Please forgive me, I’m really not here to argue or pick a fight. That’s not my style.
It’s just that this particular take on Jordan Peterson seems to miss an essential point. And I say this with genuine respect, especially given that he recently spent almost a month in intensive care with pneumonia, sepsis, and nerve damage. He’s still recovering slowly, and his family has asked for prayers.
Of course 12 Rules for Life isn’t a philosophical treatise. Peterson isn’t a philosopher, he’s a clinical psychologist. Within his field, he has a serious academic record: over 100 peer-reviewed papers, more than 24,000 citations, and an h-index between 40 and 57. He taught at Harvard, where he was nominated for the Levinson Teaching Prize for five consecutive years, and later became one of the most highly rated professors at the University of Toronto.
So when he wrote 12 Rules for Life, he wasn’t pretending to do philosophy. He was translating decades of clinical and empirical knowledge into moral-psychological language that could reach readers who had been largely abandoned by the culture, mostly young men looking for orientation, responsibility, and meaning.
That’s why the book resonated so deeply. It may not impress philosophers, but it helped those who needed it most.
So no, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that 12 Rule isn’t a work of academic philosophy. It was never meant to be.
Peterson's "12 Rules" addresses a real problem in contemporary society, that men feel both emotionally and materially precarious, unable to find safety in the workplace or in relationships.
However, the core issue with Peterson is that he perpetuates a discipline-over-love model that continues intergenerational trauma cycles instead of recognizing and healing them. When Peterson emphasizes order, hierarchy, and "toughening up," men who were raised with emotional distance find validation for their own upbringing rather than recognizing it as a wound. It becomes "my father was right to be strict and withholding" rather than "I needed more warmth and was hurt by its absence."
Peterson projects unhealthy but present anger in men. He often channels it outward (at "postmodern neo-Marxists," at societal changes, at chaos) rather than helping men examine the deeper pain underneath. Anger is often a secondary emotion protecting against vulnerability, grief, or feelings of abandonment. If a framework only validates the anger without creating space for the underlying hurt, it perpetuates the cycle.
Men seek a "father figure" in Peterson who tells them to be harder, more disciplined, and more orderly - potentially the same qualities their distant fathers emphasized. It's a re-enactment masquerading as healing. These men (like Peterson himself), who do not experience their parents as loving or unconditionally accepting, or to whom their parents evince only discipline and separation, are drawn to Peterson's ideas because they give solace to their justified anger without addressing its root cause. And the cycle continues.
His parenting advice, “If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends.” (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos) is reasonable. If you don't know how to act around people, you will not know how to act around people. But he then adopts an authoritarian position on how to enable this outcome without acknowledging that discipline without underlying acceptance and love (authoritarian-dominant) can lead to anxiety and substance abuse like Peterson and many of his acolytes experience. Authoritarian-accepting, where parents love unconditionally but set boundaries, is a very positive style of parenting.
Peterson was raised in harsh conditions and subsequently battled anxiety and substance abuse. Tellingly, he refers to his childhood as "stable," not "loving" or "close-knit", which can suggest a high-discipline family system.
Much of Peterson's research was fairly banal, focusing on behavioral correlations with addiction and on meaning-making through religion and myth. It is not a reach to say his childhood was marked by insecurity and fear, and his research and eventual public and private persona are a response to those profound emotions.
Actual healing, the alternative to Peterson's ideas, centered on love, emotional attunement, and addressing root wounds, requires vulnerability that Peterson's framework treats with suspicion. Men raised without secure attachment may experience that vulnerability as a dangerous weakness rather than the pathway to healing.
To put it more curtly, it is like a wingman at a bar saying, "Women are b____s" when their buddy gets rejected instead of helping him understand how to connect with the opposite sex—and then writing a book about how to pick up girls. Like the wingman's, Peterson's advice feels validating in the moment while ensuring men remain trapped in the same emotional patterns that render them unable to build the genuine intimacy and connection they need.
Much less complicatedly, I would add this...I have not engaged with Peterson's writing whatsoever, but his "stuff" is everywhere and unavoidable. He comes across as someone who's quite certain he's got it all figured out, and I NEVER wann to hear from someone with that attitude about basically anything, especially anything complicated.
The fact that Peterson seems to have loving relationships with his wife and children seems to suggest that he at least on some level recognizes that vulnerability is important as well. I don't think he adopted an extreme authoritarian style in his own household. I don't get the authoritarian vibe you subscribe to him from his work, but it's also been awhile since I've read his book or listened to his material. I do think a lot of what he puts out is a corrective to what he sees as excess in the opposite direction -- love and acceptance without boundaries or structure.
I am glad to hear that his family is healthy, and I do not blame him for the situation of men these days. He is responding to a genuine need. I just think he is expanding what Alice Miller called "Poisonous Pedagogy," or practices rooted in shame, punishment, and authoritarian control.
He has also lost his shit in recent years:
"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, to speak biblically—the chaos forever lurking beneath our thin surfaces of security.”
“...A flaming sword is not only that which carves, it's that which burns. And what does it carve away and burn? Well, you want to get to paradise? It carves away everything about you that isn't perfect.”
You bring up the most critical point, which is that society has changed in a way that men have been poorly prepared to handle. I will say that Silent Generation and Boomer parents were atrocious, and that has had an effect on GenX and Millenials. Men are not prepared.
How should a society respond?
In my mind, saying society should go backward to accommodate bruised people is a bad idea. In my perfect world, we would maintain the new, higher standards, less rape, more consent, fighting hierarchies, but enforce them with understanding and empathy.
I’m late to the party here, but here’s my take on the Jordan Peterson kerfuffle. I’m with you on his academic background. He was a beloved teacher. Some of his lectures are terrific—his one on Pinocchio is great. I would go see him speak. He is certainly an interesting person. But I couldn’t make it through 12 Rules. I found the writing turgid and confusing. It was completely unlike listening to him speak. That’s why I bailed.
It’s aptly titled; alchemy is fantasy, and Coelho is no more than a smooth criminal, a purveyor of sweet nothings and shimmering delusion.
The book sounds profound but says nothing at all.
It is uncertain trumpet without vision, feigning depth while barely grazing the surface.
It mistakes vagueness for wisdom and simplicity for truth and is the kind of tale that might’ve been a single parable from Christ (short, piercing, actually meaningful) instead of a meandering search for self.
But, we live in an age where self-congratulation, spiritualism, and navel-gazing masquerade as enlightenment, so of course everyone loves it.
It was slop before AI came along and made slop our daily bread.
When I read this one I truly thought I had missed something- surely something so popular wouldn’t be so… nothingburger? Ahhh to be that young and naive…
Just to provide a different opinion – I think books can be great for different people and this is an excellent example of a book that's great for some.
I remember re-reading the little prince as an adult and feeling very little, but reading it as a child and having my socks knocked off. I think the alchemist is one of those kind of books
This book made so many young people pick-up reading. It is still better than a lot of the wattpad fiction that is sold nowadays!
I read it as a teenager and I liked so much I read many other books by Coelho. Not gonna apologize for it even 25 years +!!
Now when I see my niece reading 'It ends with us' as if it was some piece of litterature, I shudder a litte. (not that I have read it myself, maybe I should read it before criticising though.)
It sounds like you’re not familiar with the cultural or philosophical references the book pulls from, and therefore it read as bland to you. I, for one, was delighted throughout — in fact the very opening of the book where the main character picks up his jacket is written as a metaphor that could sum up all alchemical philosophy. The book said “nothing” to you, likely because you didn’t have the scaffolding to receive it. Alas, if you think of alchemy as being simply equivalent to fantasy or magic, yes, the book will be a let down.
Shots fired from the Ivory Tower! :) Given I read it after a degree in philosophy, I don’t think it’s a scaffolding issue, but one of substance. Allusion alone doesn’t make art; you can’t make a good omelette out of rotten eggs, no matter how many symbolic chickens you reference.
I really liked 12 rules for life. I did end up skipping portions, especially where he’s quoting Christianity out of context, but overall I found the deeper concepts helpful.
But I like self help books, and that doesn’t mean anyone else has to.
I have trouble standing up for myself, so chapter one and two were both really helpful. The idea that I need to stand up for myself, and that standing up for myself makes it easier for me to stand up for myself. And that not neglecting myself is actually important.
Chapter 5 about not letting children do anything that makes one dislike them really challenged my parenting assumptions, but I feel like I’m better off from choosing to be a bit less permissive.
I also tend to be more flexible in my speech, but he makes a really good argument that precise language matters, and that we shouldn’t let other people determine the exact language we use to describe concepts (and especially not redefine it on a societal level). I’d previously filed language flexibility under the golden rule, that I wanted to treat others the way I wanted to be treated, and I don’t like it when people use language that disturbs me or triggers my mental heath issues. But if the language we use not only reflects our beliefs but also influences (and to some extent determines) our beliefs, we should be much more careful how we use it.
Concerning not letting children… Reminds me of my wife’s admonition to our children that she learned from her mother, “ I’m not your friend, I’m your parent. I’m raising you in such a way because I want to like you when you’re an adult. “
"we shouldn’t let other people determine the exact language we use to describe concepts (and especially not redefine it on a societal level" So we shouldn't let even Peterson to re-define what atheism, belief, "do", "God" or even "nazi" mean.
I confess I don’t like Peterson’s work in general, but I thought the book was surprisingly good. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 were really good. There were two parts of the book that bothered me. One was his diatribe about men where he cried (he read the audiobook). It comes off as disingenuous. The other was his weird views on Christianity that seem to enrage both Christians and atheists. Oh, there’s a third. He offers “just so” answers from evolution far too frequently when he should engage in critical thinking. All that said, I would recommend the book. It certainly wouldn’t show up on an anti-recommendation list from me.
jp is the annoying right-winger among the mostly left-wing scriptural liberalists and it drives me nuts (the scriptural liberalists more than jp in particular)
The definitive Peterson retrospective has yet to be written. Personally I think the Jung stuff was also pseudoscientific bunk. What's particularly damning is him orienting his entire personal moral narrative arc around lessons around genocide prevention from WW2 and enthusiastically promoting an ongoing one in Gaza.
"The worst part is you have betrayed yourself for nothing"
Man, I'm glad you included the Kaiju book. I was eying that hard a few months ago and felt bad for not grabbing it at the bookstore. This makes me feel better.
Just as another view point: I loved it! It doesn’t really have high emotional stakes, as Jared points out, but it was so so so much fun. I would still recommend you to read it, but read it for what it is, a light-hearted action / comedy / sci-fi. Don’t go in expecting something else.
That's how I felt about this one too! I really just wanted something light and funny with short chapters and a fun concept for reading out loud with my husband. We both like more serious books too but I've found that I prefer something like this when I'm reading more slowly because out loud 😄
I would say, Jared Henderson, PhD, is probably not the target audience for Peterson. It’s a bit of an odd take as a philosopher though to criticize a book aimed at the general public, claiming to have learned nothing from it. I would hope you’d learn nothing from it, having spent a lifetime reading philosophy. But for most people, this will be the first and only book they will ever read that touches on these topics. This is a bit of the academic elitism that frustrates many people outside of this world.
I read it for my doctoral dissertation on far-right extremist ideology and political theory and it was most unpleasant reading experience because it was so poorly argued without much nuance. The problem is that it is a book for children/young men that establishes a hostile framework (political ideology) that minimizes women/minorities/left-wing people's grievances. If it was just self-reliance that would be one thing, but it is decidedly more toxic/loaded advice than basic self help/productivity. As with most of Peterson's work for the public (Quora/podcast/general books) it is a man blaming boogie men he does not understand or engage with meaningfully or complexly.
I, too, disliked/ hated Pillars of the Earth. So much was contrived and overwrought. And the ending?! I felt a fool for having read it and will never touch a Ken Follett book ever again.
I totally agree. I spent a lot of time reading Pillars of the Earth. All his novels are very long. I assumed they would all be similar to Pillars of the Earth, so I have not read any others.
Peterson’s value as a thinker is in Maps of Meaning and his lectures on the Bible. What made the attacks and misrepresentations of him so stupid is exactly because 12 Rules for Life is an uncontroversial self help book for wayward young men, and there’s nothing radical or world bending about it. If you don’t need it that’s a good thing. Some men do, and it can get them to the point where someday they don’t need it either
He immediately destroys at least half that value by taking a blatant scriptural liberalist position, which makes his right-wing stance fairly unusual. But no less annoying.
It was Peterson's lobsters that did me in. Lobsters are f___ing awful creatures that breed like fieldmice and then have an orgy of cannibalism. If there ever were a totalizing system of behavior to be avoided, it would be lobster society. Yet Peterson finds the example he needs to make his inane position about positional society and runs with it.
His parenting advice is just bad and is just another flavor of the same discipline-over-love model that a million other self-help gurus with traumatic childhoods peddle. Peterson is a deeply hurt person and should not be dispensing parenting advice. And BTW, there is only one thing you must do as a parent: deeply love and accept your child for the first two years, regardless of what little beast you get.
I never read any of his work and just started learning about him when I heard his rule '5-“Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.”
That did it for me, as a mom it just felt off and wrong and I was out of the Peterson real way before all the recent drama...
Stolen Focus, for me, was at best a primer. I don’t mind his assumption that the reader already believes attention matters, but I wish he had gone deeper on a lot of his topics. The section on ADHD felt especially rushed and under researched- basically summarized as “how many people REALLY have ADHD? Idk but seems weird!” You know when one flaw really makes you notice the other flaws? That was it for me.
GTD is an interesting one. When I first read it in my 20s, I definitely thought it was a key to getting MORE done. Now a decade later, I’m currently re-reading it and it feels much more purposeful to me- how to get what matters done. I suspect what you read from it deeply depends on your mindset while reading. I also mostly use the system as a memory aid, without which I wouldn’t remember deadlines until things are due or overdue, so in many ways it helps me avoid over-spending my energy at work instead of just “grinding and being ground”.
As a woman , I just can’t with Jordan Peterson and it’s depressing and a little frightening how popular he is. The subtitle of this book “antidote to chaos” feels pretty specific from someone who also thinks femininity is chaos… not a space I’m welcome in nor one I want to visit.
I'm curious about re-reading GTD now. I read years ago whenever I was swamped at a job and it was helpful at the time, but I was also deeply entrenched in productivity culture. Also heavy agree on your JP take
It’s still definitely a productivity book. I think the latest edition is better than the original- he explicitly includes stay at home parents, retired people, etc who may also want to get things done which helps with tone. I think he emphasizes the importance of making sure tasks MATTER more than the original, but I don’t have it to compare and that could just be my own lens colouring the work.
Wild to see discussion of JP that doesn’t acknowledge how dangerous some of his views are towards women and transgender people. I wasn’t expecting to encounter the manosphere here, but perhaps that was naive of me.
I’ve never understood the hatred for Jordan Peterson’s book. I’ve read a ton of self-help books and most of what Petersen advises is generic self-help advice that you could find in 100 other books. And none of those books offended anyone. He’s just a polarizing personality I suppose. But almost none of his polarizing opinions are in this book.
Yeah I agree, it’s totally possible to think Peterson is a normal guy from just the book. It’s his non-book opinions on things like incels (ultimately women’s fault for not having sex with them), masculine and feminine energy (masc is order and goodness, fem is chaos and trouble), women in business (not qualified compared to men) or trans people (don’t really exist) that make him gross.
Do you curate the books you actually purchase and put on your bookshelf? I ask because a majority of books I buy, I don't particularly end up liking--so to a stranger, my bookshelf is not really a representation of my taste. At best, it's a bookshelf of attempted taste.
For myself, books I purchase fall into two broad categories: 1) borrowed from library and want to own or 2) not available from the library. Ones I don’t like in category 2 get donated.
Jordan Peterson's best self help is summed up pretty well in these two short videos. There's no doubt that they resonate more when you're young and struggling.
Only one work of fiction. Remembrance of Things Past is the most pointless nonsense I have ever had the misfortune of trying to read. I got to page 200 and capitulated. I was not even 10% of the way through. Its French title is: In Search of Lost Time. I suspect it is a warning to the hapless prospective reader.
Oscar Wilde wrote a short essay where he identified 3 classes of books, books to read, books to re-read and books not to be read.
"The third class is by far the most important. To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for, the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching; to Parnassus there is no primer and nothing that one can learn is ever worth learning. But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission to the University Extension Scheme.
Indeed, it is one that is eminently needed in this age of ours, an age that reads so much, that it has no time to admire, and writes so much, that it has no time to think. Whoever will select out of the chaos of our modern curricula ‘The Worst Hundred Books,’ and publish a list of them, will confer on the rising generation a real and lasting benefit."
So congratulations on adding to this noble pursuit.
Wilde's examples of books not to read:
"Books not to read at all, such as Thomson’s Seasons, Rogers’s Italy, Paley’s Evidences, all the Fathers except St. Augustine, all John Stuart Mill except the essay on Liberty, all Voltaire’s plays without any exception, Butler’s Analogy, Grant’s Aristotle, Hume’s England, Lewes’s History of Philosophy, all argumentative books and all books that try to prove anything."
I break this rule because I've read a lot of Mill other than On Liberty.
For me, an anti-recommendation would be Blood Meridian. I know for some people, this book is tantamount to a lifestyle. For me, however, I could not wait to be done with it. I probably should have just given up on it, but I am kinda' stupidly stubborn about such things.
Many great novels have grim elements to them - Crime and Punishment & Oliver Twist - come to mind - but I experienced a sense of emotional investment and even joy in reading them. Blood Meridian is just intrinsically grim in pretty much every aspect, or so it seems to me.
The stories of H.P. Lovecraft fall in the intrinsically grim camp as well.
I'm reading Blood Meridian right now in my Bucket List Book Club and it's incredible but I don't like it, if you know what I mean. McCarthy's prose is one-of-a-kind and his genius is obvious, but I've never before encountered a novel with naught a single protagonist.
Please forgive me, I’m really not here to argue or pick a fight. That’s not my style.
It’s just that this particular take on Jordan Peterson seems to miss an essential point. And I say this with genuine respect, especially given that he recently spent almost a month in intensive care with pneumonia, sepsis, and nerve damage. He’s still recovering slowly, and his family has asked for prayers.
Of course 12 Rules for Life isn’t a philosophical treatise. Peterson isn’t a philosopher, he’s a clinical psychologist. Within his field, he has a serious academic record: over 100 peer-reviewed papers, more than 24,000 citations, and an h-index between 40 and 57. He taught at Harvard, where he was nominated for the Levinson Teaching Prize for five consecutive years, and later became one of the most highly rated professors at the University of Toronto.
So when he wrote 12 Rules for Life, he wasn’t pretending to do philosophy. He was translating decades of clinical and empirical knowledge into moral-psychological language that could reach readers who had been largely abandoned by the culture, mostly young men looking for orientation, responsibility, and meaning.
That’s why the book resonated so deeply. It may not impress philosophers, but it helped those who needed it most.
So no, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that 12 Rule isn’t a work of academic philosophy. It was never meant to be.
No hard feelings at all.
Peterson's "12 Rules" addresses a real problem in contemporary society, that men feel both emotionally and materially precarious, unable to find safety in the workplace or in relationships.
However, the core issue with Peterson is that he perpetuates a discipline-over-love model that continues intergenerational trauma cycles instead of recognizing and healing them. When Peterson emphasizes order, hierarchy, and "toughening up," men who were raised with emotional distance find validation for their own upbringing rather than recognizing it as a wound. It becomes "my father was right to be strict and withholding" rather than "I needed more warmth and was hurt by its absence."
Peterson projects unhealthy but present anger in men. He often channels it outward (at "postmodern neo-Marxists," at societal changes, at chaos) rather than helping men examine the deeper pain underneath. Anger is often a secondary emotion protecting against vulnerability, grief, or feelings of abandonment. If a framework only validates the anger without creating space for the underlying hurt, it perpetuates the cycle.
Men seek a "father figure" in Peterson who tells them to be harder, more disciplined, and more orderly - potentially the same qualities their distant fathers emphasized. It's a re-enactment masquerading as healing. These men (like Peterson himself), who do not experience their parents as loving or unconditionally accepting, or to whom their parents evince only discipline and separation, are drawn to Peterson's ideas because they give solace to their justified anger without addressing its root cause. And the cycle continues.
His parenting advice, “If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends.” (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos) is reasonable. If you don't know how to act around people, you will not know how to act around people. But he then adopts an authoritarian position on how to enable this outcome without acknowledging that discipline without underlying acceptance and love (authoritarian-dominant) can lead to anxiety and substance abuse like Peterson and many of his acolytes experience. Authoritarian-accepting, where parents love unconditionally but set boundaries, is a very positive style of parenting.
Peterson was raised in harsh conditions and subsequently battled anxiety and substance abuse. Tellingly, he refers to his childhood as "stable," not "loving" or "close-knit", which can suggest a high-discipline family system.
Much of Peterson's research was fairly banal, focusing on behavioral correlations with addiction and on meaning-making through religion and myth. It is not a reach to say his childhood was marked by insecurity and fear, and his research and eventual public and private persona are a response to those profound emotions.
Actual healing, the alternative to Peterson's ideas, centered on love, emotional attunement, and addressing root wounds, requires vulnerability that Peterson's framework treats with suspicion. Men raised without secure attachment may experience that vulnerability as a dangerous weakness rather than the pathway to healing.
To put it more curtly, it is like a wingman at a bar saying, "Women are b____s" when their buddy gets rejected instead of helping him understand how to connect with the opposite sex—and then writing a book about how to pick up girls. Like the wingman's, Peterson's advice feels validating in the moment while ensuring men remain trapped in the same emotional patterns that render them unable to build the genuine intimacy and connection they need.
Much less complicatedly, I would add this...I have not engaged with Peterson's writing whatsoever, but his "stuff" is everywhere and unavoidable. He comes across as someone who's quite certain he's got it all figured out, and I NEVER wann to hear from someone with that attitude about basically anything, especially anything complicated.
Yeah, I hope I didn't come across that way.
I get triggered by Peterson because, on first read, it is so affirming, but it is cancerous.
Like the first drink for an alcoholic.
When I know I am responding from disdain, I try to be more thorough so I don't make the same mistake.
No I totally get where you're coming from. Disdain for what is worthy of disdain is no crime in my book!
The fact that Peterson seems to have loving relationships with his wife and children seems to suggest that he at least on some level recognizes that vulnerability is important as well. I don't think he adopted an extreme authoritarian style in his own household. I don't get the authoritarian vibe you subscribe to him from his work, but it's also been awhile since I've read his book or listened to his material. I do think a lot of what he puts out is a corrective to what he sees as excess in the opposite direction -- love and acceptance without boundaries or structure.
I am glad to hear that his family is healthy, and I do not blame him for the situation of men these days. He is responding to a genuine need. I just think he is expanding what Alice Miller called "Poisonous Pedagogy," or practices rooted in shame, punishment, and authoritarian control.
He has also lost his shit in recent years:
"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, to speak biblically—the chaos forever lurking beneath our thin surfaces of security.”
“...A flaming sword is not only that which carves, it's that which burns. And what does it carve away and burn? Well, you want to get to paradise? It carves away everything about you that isn't perfect.”
You bring up the most critical point, which is that society has changed in a way that men have been poorly prepared to handle. I will say that Silent Generation and Boomer parents were atrocious, and that has had an effect on GenX and Millenials. Men are not prepared.
How should a society respond?
In my mind, saying society should go backward to accommodate bruised people is a bad idea. In my perfect world, we would maintain the new, higher standards, less rape, more consent, fighting hierarchies, but enforce them with understanding and empathy.
But you make the right point for sure.
I’m late to the party here, but here’s my take on the Jordan Peterson kerfuffle. I’m with you on his academic background. He was a beloved teacher. Some of his lectures are terrific—his one on Pinocchio is great. I would go see him speak. He is certainly an interesting person. But I couldn’t make it through 12 Rules. I found the writing turgid and confusing. It was completely unlike listening to him speak. That’s why I bailed.
I nominate The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.
It’s aptly titled; alchemy is fantasy, and Coelho is no more than a smooth criminal, a purveyor of sweet nothings and shimmering delusion.
The book sounds profound but says nothing at all.
It is uncertain trumpet without vision, feigning depth while barely grazing the surface.
It mistakes vagueness for wisdom and simplicity for truth and is the kind of tale that might’ve been a single parable from Christ (short, piercing, actually meaningful) instead of a meandering search for self.
But, we live in an age where self-congratulation, spiritualism, and navel-gazing masquerade as enlightenment, so of course everyone loves it.
It was slop before AI came along and made slop our daily bread.
When I read this one I truly thought I had missed something- surely something so popular wouldn’t be so… nothingburger? Ahhh to be that young and naive…
Right?!?
Yes! A load of turgid piffle and so blindingly obvious and lacking in any subtlety whatsoever.
Just to provide a different opinion – I think books can be great for different people and this is an excellent example of a book that's great for some.
I remember re-reading the little prince as an adult and feeling very little, but reading it as a child and having my socks knocked off. I think the alchemist is one of those kind of books
Come oooon!!!
This book made so many young people pick-up reading. It is still better than a lot of the wattpad fiction that is sold nowadays!
I read it as a teenager and I liked so much I read many other books by Coelho. Not gonna apologize for it even 25 years +!!
Now when I see my niece reading 'It ends with us' as if it was some piece of litterature, I shudder a litte. (not that I have read it myself, maybe I should read it before criticising though.)
The only book I’ve ever burned.
🤝🤝🤝
It sounds like you’re not familiar with the cultural or philosophical references the book pulls from, and therefore it read as bland to you. I, for one, was delighted throughout — in fact the very opening of the book where the main character picks up his jacket is written as a metaphor that could sum up all alchemical philosophy. The book said “nothing” to you, likely because you didn’t have the scaffolding to receive it. Alas, if you think of alchemy as being simply equivalent to fantasy or magic, yes, the book will be a let down.
Shots fired from the Ivory Tower! :) Given I read it after a degree in philosophy, I don’t think it’s a scaffolding issue, but one of substance. Allusion alone doesn’t make art; you can’t make a good omelette out of rotten eggs, no matter how many symbolic chickens you reference.
Not to be too cute here but surely you realize your reply is very much "shots fired from the Ivory Tower" as well!
A PHD in philosophy !!!
What does that even mean?
Myopic and ego driven doctrine masquerading as academic excellence is so transparent.
Nuances in literature are louder and deeper than some may see
Maybe the book just wasn't your bag….
Maybe your life experience and closed “academic” mind are not receptive to the subtle intercourse of what is and what can be.
Try coming from a conscious perspective, not a “learned” one verse idiolagy.
There's a huge difference between intelligence and academic.
I really liked 12 rules for life. I did end up skipping portions, especially where he’s quoting Christianity out of context, but overall I found the deeper concepts helpful.
But I like self help books, and that doesn’t mean anyone else has to.
Could you tell me which part you found most helpful? I’m genuinely curious.
I have trouble standing up for myself, so chapter one and two were both really helpful. The idea that I need to stand up for myself, and that standing up for myself makes it easier for me to stand up for myself. And that not neglecting myself is actually important.
Chapter 5 about not letting children do anything that makes one dislike them really challenged my parenting assumptions, but I feel like I’m better off from choosing to be a bit less permissive.
I also tend to be more flexible in my speech, but he makes a really good argument that precise language matters, and that we shouldn’t let other people determine the exact language we use to describe concepts (and especially not redefine it on a societal level). I’d previously filed language flexibility under the golden rule, that I wanted to treat others the way I wanted to be treated, and I don’t like it when people use language that disturbs me or triggers my mental heath issues. But if the language we use not only reflects our beliefs but also influences (and to some extent determines) our beliefs, we should be much more careful how we use it.
Concerning not letting children… Reminds me of my wife’s admonition to our children that she learned from her mother, “ I’m not your friend, I’m your parent. I’m raising you in such a way because I want to like you when you’re an adult. “
"we shouldn’t let other people determine the exact language we use to describe concepts (and especially not redefine it on a societal level" So we shouldn't let even Peterson to re-define what atheism, belief, "do", "God" or even "nazi" mean.
I confess I don’t like Peterson’s work in general, but I thought the book was surprisingly good. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 were really good. There were two parts of the book that bothered me. One was his diatribe about men where he cried (he read the audiobook). It comes off as disingenuous. The other was his weird views on Christianity that seem to enrage both Christians and atheists. Oh, there’s a third. He offers “just so” answers from evolution far too frequently when he should engage in critical thinking. All that said, I would recommend the book. It certainly wouldn’t show up on an anti-recommendation list from me.
jp is the annoying right-winger among the mostly left-wing scriptural liberalists and it drives me nuts (the scriptural liberalists more than jp in particular)
The definitive Peterson retrospective has yet to be written. Personally I think the Jung stuff was also pseudoscientific bunk. What's particularly damning is him orienting his entire personal moral narrative arc around lessons around genocide prevention from WW2 and enthusiastically promoting an ongoing one in Gaza.
"The worst part is you have betrayed yourself for nothing"
Man, I'm glad you included the Kaiju book. I was eying that hard a few months ago and felt bad for not grabbing it at the bookstore. This makes me feel better.
Just as another view point: I loved it! It doesn’t really have high emotional stakes, as Jared points out, but it was so so so much fun. I would still recommend you to read it, but read it for what it is, a light-hearted action / comedy / sci-fi. Don’t go in expecting something else.
I think the plot was fine and probably fun. I just hate the tone!
Dang it. I was glad to shorten my list but now I may add it back
That's how I felt about this one too! I really just wanted something light and funny with short chapters and a fun concept for reading out loud with my husband. We both like more serious books too but I've found that I prefer something like this when I'm reading more slowly because out loud 😄
I would say, Jared Henderson, PhD, is probably not the target audience for Peterson. It’s a bit of an odd take as a philosopher though to criticize a book aimed at the general public, claiming to have learned nothing from it. I would hope you’d learn nothing from it, having spent a lifetime reading philosophy. But for most people, this will be the first and only book they will ever read that touches on these topics. This is a bit of the academic elitism that frustrates many people outside of this world.
I am not the target audience, sure, but I’m reporting the experience of actually trying to read it!
I read it for my doctoral dissertation on far-right extremist ideology and political theory and it was most unpleasant reading experience because it was so poorly argued without much nuance. The problem is that it is a book for children/young men that establishes a hostile framework (political ideology) that minimizes women/minorities/left-wing people's grievances. If it was just self-reliance that would be one thing, but it is decidedly more toxic/loaded advice than basic self help/productivity. As with most of Peterson's work for the public (Quora/podcast/general books) it is a man blaming boogie men he does not understand or engage with meaningfully or complexly.
I, too, disliked/ hated Pillars of the Earth. So much was contrived and overwrought. And the ending?! I felt a fool for having read it and will never touch a Ken Follett book ever again.
I totally agree. I spent a lot of time reading Pillars of the Earth. All his novels are very long. I assumed they would all be similar to Pillars of the Earth, so I have not read any others.
Peterson’s value as a thinker is in Maps of Meaning and his lectures on the Bible. What made the attacks and misrepresentations of him so stupid is exactly because 12 Rules for Life is an uncontroversial self help book for wayward young men, and there’s nothing radical or world bending about it. If you don’t need it that’s a good thing. Some men do, and it can get them to the point where someday they don’t need it either
He immediately destroys at least half that value by taking a blatant scriptural liberalist position, which makes his right-wing stance fairly unusual. But no less annoying.
It was Peterson's lobsters that did me in. Lobsters are f___ing awful creatures that breed like fieldmice and then have an orgy of cannibalism. If there ever were a totalizing system of behavior to be avoided, it would be lobster society. Yet Peterson finds the example he needs to make his inane position about positional society and runs with it.
His parenting advice is just bad and is just another flavor of the same discipline-over-love model that a million other self-help gurus with traumatic childhoods peddle. Peterson is a deeply hurt person and should not be dispensing parenting advice. And BTW, there is only one thing you must do as a parent: deeply love and accept your child for the first two years, regardless of what little beast you get.
I'm out.
I never read any of his work and just started learning about him when I heard his rule '5-“Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.”
That did it for me, as a mom it just felt off and wrong and I was out of the Peterson real way before all the recent drama...
I do enjoy his essay collection Consider the Lobster, though
ha!
I would love to see Jordan Peterson visit a porn trade show and share his conversations.
Stolen Focus, for me, was at best a primer. I don’t mind his assumption that the reader already believes attention matters, but I wish he had gone deeper on a lot of his topics. The section on ADHD felt especially rushed and under researched- basically summarized as “how many people REALLY have ADHD? Idk but seems weird!” You know when one flaw really makes you notice the other flaws? That was it for me.
GTD is an interesting one. When I first read it in my 20s, I definitely thought it was a key to getting MORE done. Now a decade later, I’m currently re-reading it and it feels much more purposeful to me- how to get what matters done. I suspect what you read from it deeply depends on your mindset while reading. I also mostly use the system as a memory aid, without which I wouldn’t remember deadlines until things are due or overdue, so in many ways it helps me avoid over-spending my energy at work instead of just “grinding and being ground”.
As a woman , I just can’t with Jordan Peterson and it’s depressing and a little frightening how popular he is. The subtitle of this book “antidote to chaos” feels pretty specific from someone who also thinks femininity is chaos… not a space I’m welcome in nor one I want to visit.
I'm curious about re-reading GTD now. I read years ago whenever I was swamped at a job and it was helpful at the time, but I was also deeply entrenched in productivity culture. Also heavy agree on your JP take
It’s still definitely a productivity book. I think the latest edition is better than the original- he explicitly includes stay at home parents, retired people, etc who may also want to get things done which helps with tone. I think he emphasizes the importance of making sure tasks MATTER more than the original, but I don’t have it to compare and that could just be my own lens colouring the work.
Wild to see discussion of JP that doesn’t acknowledge how dangerous some of his views are towards women and transgender people. I wasn’t expecting to encounter the manosphere here, but perhaps that was naive of me.
I’ve never understood the hatred for Jordan Peterson’s book. I’ve read a ton of self-help books and most of what Petersen advises is generic self-help advice that you could find in 100 other books. And none of those books offended anyone. He’s just a polarizing personality I suppose. But almost none of his polarizing opinions are in this book.
Yeah I agree, it’s totally possible to think Peterson is a normal guy from just the book. It’s his non-book opinions on things like incels (ultimately women’s fault for not having sex with them), masculine and feminine energy (masc is order and goodness, fem is chaos and trouble), women in business (not qualified compared to men) or trans people (don’t really exist) that make him gross.
Do you curate the books you actually purchase and put on your bookshelf? I ask because a majority of books I buy, I don't particularly end up liking--so to a stranger, my bookshelf is not really a representation of my taste. At best, it's a bookshelf of attempted taste.
For myself, books I purchase fall into two broad categories: 1) borrowed from library and want to own or 2) not available from the library. Ones I don’t like in category 2 get donated.
Jordan Peterson's best self help is summed up pretty well in these two short videos. There's no doubt that they resonate more when you're young and struggling.
"Take Aim, Even Badly"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwGDnSWmqhM
"Fix Yourself"
https://www.prageru.com/videos/fix-yourself
Only one work of fiction. Remembrance of Things Past is the most pointless nonsense I have ever had the misfortune of trying to read. I got to page 200 and capitulated. I was not even 10% of the way through. Its French title is: In Search of Lost Time. I suspect it is a warning to the hapless prospective reader.
A take so ballsy that I kind of respect it
Oscar Wilde wrote a short essay where he identified 3 classes of books, books to read, books to re-read and books not to be read.
"The third class is by far the most important. To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for, the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching; to Parnassus there is no primer and nothing that one can learn is ever worth learning. But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission to the University Extension Scheme.
Indeed, it is one that is eminently needed in this age of ours, an age that reads so much, that it has no time to admire, and writes so much, that it has no time to think. Whoever will select out of the chaos of our modern curricula ‘The Worst Hundred Books,’ and publish a list of them, will confer on the rising generation a real and lasting benefit."
So congratulations on adding to this noble pursuit.
Wilde's examples of books not to read:
"Books not to read at all, such as Thomson’s Seasons, Rogers’s Italy, Paley’s Evidences, all the Fathers except St. Augustine, all John Stuart Mill except the essay on Liberty, all Voltaire’s plays without any exception, Butler’s Analogy, Grant’s Aristotle, Hume’s England, Lewes’s History of Philosophy, all argumentative books and all books that try to prove anything."
I break this rule because I've read a lot of Mill other than On Liberty.
For me, an anti-recommendation would be Blood Meridian. I know for some people, this book is tantamount to a lifestyle. For me, however, I could not wait to be done with it. I probably should have just given up on it, but I am kinda' stupidly stubborn about such things.
Many great novels have grim elements to them - Crime and Punishment & Oliver Twist - come to mind - but I experienced a sense of emotional investment and even joy in reading them. Blood Meridian is just intrinsically grim in pretty much every aspect, or so it seems to me.
The stories of H.P. Lovecraft fall in the intrinsically grim camp as well.
I'm reading Blood Meridian right now in my Bucket List Book Club and it's incredible but I don't like it, if you know what I mean. McCarthy's prose is one-of-a-kind and his genius is obvious, but I've never before encountered a novel with naught a single protagonist.