{"id":22562,"date":"2019-02-10T18:42:19","date_gmt":"2019-02-10T23:42:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/?p=22562"},"modified":"2026-03-25T16:51:38","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T20:51:38","slug":"jordan-petersons-12-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/jordan-petersons-12-rules\/","title":{"rendered":"Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"12<\/a>I<\/span> really<\/em> wanted to read this book objectively, separating it from the media hype and social media torrents<\/strong> of opinion and abuse that often accompany its author, Jordan Peterson. I wanted to consider it in the company of the vast number of already-published self-help or philosophical books, and the historical context in which they exist.<\/p>\n

Sadly, I was unable to do so for one simple reason: there’s too much Jordan Peterson in it.<\/strong><\/span> You have to wade through far too much of him to get to the rules. He meanders quite a bit, mostly to ramble on about himself. The rules are, themselves, rather diluted by his presence.<\/p>\n

Jordan Peterson is undoubtedly a smart, well-educated man and a reasonably good writer, but sometimes he comes across as a pompous, supercilious git. And that obfuscates the intended message, at least for me.<\/p>\n

Peterson is, like I said, a smart man. I cannot dispute his statements on psychology or human development because he knows more about it than most of us. And he references several of his statements with citations to such awe-inspiring academic documents as “Allostasis and allostatic load implications for neuropsychopharmacology,<\/em>” “Tool use induces morphological updating of the body schema<\/em>” and “Dimension models of personality: The five-factor model and the DSM-5<\/em>.” Who am I to argue with these sources?<\/p>\n

For those of us on a less-lofty plane, he also references the Bible, poems of W.B. Yeats, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago<\/em>, Lao Tse’s Tao teh ching<\/em> and the Guardian newspaper. Whew. Something I can read and maybe understand. But these references don’t cover the voluminous number of claims and statements in the book. It’s full of pithy epigrams and aphorisms.<\/p>\n

There are only 220 noted sources and no separate bibliography. Peterson makes a lot of statements that, without being referenced to a citation, are either vague generalities or simply opinions. For example:<\/p>\n

Eco-activists, even more idealistic in their viewpoint, envision nature as harmoniously balanced and perfect, absent the disruptions and depredations of mankind. (p13-14)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t know which “eco-activists” he spoke to, but that sort of romanticized, even naive (if not downright puerile) view of eco-activism doesn’t match any viewpoints I’ve heard or read from anyone who might fit that description.\u00a0 And you can read a lot of them online. David Suzuki, for example, arguably Canada’s most well-known environmental activist, doesn’t say anything of the sort. His own website<\/a> neatly defines his views:<\/p>\n

We are interconnected with nature, and with each other. What we do to the planet and its living creatures, we do to ourselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ll chalk this one up as an opinion, and a politically-biased one at that. The Catholic World Report<\/a> noted in its review:<\/p>\n

Peterson wades into a muck of assertions without argument; disconnected similes and examples that insult reason; arbitrary and happenstance judgments; and implications that are dangerous in their banality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here are some other statements I pulled at random, also not referenced to any source or publication:
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