Jordan Petersen – 12 Rules For Life. Chapter 10.

I just got reminded of this readthrough that I abandoned 3 years ago, because I got distracted which is half the story of my life, and also got told off for giving Jordan Petersen airtime and not paying enough attention to the additional context around his work which made it morally reprehensible, which is also the story of my life. Since then he’s published another book and also become addicted to diazepam which apparently could only be dealt with by going to Russia to be put into a medically induced coma.

This confused me as I’ve been on and off diazepam for about a decade now, with no real problems and definitely no Russian coma (and why Russia? Are there no comas in Canada? I understand I could probably find out but having utterly failed to google this shit through the entire rest of my read through, I’m not starting now) but was apparently a very big thing. This review is almost certainly totally out of date but…eh. I started. So I ought to finish.

Jordan Petersen – 12 Rules For Life.

Rule 9 – be precise in your speech.

• Hmmm….I am suspicious. Is this going to be a whole chapter subtitled ‘just tell me what exact words I said were sexist/transphobic/racist? No, don’t give me context. Just give me the words. Also, I didn’t say you should have cleaned the kitchen, Julia. I just said this kitchen was a total shithole and someone should have cleaned it, while looking straight at you. Listen to what I say, not what you think I said?”
• No, it’s OK, Jordan, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Let’s read.
• Huh. It starts with a long ramble about laptops and the interconnectedness of things.
• QUOTE – “Your laptop is a note in a symphony currently being played by an orchestra of incalculable size”.
• OK. He just made a good point about the extent to which our society – our ability to have things like laptops, the internet and electricity to power it is based on a interdependent and invisible system of trust.
• Right. Sudden leap to ‘we see the whole world as manifestations of this system’ which is…yes. I think it does follow. A laptop is not just a box. We know that immediately and so recognise it for its utility – as a communication tool. A chair is not just a lump of wood – we recognise it as something we can sit on. Chairs don’t need complex structures to exist, but I think I still follow the leap from ‘it’s all about systems’ to ‘objects as entities shaped by their use’.
• Also, coincidentally, a topic I’ve written a load about when arguing that objects like fans or paddle steamers (to use two apparently disparate examples) should be kept in use as long as possible because it’s in their movement that they really exist.
• Yes, I can take questions on that later.
• Oooh…now moving on to people. But now he’s pulling in and focusing on the bits we see of people – not their networks, or their past, or their internal context or experiences. Just them and in that precise moment because that is how they relate to use – how they are useful. The face communicates and lets us connect and cooperate with them in that moment.
• We deal with people this way because otherwise we’d collapse in the complexity of the world.
• Huh. I think this is a part of Jez’s training program for chuggers – he teaches them to never take anything anyone says to them on the street personally because you don’t know where they are coming from, what they are feeling, what their day is. You get a moment in time but it’s only the tip of the iceberg and often the words you get from them don’t really related to you at all, but are the result of a dozen complex social interactions that you don’t and can’t understand. I don’t know if this is where Petersen is going, but I do recognise the theory.
• Some interesting stuff about how we extend our sense of self into the interconnected networks – how we identify with our sports team or our country.
• Going back to the complex social relationships – because the world is all so complex we take corners of them, see them for how they work/how they can be used, and then rely on those simple explanations to make sense of the world. If these assumptions cease to make sense, then chaos ensues and everything goes wrong.
• Huh. I think I understand now why Petersen is so threatened by trans people. He really doesn’t like change and he super duper hates change he doesn’t understand/which shifts the boundaries of reality as he understands it.
• Suddenly 9/11 reference. And then….watery formless chaos and the ineffable Word of God. Holy fuck, that escalated quickly.
• QUOTE – ‘what we perceive, when things fall apart, is no longer the stage and settings of habitable order. It’s the eternal watery tohu va bohu, formless emptiness, and the tehom, the abyss…the chaos forever lurking…it’s from that chaos that the Holy Word of God Himself extracted order and the beginning of time, according to the oldest opinions expressed by mankind (and it is in the image that same Word that we were made, male and female, according to the same opinions.)
• Goodness.
• And this means that when change happens, when we feel betrayed, by something as mundane as an unfaithful husband, we see the formless chaos, doubt god and go mad.
• I am beginning to see where the diazepam addiction and Russian coma came from. Also, Jordan, should you really have been so judgy about the patients in the psych ward earlier?
• Holy crap this is weird stuff. Now he’s referring to the betrayed wife seeing only ‘the shell of her former husband’ as she is cast into ‘the underworld with all its terrors’.
• I don’t think this is a universal response to change, Jordan. I’m just putting it out there. Have you talked about this with your therapist?
• But we take a sudden left turn. Maybe the way to avoid change is to acknowledge the dragons in our lives – that which is left unsaid – before they grow into giant dragons which eat us all and send us to the Underworld. This isn’t my analogy btw. This is Petersen’s. But what if what is left unsaid are experiences or identities which don’t fit with your social consistency and continuity, Jordan?
• OK, no, we’re focused on marriage guidance counselling again and how couples should talk more about their sex lives. I mean, yes, that’s reasonable.
• Now we’re talking about whether or not we take on the role of tyrant or slave in our lives. I’m afraid I’m about to hear the word ‘sheeple’.
• Man, this chapter flip flops rapidly between the sensible and the epic religious derangement.
• His exploration of what might go wrong in a marriage provides a terrifying insight into Jordan Petersen world. QUOTE ‘maybe she could not agree with him on the proper disciplinary approach to the children and shut him out of their lives in consequence. Maybe that allowed him to circumvent what he saw as an unpleasant responsibility’. So, kids, remember to make sure Dad has his role as Stern Disciplinarian or it all goes wrong and everyone goes mad and ends up in Hell. No, pretty much literally.
• Sudden apocalyptic Yeats poetry!
• OK. So, he says communication is important, even if it hurts, because that you have a sharp and specific hurt you can learn from instead of kindly meant lies which lead to a dull ache of hopelessness.
• More ominous poetry.
• To give structure we need speech and the right words. I mean, OK, fine, Jordan. That is mostly how I live my life, as readers of all my very wordy FB posts may be aware. Words give shape and structure.
• QUOTE “Precision specifies”. I’ve had this therapy session.
• If you hear a weird noise in the forest it might be a tiger. But it also might be a squirrel. Actually, pretty solid point.
• QUOTE “Be careful with what you tell yourself…search for the correct words. Organize those words…the past can be redeemed….the present can flow”
• We have now leapt back from strange romantic poet hallucinations of demons to stern dad solid advice, with a bit of additional bootstrapping about how once you’ve got the words to talk about your life you need to ‘pay attention, note your errors and strive to correct them’.
• And….we’re back to the big primordial spiritual soup. ‘Confront the chaos of Being’.
• OK. So, this chapter can be boiled down to ‘there was formless Chaos, and then there was GOD who gave us Order. If we move away from the Order there is only Chaos. Also, people should talk more and communicate their wants and needs. But really, it’s about Order,’
• An odd sandwich of a chapter. 50% solid. 50% the kind of thing I imagine being said by a cult leader as he beats his acolytes out back in the commune’s woodshed.

Will I manage the last two chapters? Wait and see!

Jordan Peterson – 12 Rules for Life. Chapter 9

Well, it’s been a while since I wrote a Jordan Peterson chapter review, but today feels like the kind of day to do it on.

So here I go.

Rule 9 – assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.

• OH MY GOD! JORDAN PETERSON WAS DAVE WADE ALL ALONG! Explanation – Dave has been saying this for years. It’s one of the smarter things he’s ever said to me and actively changed how I look at the world.

• I’m inclined to like this chapter already. Also, his first paragraph is bang on the money.

• Quote – ‘psychotherapy is not advice. Advice is what you get when the person you’re talking with about something horrible and complicated wishes you would just shut up and go away. Advice is what you get when the person you are talking to wants to revel in the superiority of his or her own intelligence. If you weren’t so stupid, after all, you wouldn’t have your stupid problems’.

• I think Jordan Peterson just engaged in ‘call out culture’. I think I might have been the target.

• Quote – ‘psychotherapy is genuine conversation….when you’re involved in a genuine converastrion you’re listening, and talking – but mostly listening. Listening is paying attention’.

• Listening is how Jordan Peterson found out that a low level civil servant he knew was a fluffy hippy witch. Which apparently surprised him although it seems pretty in keeping for me based on the witches I know.

• Also, this is the nicest Jordan Peterson has been about either women or alternative people so far. Go witches!

• Also, an anecdote about one of his patients who I think is meant to be a cautionary tale but I kind of like her already. OK, so she’s a chancer with a drink habit so severe she comes to see a therapist unsure if she’s been raped or not, but I feel like I’ve been there and it doesn’t surprise me that those people exist. What impresses me is that while dealing with these struggles she’s apparently blagged her way onto a radio show and a government advisory board.

• She’s an example of someone who needs order in her life apparently. I mean, yes, but she still sounds kind of compelling just as she is.

• Also, I’m not sure that Jordan Peterson’s idea of ‘genuine conversation’ is very difference to advice, you know. It sounds mostly the same but with the judging happening silently and for longer.

• Some useful stuff about memory and how we tend to warp our memories in search of some kind of coherent narrative or structure to our pasts. This seems right on the money.

• Hrm. Also some useful stuff on how you can frame a lot of events to give them whatever meaning you want, which is a fairly fundamental truth in therapy speak, but I think it often not discussed commonly amongst people and I’m sort of glad he’s talking about it, while also fearing that he is going to sound more profound that he is – he’s talking about something that isn’t a sudden insight of his. It’s a normal therapeutic tool. But so few people outside of that world seem to understand it.

• Also, valid points about how often ‘absolutely everyone’ is right. Yeah, sometimes you’re the first person to think of a certain radical and new truth that is, nonetheless, truth. But often you’re not.

• So far this chapter is Sensible Jordan Peterson.

• I’m suspicious….

• Freud!

• This is a lot like reading system psychotherapy essays. I used to work with psychotherapists.

• Many of them were tossers. I just want to say that now. I can list seven or eight people off the top of my head I still think of only with deep seated loathing. The woman who wanted me to type up her essays because she was a very busy senior social worker and I was just a secretary will stay with me.

• Oooh…good advice. Quote ‘ I routinely summarize what people have said to me and ask if I have understood them properly. Sometimes they accept my summary. Sometimes I am offered a small correction. Now and then I am wrong completely. All of that is good to know.’

• I presume he doesn’t do this when discussion gender roles or identity.

• Oh! This is him quoting Rogers but it’s brilliant. Quote – ‘if you really understand a person in this way, if you are willing to enter his private world and see the way life appears to him, you run the risk of being changed yourself. You might see it his way, you mioght find yourself influenced in your attitudes or personality. This risk of being changed is one of the most frightening prospects most of us can face’.

• Also, yes. Dominance hierarchy conversations are totally a thing.

• Oh god. He just described the exact structure of every Facebook meme ever, from all points of the political spectrum.

• Fine. You are now agreeing with one of my hobbyhorses, Jordan. I like you.

• And you also sympathize with my obsessive need to use words (written, spoken) to order my thoughts. You may have more brownie points today.

• Jordan Peterson follows the ‘it’s OK to say anything as long as it’s funny’ rule. He describes this as ‘blue collar’ – I’m not sure if it is, or if maybe there’s a cultural element of this too. I will say that the anecdote he tells as a test of how your sense of humour works made me snort out loud. I vaguely wondered if that just means I’ve spent a long time in Scotland – the Celtic fringe of the UK has always had a slightly more savage sense of humour than the Anglo-Saxon main in my experience. Maybe he’s thinking of his rural Canadian hometown (where that particular kind of banter is common) as blue collar, when actually he just shifted from a culture dominated by Scots immigrants to one with a more Anglo-Saxon set of sensibilities? I don’t know, and I’m off on a tangent now.

• Conversation as spiritual exploration next.

• He’s said nothing invalid.

• OK, so this was a mostly sound and sensible chapter. I’m just left moderately curious as to whether Jordan Peterson follows his own advice.

Inspired by depictions of the psychiatric hospital estate in modern urban fantasy and popular fiction. A true and accurate depiction of life when you are a tormented waif in an asylum, pursued by demons and John Constantine. Based on my real life time in the Maudsley Hospital.

John Constantine pulled his collar up around his face to try and keep out the cold winter wind as he leant in to talk to his contact.

The contact leant in and murmured “the dead girl had a sister.”

John Constantine felt a shiver run through him.

“A sister?”

“A twin. She was there on the night of the rift. She’s not been the same since.

“Is she…?”

“Yes. She’s in the asylum now. Tormented by messages from the other side, they say,”

Constantine lit a cigarette – the smoke quickly whipped away by the wind.

“Well,” he said. “Guess I better find a way of getting into that place to see her then, don’t I?”

His contact looked surprised.

“Oh, that’s not difficult. Visiting hours are 2 pm to 6 pm daily. You just need to get the number 10 bus.”

“What? The number 10 bus? It goes all the way out into the countryside?”

“Oh! You’re thinking of the old Victorian asylum. The big mansion place with the attic and the weird hedge maze. Nah, mate. That got shut down in 1987. These days psych patients have a wing in the new Queen Elizabeth super hospital out along the ring road. They do have parking as well, but it’s £4 per hour,”

“What?!”

Constantine was genuinely horrified.

“But that’s monstrous! £4 per hour! The old place had free parking, along with the friendly poltergeists”

“I know,” his contact said gloomily. “Things just aren’t what they used to be,”

*

[2 hours later]

John Constantine stood before the great hulking shape of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, gazing up at the wing that held the most severe of mental patients, those few, terrible, broken people. He could not repress a shudder. Mostly because it was a modern NHS building which meant 17 different units in the building, a lot of corridors and inadequate signage.

In the end it took him 34 minutes to find his way up the stairs and he got lost in Endocrinology twice.

But at last he found his way to the anti-climactic sliding glass doors that lead to the asylum. There was a sign. It said ‘Honeysuckle Acute Psychiatric Ward’.

The old asylum hadn’t called anywhere ‘honeysuckle’ but Constantine tried to ignore that as he pressed the buzzer.

*

“Oh!” the cheerful plump nurse said enthusiastically. “You’re here to see Alinor. How lovely. She’ll probably be drawing around now,”

Constantine felt a shiver of expectation go through him.

“Drawing? Messages she says she receives from the other side?”

“We don’t like to focus on that” the nurse said firmly. “She’s drawing. Hopefully she’ll have taken my advice and maybe tried some flowers. But I can take you to see her.”

This, Constantine thought, was more like it. Some things never changed. The beautiful but tormented waifish girl, painting in her own blood on the attic walls.

“Upstairs?” he asked hopefully. “So I can see the paintings?”

The nurse looked confused.

“Upstairs? No. That’s Endocrinology. She’ll be in the art therapy room,”

That was a let down.

“Painting on the walls?” Constantine enquired. Maybe all was not totally lost.

“Bless you, no!” the nurse said firmly. “The Inspectorate would have our heads for that. No, she has paper. But we can’t go the art therapy room. Most of the ward are hanging out there. The TV in the main rec room is broken, you see, and we keep the magazine stash in the art therapy room. You’ll have to fight through the mob trying to get a copy of ‘Take A Break’.

“But we have visitors rooms. I’ll bring her right there.”

*

The visitors room was magnolia. Everything here was magnolia. The chairs were standard NHS soft furnishings, and everything smelled of disinfectant.

Alinor was also a sad disappointment. She was wearing a hospital gown, but it was somehow less flattering that Constantine remembered. Maybe you had to be very thin to make that kind of thing look good, and Alinor was, tragically, not that thin. Constantine remembered, with an unpleasant jolt, that the majority of serious antipsychotics have weight gain as a common side effect and NHS catering budgets rarely stretched to salads.

Even her hair wasn’t artfully dishevelled. Apparently someone had encouraged her to brush it. Clearly the NHS staff in this Ward had too much time on their hands! Art therapy? Hair brushes?

Still, Constantine managed to pull up his collar and deliver the young woman standing before him a smouldering look, the look of a demon hunter, haunted by his past.

“John Constantine?” the girl said, in an oddly calm voice. “I’ve been expecting you”

This was more like it!

“The voices told you?” Constantine enquired.

She nodded, her huge dark eyes never leaving his face.

“I saw you,” she said. “In my dreams. Your face. Over and over,”

She held out a sheaf of paper. Constantine looked down. A giant yellow blob gazed back at him.

“I mean,” Alinor continued, “I couldn’t draw it properly. All the art therapy room has are crayons.

“They’re mostly broken and the only colours left are yellow and orange. Nothing really comes out well.

“So, anyway, I kind of gave up drawing and mostly put your instructions into bullet points. I thought that might be more useful for you anyway,”

Constantine stared.

“Bullet points?”

“Yes. Bullet points. You know, my sister’s messages, directions, names of the relevant infernal beings chasing you. Oh, and I’ve done a page of prophecies in descending order of likelihood,”

“Right. Yes. I see. Actual bullet points.”

Well, this was unexpected.

“Hope this helps,” Alinor said. “Oh, by the way, if you need to speak to me again, I won’t be here after tomorrow,”

“What?”

“I’m going home,”

Constantine stared at the girl in front of him.

“Home? But you’re constantly hearing voices, tormented by infernal beings from the pits of hell, in communion with your dead sister. They can’t send you home!”

Alinor looked wry.

“Mr Constantine, do you have any idea how much money it costs to keep me here? Even with the 27p budget per day for food. It costs a fortune and NHS cuts mean they can’t afford to throw that kind of cash around. Right now, I’m not an active danger to myself, or anyone else. I just talk to demons. I’m, frankly, WAY down the priority list for a bed here. They’re increasingly my diazepam dose and sending me to stay with my mum.

“I get to see a CPN – that’s s community psychiatrist nurse – once every two weeks though. And I can call the crisis line if I need more.”

She must have noticed Constantine’s crestfallen expression because Alinor leant forward to pat his hand comfortingly.

“It’s OK. I’d like to see you. It’ll be talking to you or filling in a 93 page ESA application form. Frankly, a nice bit of communion with the infernal will be a relief….”

END

 

So, I’ve noticed lately that I’ve got involved in a number of conversations about when and how it’s appropriate to comment on what other people are eating, and the etiquette therein, and this morning I found myself briefly overcome with the urge to write a small etiquette guide on this front. I am related to someone with a “sir” in their name, after all, which means I absolutely am the totally best person to give this advice, in the face of no other qualifications whatsoever.

So, without further ado, when is it NOT OK to give someone your opinion on their eating habits:

1) If they have certain dietary restrictions that they have chosen based on their religious/cultural/ethical beliefs. I understand that you may be really keen to share your feelings on kosher/halal slaughter practices, or the impact of veganism on quinoa production in South America, or maybe just whether or not snails are ‘gross’. However, I feel SURE that if the person in question is your friend, they will let you know when they are feeling happy and ready to engage in spirited debate. If they are not your friend, you probably aren’t the right person to tell them that their diet is evil.

(Equally, if someone is eating food that you don’t eat due to your religious/cultural/ethical beliefs – they don’t share your views. They get to eat the goddamn bacon. This happens less frequently but I’ve seen it happen too. It’s also not OK.)

2) If they have certain dietary restrictions that they have chosen based on medical reasons, whether they have allergies or are Coeliac, or diabetes issues or whatever. I know that you definitely read an article on Buzzfeed News a while ago saying that gluten intolerance is not a thing, or you know someone who ate tiny amounts of egg and worked through an egg allergy, or you’re sure that prawns and fish are totally different things, but you do not have to live in your friend’s body. They do. They know what makes them feel better, and what makes them feel worse and they get to decide whether, in that moment, they want to eat in a way that makes their body feel good. Or, frankly, if they are going to say “sod it” and eat something bad for them. That’s actually their choice too. And on the GF front – if it’s just a fad, it’s a fad that makes life easier for Coeliacs the world over with the amazing spread of free from food so let’s support that too. Who the fuck does it hurt if people eat the stuff that makes their bodies feel better?

3) If they look particularly fat/thin to you and seem to be eating foods which will make them fatter/thinner. See above. Their body. Their choice. They almost certainly know that salad has fewer calories than chocolate. You will absolutely not be telling them anything new. So it’s really just a waste of everyone’s time.

4) If they are eating food which you have totally and arbitrarily assigned a moral value to and wish to comment on. Stop it. It’s stupid. That cookie is not ‘cheeky’. It is highly unlikely to talk back to it’s cookie mother or give it’s cookie teacher trash talk for its cookie tie. I would also add that your friend is not ‘cheeky’ for eating said cookie. It’s a cookie. It’s food. Get over it.

That is when it is NOT OK to pass comment on someone’s food. But it’s alright – I’m not a total food Nazi! There are loads of times when you absolutely SHOULD pass comment on someone’s eating habits. Here are a few of them:

1) If they have an allergy and are unaware that the food they are about to eat contains the matter they are allergic too. Note – as someone who has been trapped by stealth banana bread before, I welcome your interventions.

2) If you are aware of deeply unhygienic practices in the kitchen from which they are eating and want to warm your friend post haste.

3) If your friend has a geas which means they will die if they eat dog meat, but also have a geas which means they are unable to refuse hospitality, and now find themselves trapped between geasa due to the intervention of a group of wicked hags.

4) If you know that the helpful nurse who made your friend a sandwich is actually their wicked aunt from Canada, masquerading as a nurse in order to murder them and seize the family money, and you have grave concerns that the sandwich may be poisoned.

5) If the food in question is not actually food, but a sleeping kitten who is still very much alive but might not survive the onslaught of your friends’ teeth. Especially if your friend is a giant wolf.

Under all those circumstances you absolutely should intervene.

So, that’s my totally unsolicited etiquette guide on how to tell people how to eat. Thank you, I’m sure it’s what you wanted for your Friday morning and I’ll be here to offer totally unwanted advice all day. Any further queries do leave them in a comment.

Jordan Peterson – 12 Rules for Life. Chapter 8

The slow marathon grinds on. I will admit I took a detour from this into reading Agatha Christie’s autobiography for her particular set of highly Edwardian life lessons. I’m not sure she said anything that Jordan Peterson wouldn’t agree with, which either is a reflection on how very traditional he is, or just a comment on how timeless the cry of ‘children were much better behaved in my day’.

As an even bigger tangent, I’ve actually come to the conclusion that everyone always thinks that they, as a child, were self contained and well behaved and knew how to entertain themselves because parents in their day were more relaxed and hands off, while also being stricter and demanding better behaviour, and they turned out fine. As a parent, they are always convinced that children are much more difficult these days and it’s just harder to raise children in this new social climate. As a grandparent, you always think the kids are great, it’s just the parents are weaker than they used to be.

I am willing to believe the ancient Greeks thought the same.

But enough. Back to Jordan Peterson. Today we have rule 8 – tell the truth, or at least, don’t lie.

• We start off with Jordan’s experience as a clinical psychologist in one of the old asylums that sort of stopped existing when anti psychotic drugs and care in the community (or equivalent) changed the world. I think Peterson got in right at the tail end, in the 1980s, when the huge mass of sensitive artistic types had been discharged and those who remained were, to quote ‘strange, much-damaged people’.

• As someone who has been hospitalized, I’m a little unsure if I am OK with the description of psych in patients as ‘strange’ and ‘much-damaged’.

• Fuck it. I’ll embrace it.

• As another total tangent, it occurs to me that one of my massive issues with fictional depictions of psych wards and with the more romanticized ‘tormented artistic waif’ portrayal of the mentally unwell stems less from active idiocy and denial on the part of the wider fiction writing world, and more from society in general having apparently not caught up with the massive changes in the 1980s, which mean that sensitive and slightly misunderstood artists generally don’t get put into large and architecturally well designed mental hospitals to paint on the walls any more. It was probably far less of a blatant lie as late as 1980.

• It’s still a really out of date trope.

• This chapter is going to be really hard for me to focus on and avoid tangents, isn’t it?

• Your patients looked like they had been painted by Hieronymus Bosch, Jordan?

• Um.

• Did you actually intern at an actual hospital? I mean, and not hell? Because I’ve been in two psych wards so far and I am pretty sure I didn’t see any Bosch like patients.

• Shit. Were you actually an intern and not a patient, Jordan? Were the Bosch beasts even there?

• Small anecdote follows which relies totally on all readers identifying totally with the doctors and automatically thinking of the patients as Other.

• I’m not the target audience here.

• Also, apparently trainee psychologists can be patronizing tossers.

• My sympathies are with his patient in the next anecdote. To give Peterson credit, in this anecdote he actually comes across as a fairly reasonable therapist.

• I would much rather have a therapist that is honest with me, even if sometimes uncomfortably so, than spouts me soothing and patronizing bullshit.

• I sort of see how this could go very wrong when it comes to dealing with issues of identity which don’t offer a single, unified, objective god given ‘truth’, and instead try and find truth in the subjective and the fluid. By which I mean ‘it’s good to be politely but relentlessly brutal in rejecting your client’s fixation on their connection to the gods. It’s shit when you take that approach and apply it to something that you think is equally mad – because you believe in gender = biological sex = given by god – but isn’t actually a psychotic hallucination’.

• I think maybe this whole book is an excellent example of how maybe life lessons shouldn’t be taken from ‘coping strategies in dealing with the acutely unwell’. Sometimes the context is radically different.

• Surprise diagnosis from range! Apparently he once lived next door to someone who ‘bore the marks of self-inflicted injuries characteristic of borderline personality disorder’. Peterson does not seem to have been her clinician. Please don’t diagnose based on nodding to her on the landing, Peterson.

• Nothing wrong with being BPD, btw. I just really dislike insta-diagnosis from range. It’s a good way of boiling a lot of complex issues down to a stereotype, which does no one any good.

• After all this, I don’t think he’s saying anything super unreasonable when he says ‘be honest’ but I’m really struggling with this chapter, mostly as I don’t like being like me being used as some kind of object lesson. I’m a reader too, Jordan! Right here! Reading! Like a real person, albeit apparently strange and much damaged.

• He makes me sound like some kind of mid Victorian home decoration.

• I can get behind that actually.

• SUDDENLY SATAN!

• Yup. You know who else lies? Lucifer?

• You know, everyone loves Miltonian Lucifer, Jordan?

• He’s the protagonist of Paradise Lost. Everyone knew it. I’m still not sure he wasn’t in the right.

• And you know who’s like Miltonian Lucifer? SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIORS!

• I mean, I get where you’re coming from, Jordan. The basic notion – that it’s a dumb idea to define your Utopia at a young age and then spend the rest of your life unhappy because you’re fighting for a promised land you don’t even want anymore but are too proud and too invested in to admit this – is good. But there is a lot of value judgement in the examples given.

• Lots more value judgement. Dreams are bad unless they contain protestant work ethic.

• Yes, OK. I do agree with Peterson that single axioms are mostly unproductive.

• Quote: [ideologues] ‘believe, narcissistically, underneath that bad theory, that the world could be put right, if only they held the controls’.

• That’s a fair point. I’m just not entirely sure that Mr 12 Rules for Life is the right person to make it.

• Quote – ‘if you will not reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself…this is a biological truth as well as a conceptual truth’.

• SUDDENLY GENETICS!

• So this book is basically 25% pop science evolutionary biology, 25% philosophy, 25% Sunday School (Calvinist version), 15% rugged masculinity and 10% ‘tidy your bed’. There. No need to read it now. I think I’ve boiled it down for you, and if you too make your bed, and then sit on it, chopping wood with one hand and reading Nietzsche with the other, as ‘Jerusalem’ plays in the background, you’ve basically had the same experience’.

• Learn to say “no” or you’ll turn into a gulag guard. Which is a fair point, although I’m not entirely sure that it was quite as simple as that.

• And of *course* it’s the gulags being referenced.

• Will there be more Columbine killer Eric Harris next? I’m a little apprehensive.

• OK. Self-awareness is good. Gotcha.

• Live authentic. Apparently Instagram was right all along.

• As ever, when reading this kind of thing I’m reminded of an appalling training course I was once sent on, which had a session on ‘how to be a more likeable person’. There were 10 rules in that course, each one with a power point slide, on how you should sit, how you should listen, how to talk to people. Do and don’t type stuff. Then, of course, the last point was ‘be your authentic self’. I nearly burst out laughing. I sort of feel the same about it coming up in this book.

• I’m also confused by what Peterson wants ‘authenticity’ to mean. I think he actually means that if stuff has gone wrong, and you decide to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and continue, then you’re authentic. If you look to external forces or feel the world is unfair, you’re inauthentic.

• But that isn’t what authentic means! I’m sure it isn’t! To be authentic indicates sincerity, surely, not showing a stiff upper lip.

• And what if you’re in a situation where the world genuinely isn’t fair? I mean, that’s an actual thing that happens. Sometimes life is unjust, difficult, and cruel.

• Jordan, were people in Stalin’s Russia inauthentic when they complained that the gulag was tough?

• Except in the next paragraph it’s good to take a stand.

• I think it’s good to complain about stuff that Peterson thinks is important and dumb to kick up a fuss about stuff he thinks isn’t.

• Holy fuck, this chapter is inconsistent as fuck.

• He is answering my question – the gulags existed because Soviet citizens lied to themselves.

• Quote – ‘deceitful, inauthentic existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism’.

• Well, that’s a bit of a heavy burden to lay on the Instagram lifestyle bloggers.

• OK. I’m going back to his authentic comment to see if I misread it as it seems so jarring.

• Re-read. OK. I think I see what he’s trying to say which is that the people bringing in bad rules which others don’t like are being inauthentic and the noble resistance to such bad ideas are authentic.

• That doesn’t make it better.

• Man, Peterson hates Instagram more than tumblr, doesn’t he?

• Freud also agrees that inauthenticity is bad.

• No one likes Freud.

• Jung agrees.

• Everyone loves Jung.

• MOTHERS! TEACH YOUR CHILDREN THE TRUTH ABOUT PAIN OR YOUR SON WILL NEVER MAN UP!

• Back to Milton.

• In Peterson’s reading, reason = God.

• Rebellion against reason is heresy.

• The left wing is made up of angels, beloved of reason, who became hubristic and believed that in their intellectualism they understood better than GodReason and were always right. THEN MURDER!

• Well, this is awkward.

• Next step – how to avoid being an intellectual murder-angel.

• Quote – ‘some reliance of tradition can help us establish our aims. It is reasonable to do what other people have always done unless we have a very good reason not to…but it is necessary to aim your target, however, traditional, with your eyes wide open’

• Is this whole chapter just here so he can say “life is hard, be self aware, accept change and be ready to start again. BUT GOD IS GOOD”.

• Yup. Think so.

As a note, the recent chapter was genuinely quite difficult to read, mostly as people like me were the objects being held up to make a point to the Normal People ™ in Peterson’s moral lesson today.

And there was a lot of that for a lesson which really could have been a single paragraph. But I think that’s maybe how self help books go.

Jordan Peterson – 12 Rules of Life. Chapter 7

More Jordan Peterson. Somehow, I’ve only made it to Rule 7. How on earth am I only half way through this? I’m becoming concerned. But I’ve started, so I’ll finish.

Rule 7 – pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

I suspect writing snarky blog posts about self help gurus is not meaningful. I am chastened already. But enough. Let’s begin.

• Life is suffering. Right. We’re sticking with that.

• Life is suffering and people use this fact to justify meaningless distraction. Like the drugs in your home town, Jordan? Eurgh. I wish I’d never read that chapter. I’m feeling guilty about being mean already.

• Quote – ‘why not simply take everything you can get, whenever the opportunity arises?…our ancestors worked out very sophisticated answers to such questions’.

• He’s very ‘wisdom of the ancients’ isn’t he?

• I mean, I guess his basic premise is not a bad one – that religion is something our collective imaginations produced in Ye Olde Days to provide meaning and structure to existence so we don’t all just run around biting each other.

• I mean, if you want to just run about biting people, that’s your call too. I won’t judge. Peterson might.

• Work and delayed gratification are good and religion teaches us both these things. Quote – ‘the act of making a ritual sacrifice to God was an early and sophisticated enactment of the idea of the usefulness of delay’. Not entirely convinced. I have always read that as more about man’s desperate need to delude himself that he can exert control over the uncontrollable. It’s the same urge that makes me read self-help books.

• Hrm. He’s big on self-discipline and motivating yourself to give up partying and the like to study – it’s all very protestant work ethic. I’m just not sure it’s true. But I’m going to try and step away from a long tangent on my opinions on the existence of laziness, and we’ll just stay with ‘Jordan Peterson definitely thinks work = morality’.

• Pop anthropology follows.

• Benjamin Franklin quotations! I’m never sure I trust Benjamin Franklin. Mostly because he wrote most of those aphorisms to make money as part of his almanac empire. Hrm. I see why Jordan Peterson likes him though.

• Oh god. This is all going very Catholic.

• But with added Socrates.

• Sacrifice is good and important – live meaningfully and it will protect you even from death.

• I mean, I guess that’s all fairly powerful helpful stuff. But very very Christian. I’m reminded of the fact that in its early days, there were those who thought of Christianity as a creepy death cult.

• I’ve never been sure they are wrong.

• More Goethe.

• A fairly scary but accurate observation – when you become self aware, you are able to torment others because you see human vulnerability.

• This is going all very goth.

• This is the chapter of Goth Catholicism. I feel like I ought to be wearing black lipstick and lace mittens and sitting in a church yard at night to read it.

• God, I’d have felt intelligent reading this stuff when I was 17.

• Now we’re onto why Jesus didn’t go down the Cain route of murder.

• Also, more Columbine quotes. Eric Harris – philosopher.

• Egyptian mythology and PTSD and how PTSD comes from wrestling with the Sutekh within.

• Man, I should be wearing an ankh while reading this.

• More bible and why Jesus was kick ass in his extreme asceticism.

• The moral lesson to all this is, to quote, ‘there’s something above even the pinnacle of the highest domaince hierarchies, access to which should not be sacrificed for mere proximal success’. Basically, man cannot live like lobster alone. Or maybe lobsters would rule the world instead of us if they only had Jesus.

• I’m not totally buying your claims about Christianity’s social progressiveness vs oppressive paganism, Peterson. I mean, I don’t believe in the loving mother goddess ancient Wicca theory. But I have concerns. I do not think Corinthians says what you think it says.

• I definitely don’t think Christianity separates church from state as a matter of doctrine.

• Now we have Nietzsche and his critique of Christianity. Seventeen year old Sally feels SO SMART. She may slowly smoke a menthol cigarette as she reads this.

• Dostoevsky appears. I can make no comment. He’s still one of my favourite writers. Shut up. I know I’m pretentious.

• I bet half of Peterson’s readers skim read this chapter, you know. That’s a lot of dense debate about Christianity and its 19th century intellectual critics.

• Quote – ‘it was in the aftermath of God’s death that the great collective horrors of Communism and Fascism sprang forth as both Doestoevsky and Nietzsche predicted they would’. But your whole argument here, Peterson, rests on communism and fascism being uniquely and absolutely horrible and destructive and you’re not making that argument well. You’re relying on your readers accepting this is true because they are the great horrors they know the best due to both being recent and also well documented by people who look a lot like most of your readers. I dispute that communism and fascism are so different in their moral character to imperialism (which produced the Atlantic slave trade, and the horrors of the Belgian Congo’ for example, or a myriad of other terrible choices on behalf of humanity which were not able to spread so far due to the lack of an industrial global society. Just because humanity invented good enough transport to be able to spread its awful ideas further, or record them in technicolor, doesn’t mean the previous awful ideas weren’t just as awful. Nor that the decline in religion (which is another debate) is the root cause.

• Also, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche got a lot wrong.

• Now enter Jung, stage left, explaining why humans need religion.

• Everyone loves Jung.

• Also Freud. No one loves Freud.

• Of course Peterson was a teenage socialist.

• Of course he realized socialism was wrong by reading George Orwell.

• Shush, George Orwell. Shush. All Peterson heard was you saying that socialism didn’t work. He doesn’t need the rest of your nonsense.

• Quote – ‘I was…tormented by the fact of the Cold War. It obsessed me. It gave me nightmares’.

• Peterson really believes in clear cut good and evil. He hates moral relativism. We have to believe in clear cut good and evil or we are all doomed.

• Why on earth does he not like modern social justice? It’s obsessed with good and evil as well. Is he actually fighting the livejournal philosophers of 2002?

• Quote – ‘above all, don’t lie. Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell’.

• Jungian archetypes – we all get to pick ours and make our own hierarchy of values. I sort of buy into this actually.

• Some slightly unsettling rambling about sin. Also about making the world better. Which you can’t do until you make yourself better due to his last chapter.

• I think Jordan Peterson might flagellate regularly. I just have that vibe.

• OK. I am slightly out of breath after reading this chapter. It’s pretty brutal and unforgiving. I think the summary is that without God, all men are evil and atheism leads to Stalin.

• We are all sinners and must repent our sins by choosing every day to sacrifice easy happiness for painful virtue and hard work.

• Also flagellating. I swear to god, I’m sure this man flagellates.

• This has been a very weird chapter. On a TMI level, what scares me the most is how much of this chapter actively reflects a bunch of things I get VERY CONCERNED ABOUT when I’m unwell and my brain is misfiring everywhere. Reading this feels like looking into my own psychosis and I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that.
• I’m going to be expedient and abandon meaning immediately and have a bath.

Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life – Chapter 6

Right. A bold step. I’m returning to Mr Peterson, after taking a break. As a vague note, I have thought about this a lot, and it seemed to me that there was absolutely no point in doing this readalong-and-blog if I wasn’t actually writing down my immediate responses to the text itself – not the context given to me by people who have watched him on YouTube, not constructed outrage which I wouldn’t feel for a second if I was reading something by a small Japanese woman instead of the testorone fuelled standard bearer of machismo, Jordan Peterson.

This is attempting to be a fair and good faith reading of this book, and I am sure I’ll miss loads and things and get lots wrong along the way, but please don’t think I’ve not considered whether I should more due diligence before reading. I have. And I’m reading blind anyway.

Now, next chapter – Rule 6. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.

• We start with the Sandy Hook Gun Massacre. OK. That’s an emotive subject. But I think worthwhile considering Peterson’s fairly deep seated anxiety about good and evil. And I think worthwhile as a philosophical subject in some ways. As Peterson points out, another mass murderer at Columbine wrote ‘the human race isn’t worth fighting for, only worth killing’. And if you do see the world as intrinsically awful and filled with evil, that is a sort of logical conclusion to reach. Quote – ‘people who think such things view Being itself as inequitable and harsh to the point of corruption, and human Being, in particular, as contemptible’.

• Shit. I hope Peterson isn’t about to go on a gun rampage.

• No, I don’t think so. We’ve moved on to Faust. Which I like. Goethe is always good value. And Mephistopheles, who Peterson is quoting…

• …oh man. Yeah. I think I see what Peterson is so scared of. I think he perceives a chunk of splodged together Leftist dialogue as basically being Mephistophelean when it gets nihilistic. Mephistopheles would probably enjoy punching Nazis. He’d explain how it was his ‘proper element’ and everything. He turns up when humans are shit and need battered down. I think, anyway. I should read more.

• WHY GOD?!? WHY?!? We’re now looking at suffering and why the world is shit.

• Now Tolstoy moping. I feel like I should confess – I love Tolstoy’s writing, but I don’t like him much as a moral guide and I find his insight into the human condition unreliable. I think this is because I’m a woman and Tolstoy is not super keen on women-as-humans due to being a 19th century Great Thinker. So I’m biased. But his dodgy relationship history and treatment of his wife lingers whenever he is quoted. It’s my very own slightly out of date #MeToo anxiety.

• Mass murder is a problem, Jordan. Um. Is this the theme of this chapter? Because I think we’re going beyond the remit of a self help book. Quote – ‘how can a person who is awake avoid outrage at the world?’

• Is it just me, or is that a little bit Reddit sounding? And you all know the parts of Reddit I mean….

• Even Jesus got angry at how unjust the world is. Randomly, is this the central theme for everyone of every political persuasion writing on the internet? The world is unfair and we need to find a thing to point at as to why this is?

• More Columbine quotes. I’m really very unconvinced that those two particular boys are reflecting on a universal part of the human condition, you know, and I’m unsure that this particular piece of ongoing promotion of them as nihilistic warrior philsophers really meets the No Notoriety code of behaviour designed to stop further school shootings.

• I also feel that making the Columbine killers avatars of Cain likewise is a little…glamorizey? Re- accuracy – I think that’s a subject for another post, especially as it crosses into whether you are of the ‘they were mentally ill and there was no philosophy’ school of thought or the ‘they weren’t mentally ill and don’t stigmatize mental illness (there might have been a philosophy)’ school of thought.

• Why are there two well defined schools of thought in internet discourse about mass shooters? Oh god. Oh god. This is why I ignore reality and focus on gardening and Marie Kondo.

• Goddamnit, Peterson. You’re getting to me again. Quote – ‘truly terrible things happen to people. It’s no wonder they are out for revenge. Under such conditions vengeance seems a moral necessity. How can it be distinguished from the demand for justice? After the experience of terrible atrocity, isn’t forgiveness just cowardice or lack of willpower? Such questions torment me’. I HAVE HAD THOSE CONVERSATIONS ABOUT PUNCHING NAZIS TOO, JORDAN! I ALSO WANT AN EXCUSE FOR PACIFISM!

• Inspirational Native American anecdote. Yeah. Jordan Peterson is a classic 1980s liberal.

• Nietzsche quote!

• I still don’t think the Columbine killers should be quoted quite as cheerfully next to Nietzsche, Goethe and Tolstoy.

• Is that elitist of me?

• TS Eliot has a character who is basically me, it seems. I should read The Cocktail Party.

• Solzhenitsyn is Peterson’s hero. I should have seen that coming.

• And the lesson we learn from Solzhenitsyn is that both Stalin was bad, and you should respond to suffering with self analysis and improvement. I think this might actually be the core of Peterson. Hate Stalin. Reflect. Make your bed. Hate Stalin some more.

• You don’t need to read this book now, by the way. I’ve just summed it up for you.

• Quote – ‘this is life. We build structures to live in. We build families and states and countries…at first we inhabit those structures and beliefs like Adam and Eve in Paradise. But success makes us complacent….we fail to notice that things are changing or that corruption is taking root. And everything falls apart. Is that the fault of reality – of God? Or do things fall apart because we have not paid sufficient attention?’

• I have a really bad feeling about this line of logic. Please Jordan, don’t move on to talking about ‘western civilisation’ right now.

• OK. I misjudged you, Jordan. You didn’t talk about western civilization here. Just that suffering is normal, and all we can do is take responsibility because we can change ourselves, we can’t change the will of God.

• I mean, that is actually the basis of my life philosophy.

• Shit. I am tainted.

• I’m going to start jousting lobsters next.

• Bugger.

• Right. Back to self help talk.

• Clean up your life. I think I’ve slipped into rugged Canadian Marie Kondo world.

• Quote – ‘don’t’ blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience’.

• This is ‘Lean In’ with extra German philosophers, isn’t it?

• Man, Peterson loves Protestantism.

• I’m left with a faintly unsettled feeling after this chapter. I think once again Peterson has done his trick of taking a shed load of academic references with some nice quotes (GERMANS! RUSSIANS! AMERICAN MASS MURDERERS!), adding them to some genuinely solid life advice about changing those things you can control because there are things you can’t…AND THEN MADNESS. Nothing as grand as the lobsters, but he takes the basic truth that you can’t just blame God and you do need to break down your problems into that which you can control and god knows we probably do all need to start there to (not a quote) ‘fuck all that Tumblr whining. Sort out your own life. If it goes wrong, it’ll be your fault’. Which isn’t really how it works. As Michelle Obama says ‘sometimes that ‘lean in’ shit doesn’t work’.

• I know I’m being inconsistent here in that I am deeply invested in avoiding blaming god and blaming myself for as much as possible. But even I know that my rugged individualism only gets me so far.

• I probably would have been eaten by bears in Jordan Peterson’s home town to be fair.

• I find myself, slightly sadly, wondering if this chapter is also influenced by his childhood friend who committed suicide. Because if the only thing you can sort out is your own life, if you can’t criticize or look to the wider picture until you’ve done that, if suffering is the norm of human existence and we must live with it, then it’s no one’s fault if those around us fall.

• Maybe I’m overthinking.

• That’s when the bears get you.

Actual footage of me during this read-through

Some clarifications

These clarifications came from some commentary on my Facebook post and I put them up here as well for posterity. 

Someone queried his comment that ‘all families are not equally good’ which they very much read as an overt attack on queer families and single mothers. My comment in reply was:

My take on that was that it wasn’t an attack. It wasn’t even a reference to queer families – I read it and thought ‘I bet this gets quoted as an anti queer family comment’ but it doesn’t mention gender and the only reason it gives for why parenting is better done in pairs is because it’s fricking hard doing it on your own – you’re more likely to be tired, make mistakes, struggle with staying calm when you’ve got no one to say “can you take the baby – I need to sleep”. Which is what single mothers I know say – it’s harder.

I think if it wasn’t Peterson, who has some bizarre theories re: gender, no one would have batted an eyelid. The interpretation being given may be accurate based on his YouTube videos or whatever, but it’s definitely not in the text.

Re – single mothers – I *think* if you’re being charitable he’s not even meaning to attack them – he has a whole paragraph on how he doesn’t want to attack single mothers who do an amazing and difficult job, often after escaping abusive situations. He’s really explicit that he thinks as individuals they are doing the best they can in a non-optimal situation.

Totally open to that being still a not-OK thing to say (not a parent, can’t comment). And I’m not really even writing this to defend Peterson. Just to try and actually see what he says instead of what Tumblr says he says. And I didn’t actually see him criticizing non-heterosexual partnerships anywhere at all in this and his sole comment on single parenting was that it was a shed tonne harder and likely to be less optimal.

Just phrased in a ‘let me be politically incorrect and stern’ kind of way.

Quote of whole paragraph:

Parents should come in pairs. Raising young children is demanding and exhausing. Because of this, it’s easy for a parent to make a mistake. Insomnia, hunger, the aftermath of an argument, a hangover, a bad day at work – any of these things singly can make a person unreasonable, while in combination they can produce someone dangerous. Under such circumstances it is necessary to have someone else around, to observe and step in and discuss. This will make it less likely that a whiny provocative child and her fed up cranky parent will excite each other to the point of no return…I am not saying we should be mean to single mothers, many of whom struggle impossibly and courageously – and a proportion of whom had had to escape, single, from a brutal relationship – but that doesn’t mean we should pretend that all family forms are equally viable. They’re not. Period.

I don’t think that paragraph is one I agree with. But I don’t think it’s alt right ‘ban gay marriage’ stuff. It’s deeply mainstream.

I think that’s my only take from this chapter. Not that it’s wonderful stuff and I shall buy a stuffed lobster in the morning. Just that it was actually relatively moderate mainstream stuff that I couldn’t, in all conscience, comedically rant about because there was nothing there to feed on.

I will add that I am not saying something is harmless for being mainstream exactly. I think this comment was more about my understanding why exactly he does appeal to so many people, because the outlandish nonsense ebbs and flows and is generally aimed at groups that may not seem real or vulnerable to you.

Which doesn’t make it OK. Or an apology for Peterson.

It’s worth my also stating that anyone reading who is offended may be right. I mean, I’m not an activist, or a philosopher or a theologian or anything other than a valium raddled old harridan with a kindle book.

My primary aim though, when doing this, was to attempt an honest and good faith analysis of the text, because I felt like I was on the verge of falling into a an easy hole of ‘I read this article on Medium about how Jordan Peterson sucks’. And in that context, I’m actually not sure whether I would read the above paragraph normally as ‘I hate gay people’ or not.

Which isn’t to say other people shouldn’t take it that way – totally their right and I’m really not here to defend the man. I just don’t think by my rules of what I can snark at him over, this chapter was pretty thin on the ground.

Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life – chapter 5

Rule 5 – do not let you children do anything that makes you dislike them

 

Yesterday I took a bit of a break from Mr Peterson, so I could go to the gym, go to Edinburgh and go to the pub, all of which were fine things to do. I spent a while pondering his obsession with Genesis. If ancient wisdom is good, is even more ancient wisdom better? Should I be looking at Hindu Vedas? What would I learn from traditional pagan deities?

I feel like that might be a project for another day. For now, another chapter. I’m starting this one in a slight dip – I don’t have children so I’m not sure I can comment much on Jordan Peterson’s advice on parenting. I did wonder if he was maybe being a little optimistic devoting a whole chapter to parenting techniques if his core readership demographic is frustrated nerds who aren’t even sure they can get laid, no matter how lobster-y they might be.

But what do I know? I’ve not written a best selling self help book. So let us begin…

• Don’t let you kid scream for hours in an airport. Don’t abuse your children. Right. Got it. Noted.
• He’s talking a lot about mothers here. Not so much about fathers.
• Hang on. Is this the women chapter?
• Men get lobster feudalism, women get told to not stave their children?
• No, we’re talking about fathers now and…
• …radical social change is bad.
• I think I have got the gist of this chapter. Basically, Tradition is good (and also better for children). Quote – ‘horror and terror lurk behind the walls provided so wisely by our ancestors. We tear them down at our peril. We skate, unconsciously, on thin ice, with deep cold waters below, where unimaginable monsters lurk’. Fuck me. He’s gone full Lovecraft.
• Apparently, the sixties sucked. I think because of hippies. Hippies really suck. They are the worst. The total worst. Probably because they don’t chop wood.
• Rousseau vs Golding. FIGHT!
• OK, Jordan, I’m confused. You wrote an entire chapter on how lobsters were hierarchical and this means we should be because nature = good or something? But now you’re explaining how chimps are horrible murder hobos (also, Jane Goodall named one of her chimps ‘Satan’. He was super murderous. I’m not sure what to take away from that, except that I will try and name all animals I meet something like ‘Buddha’ in future) and so this means we should do the opposite of them and remember that nature = original sin.
• WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE LOBSTERS?
• Loads of murder stats from the undeveloped world. I am slightly uncomfortable with the conclusions drawn which are apparently that ‘complex social structures’ (by which he means post industrial western societies) are good and the developing world is a terrible window into the intrinsic brutality of man. I don’t feel like he’s proved his point – poverty, colonialism, bad nineteenth century stats are all things I’d like to look at. But I sort of get his raw point which is that the ‘noble savage’ is not a thing. Except I’m not sure anyone except him has ever thought it was.
• Back to kids and how they need socialisation.
• Kids need boundaries and rules as well as love. Gotcha. Seems pretty sensible.
• Reward is good, but you can’t just rely on that. Quote – ‘Negative emotions, like their positive counterparts, help us learn’. Yes, actually. I agree with that. I think this is going to lead to ‘suffering is good’ soon, but I actually can’t fault what has so far been said.
• Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. I think Jordan Peterson and I actually agree here – that film is a great example of appalling parenting.
• Quote – ‘bad laws drive out respect for good laws’. I quite like that comment.
• Peterson’s oldest daughter is called ‘Mikhaila’ after Mikhail Gorbechev. I just wanted to make sure I had taken note of this. I have no more comment to make.
• There’s a bunch of stuff on child rearing and punishment, including smacking, that I feel completely unqualified to comment on. I vaguely suspect that Peterson’s kids were brought up in a way not too dissimilar to me. Make of this what you will.
• Quote – ‘parents should come in pairs’. I can see this is one of those quotes that can be taken out of context hugely. Even more so the next one ‘ we shouldn’t pretend that all family forms are equally viable. They’re not. Period’. My read on this in context is not actually that it’s a critique of gay or poly or unconventional parenting. It’s a comment that single parenting is much harder than parenting with more people because it’s just a shed load more work, which is a very different comment. Again, whether it’s true or not, I don’t think I can comment. I just don’t know.
• Yeah, the actual meat of this chapter doesn’t seem very outlandish. It seems…normal. Mainstream. Stuff that everyone else in the world says all the time, with a light sprinkling of Milton-esque theology, but only really for flavour.
• He actually never did go all ‘suffering is good’. My concerns about this chapter have proven to be entirely unfounded. I think maybe I wouldn’t have expected it either if I wasn’t primed to find this book dubious and extreme, which is maybe a comment on me.
• Final thought – I am trying to articulate this and it might take me a while, but the main thing that strikes me so far is how very very uncontentious Peterson is when talking about a certain kind of white middle class and relatively (small c) conversative world. And, in fact, how comforting he is about that world. I don’t think he’s aiming to promote the alt-right, you know. I think he’s aiming to make guilty Daily Telegraph readers feel empowered. I don’t know if that’s what he’s achieved, but I really am not getting the feeling so far that he has ever intended to have the exact political status he has gained.

Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life. Chapter 4

Rule 4 – Compare yourself to who you are today, not who someone else was yesterday.

Yes, Jordan. That sounds sensible. But I’ve been lured in before. I’m not falling for it this time! But enough. Let’s proceed….

• I really see why the alt-right love this guy. Also, I think I see why I could like this guy. Quote – ‘dare to articulate yourself and express, or at least become aware of, what would really justify your life….if you allowed your dark and unspoken desires for your partner, for example, to manifest themselves you might discover that they were not so dark, given the light of day’. This is actually a valid point in many contexts – I’ve written before here about the toxicity of our purity culture, of our addiction to shame. I’m someone who has been taken into hospital after freaking out about being a stain on society. I mean, yeah, I’m batshit. I go beyond what’s normal. But I think although my feelings are exaggerated, they aren’t uncommon. And god, I love the idea of being told ‘don’t feel guilty’. It’s why I started larping, after all, back in the grim and dysfunctional nineties when it was cool to be a bad guy and ‘problematic’ meant you’d fucked up at algebra.

• Quote – ‘the femme fatale and the anti-hero are sexually attractive for a reason’. You know, I’m not going to blame Peterson for the fact that the dangerously unhinged take this as an excuse to be tossers. Because he is just observing a truth well recorded in pop culture. Do you remember the Loki fan girls? I sure do.

• He’s also dead right on not comparing yourself to others.

• Oh, hello evolutionary psychology. I’ve missed you. We have eyes because we are hunters and this means…we need a figurative target as well as a literal one to….BIOLOGY THAT IS WHY!

• I mean, I’m not saying it isn’t good to have goals. I’m basically addicted to them at this point (trufax, I spent this evening mourning that I had run out of rooms in my house to clean before making a list of potential new projects/hobbies/things to learn. Shush. It’s perfectly happy. I’ve added ‘relax’ to my ‘to do’ list). But Peterson loves linking anything and everything to biology.

• I’m gonna admit, this chapter is definitely not as awful as previous ones. He’s not been that mad at all and I’m being a bit picky. Yeah, I like the idea that ‘happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill’. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it isn’t awful.

• Yeah, I really like the idea of starting by fixing some small things to soothe the inner critic and then moving on.

• Fair point about religion existing because humans like value systems which point the way to a higher order. I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t like that.

• I can’t even criticize him for quoting Dostoevsky because it’s totally relevant and also one of my favourite books. DAMNIT! Someone get a normal person instead of a pretentious achievement junkie to review this shit!

• Hrm. Interesting suggestion as to why the bible is useful – not as the word of god, but as the document that is the product of the collective human imagination of the west. Quote – ‘it’s careful, respectful study can reveal things to us about what we believe and how we do and should act’. Very Jungian. But not insane.

• ….

• Um.

• Old Testament God = manly and likely to punch things. This means he’s good. New Testament ‘God of Love’ is a wuss bag and therefore bad. I think I need a drink. Goddamnit, Jordan. I was so hopeful for a bit. Also, he’s talking about Stalin again.

• Fiiiine. So other people have asked about how you can believe in a kind God after Auschwitz. You can get as pass on that, Peterson.

• OK. This chapter is the least batshit so far. Only moderately stern and mostly in a way that I’ve let CS Lewis get away with before. A load of this stuff could be in the Screwtape Letters. Except those were funnier. This was a bit earnest but not horrible.

• I do kind of miss the lobsters.

 

This is also the last of my posts copied across from Facebook. They were all written today (01/02/2019) over a six hour period when apparently I had more time than sense. Future posts I’ll try and cross post from Facebook to Blogger, as I’ve been asked to save them for posterity. I think people just want spoilers about the lobsters…