Why I can't Recommend "Twelve Rules for Life" by Jordan Peterson
When you pick up a book called “Twelve Rules for Life” you should know you are going to get someone telling you what to do. Yet there is a tonal and structural difference in how this is often done. Jordan Peterson started out strong. His first two rules seemed clear and useful, and I enjoyed how he used a simple rule to show a bigger idea. But with each rule after that I became more frustrated by with the book.
Twelve Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson is more or less what it claims to be. The rules, as I implied before, are both simple and designed to illuminate bigger ideas. The first rule, “Stand up straight with your shoulders back,” discusses the importance of posture, but it also goes into how the way you move affects the way you feel. It goes far abroad in the subject and then returns you to that first simple rule with a much better understanding of why the rule is useful.
Most of the rules of Twelve Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson are excellent advice. I don’t think any of them would harm a person by following it and most if not all of them would improve your life considerably by themselves even without the others.
Yet this book frustrated me far more than it helped. The problem is that while his rules are excellent advice by the end of the first third of the book, certain ideas crept in. I don’t fully disagree with them. I’m not a communist nor do I think it’s a great idea, but the amount of times he brings it up is excessive and his inability to tell the difference between communism and totalitarians reminds me of propaganda I saw in school in the 1980s that told you that there was nothing good about communism rather than pointing out that it didn’t seem to work in large scale governments. Those books were written for children, and perhaps they felt they were too young to understand that complexity. “Twelve Rules for Life” is not written for children, and ignoring the complexity of life for the sake of propaganda isn’t acceptable.
The other thing he brings up many too many times is that boys and girls are different. I can only assume he has run into far more people who don’t think this than I have, or perhaps he just assumes the rest of the world too stupid to know this. Either way, he misses the point of the vast majority of people who desire equality being unable to understand the difference between equality and sameness while assuming everyone else is too dense to know basic biology. Beyond that he seems to believe that the old-school ideas of masculinity show you are strong and that men who don’t have those traits are weak. He touts the virtue of hazing and puts down those who dare complain. To some extent that is fine, but he not only goes much too far in this but seems to miss that when people are actually strong, they can show compassion and tenderness without having to show weakness and that bravado and swagger are far more commonly an attempt to hide weakness than they are a sign of strength.
I almost didn’t write a review of this book. It’s hard to agree with most of a book and yet disagree so vehemently with a few points that are almost entirely outside of the point of the book it makes it almost unreadable, but I thought it was a point worth making. To say that you can agree with the stances of someone and yet understand their weaknesses. That you can look at someone and say that while they might be right on some things the bad still outweighs the good. So, do I recommend Twelve Rules for Life? No. I can’t because the book decided it was far more important to attack the commies than to pursue what is meaningful and it looks far to down on the people it is writing to to assume a person knows anything he doesn’t and that it didn’t need to defend its points if it could find any part of the bible that could be twisted to that belief.