the state until you have ordered your own experience. “Don’t blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. He takes the view that one should build outwards from small-scale personal choices towards larger social and political questions. We should choose our friends wisely, lovingly discipline our children, respect the wisdom of tradition and so on. Most of his rules are to do with personal responsibility, and making the kind of life choices that will allow a person to function efficiently in the world. Peterson’s stern preceptor persona probably works well in a clinical setting, where he presumably encounters damaged people in need of an authority figure who can provide an external source of order and stability. Photograph: Michael Nigro/Pacific/BarcroftImages Peterson styles himself as a prolific culture warrior who has no truck with social justice movements. The effect is bizarre, like being shouted at by a rugby coach in a sarong. Within a page, we are told that “expedience is cowardly, and shallow, and wrong” and “meaning is what emerges beautifully and profoundly like a newly formed rosebud opening itself out of nothingness into the light of sun and God”. He likes to capitalise the word “Being” and also to talk about “fundamental, biological and non-arbitrary emergent truth”. Once the cloud of testosterone has cleared (leaving behind the lingering curiosity as to why, exactly, one would want a longhouse upstairs), the reader discovers that each of Peterson’s 12 rules is explained in an essay delivered in a baroque style that combines pull-your-socks-up scolding with footnoted references to academic papers and Blavatskyesque metaphysical flights.
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Jordan B Peterson, raised and toughened in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta, has flown a hammerhead roll in a carbon fibre stunt plane, piloted a mahogany racing sailboat around Alcatraz Island, explored an Arizona meteorite crater with a group of astronauts, built a Native American longhouse on the upper floor of his Toronto home, and been inducted into the coastal Pacific Kwakwaka’wakw tribe.
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His publisher has preferred to gloss over his reputation as an internet controversialist, characterising him tactfully as a “modern day truth teller” and furnishing him with a page-long biography that begins: His baroque style combines pull-your-socks-up scolding with Blavatskyesque metaphysical flights
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It is a book that combines sensible advice gleaned from his clinical practice with inspirational anecdotes from his personal life, accounts of his academic work in the field of psychology and a lot of intellectual history of the “great books” variety, which he interprets in highly tendentious ways. This response captures much of what, for good and ill, informs 12 Rules for Life, his long and often peculiar foray into the self-help genre. Metaphysically I am an American pragmatist who has been strongly influenced by the psychoanalytic and clinical thinking of Freud and Jung.” Philosophically I am an individualist, not a collectivist of the right or the left. In an emailed rebuttal to a journalist who termed him a figure of the “far right”, he described his own politics as those of a “classic British liberal … temperamentally I am high on openness which tilts me to the left, although I am also conscientious which tilts me to the right. His work on the psychology of political correctness has raised eyebrows, given his recent proposal to purge “corrupt” academic departments of courses and teachers he deems infected by this pathology.
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His academic work includes many papers in which he seeks to understand political and religious belief in terms of the so-called “big five” personality traits – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.