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12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos Hardcover – January 23, 2018

4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 59,434 ratings

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Editorial Reviews

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#1 NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 

“Jordan Peterson, has become one of the best-known Canadians of this generation. In the intellectual category, he’s easily the largest international phenomenon since Marshall McLuhan. . . . By combining knowledge of the past with a full-hearted optimism and a generous attitude toward his readers and listeners, Peterson generates an impressive level of intellectual firepower.” —Robert Fulford,
National Post

“Like the best intellectual polymaths, Peterson invites his readers to embark on their own intellectual, spiritual and ideological journeys into the many topics and disciplines he touches on. It’s a counter-intuitive strategy for a population hooked on the instant gratification of ideological conformity and social media ‘likes,’ but if Peterson is right, you have nothing to lose but your own misery.” —
Toronto Star

“In a different intellectual league. . . . Peterson can take the most difficult ideas and make them entertaining. This may be why his YouTube videos have had 35 million views. He is fast becoming the closest that academia has to a rock star.” —
The Observer

“Grow up and man up is the message from this rock-star psychologist. . . . [A] hardline self-help manual of self-reliance, good behaviour, self-betterment and individualism that probably reflects his childhood in rural Canada in the 1960s. As with all self-help manuals, there’s always a kernel of truth. Formerly a Harvard professor, now at the University of Toronto, Peterson retains that whiff of cowboy philosophy—one essay is a homily on doing one thing every day to improve yourself. Another, on bringing up little children to behave, is excellent…. [Peterson] twirls ideas around like a magician.” —Melanie Reid, 
The Times

“You don’t have to agree with [Peterson’s politics] to like this book for, once you discard the self-help label, it becomes fascinating. Peterson is brilliant on many subjects. . . . So what we have here is a baggy, aggressive, in-your-face, get-real book that, ultimately, is an attempt to lead us back to what Peterson sees as the true, the beautiful and the good—i.e. God. In the highest possible sense of the term, I suppose it is a self-help book. . . . Either way, it’s a rocky read, but nobody ever said God was easy.” —Bryan Appleyard,
The Times

“One of the most eclectic and stimulating public intellectuals at large today, fearless and impassioned.” —
The Guardian

“Someone with not only humanity and humour, but serious depth and substance. . . . Peterson has a truly cosmopolitan and omnivorous intellect, but one that recognizes that things need grounding in a home if they are ever going to be meaningfully grasped. . . . As well as being funny, there is a burning sincerity to the man which only the most withered cynic could suspect.” —
The Spectator

“Peterson has become a kind of secular prophet who, in an era of lobotomized conformism, thinks out of the box. . . . His message is overwhelmingly vital.” —Melanie Philips, The Times

About the Author

JORDAN B. PETERSON, raised and toughened in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta, has flown a hammer-head roll in a carbon-fiber stunt-plane, explored an Arizona meteorite crater with astronauts, and built a Kwagu'l ceremonial bighouse on the upper floor of his Toronto home after being invited into and named by that Canadian First Nation. He's taught mythology to lawyers, doctors and business people, consulted for the UN Secretary General, helped his clinical clients manage depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, and schizophrenia, served as an adviser to senior partners of major Canadian law firms, and lectured extensively in North America and Europe. With his students and colleagues at Harvard and the University of Toronto, Dr. Peterson has published over a hundred scientific papers, transforming the modern understanding of personality, while his book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief revolutionized the psychology of religion. The author lives in Toronto, ON. www.jordanbpeterson.com

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Canada; Later prt. edition (January 23, 2018)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 409 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0345816021
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0345816023
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.45 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.6 x 1.4 x 9.3 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 59,434 ratings

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Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. His main areas of study are the psychology of religious and ideological belief, and the assessment and improvement of personality and performance.

From 1993 to 1997, Peterson lived in Arlington, Massachusetts, while teaching and conducting research at Harvard University as an assistant and an associate professor in the psychology department. During his time at Harvard, he studied aggression arising from drug and alcohol abuse, and supervised a number of unconventional thesis proposals. Afterwards, he returned to Canada and took up a post as a professor at the University of Toronto.

In 1999, Routledge published Peterson's Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. The book, which took Peterson 13 years to complete, describes a comprehensive theory for how we construct meaning, represented by the mythical process of the exploratory hero, and provides an interpretation of religious and mythical models of reality presented in a way that is compatible with modern scientific understanding of how the brain works. It synthesizes ideas drawn from narratives in mythology, religion, literature and philosophy, as well as research from neuropsychology, in "the classic, old-fashioned tradition of social science."

Peterson's primary goal was to examine why individuals, not simply groups, engage in social conflict, and to model the path individuals take that results in atrocities like the Gulag, the Auschwitz concentration camp and the Rwandan genocide. Peterson considers himself a pragmatist, and uses science and neuropsychology to examine and learn from the belief systems of the past and vice versa, but his theory is primarily phenomenological. In the book, he explores the origins of evil, and also posits that an analysis of the world's religious ideas might allow us to describe our essential morality and eventually develop a universal system of morality.

Harvey Shepard, writing in the Religion column of the Montreal Gazette, stated: "To me, the book reflects its author's profound moral sense and vast erudition in areas ranging from clinical psychology to scripture and a good deal of personal soul searching. ... Peterson's vision is both fully informed by current scientific and pragmatic methods, and in important ways deeply conservative and traditional."

In 2004, a 13-part TV series based on his book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief aired on TVOntario. He has also appeared on that network on shows such as Big Ideas, and as a frequent guest and essayist on The Agenda with Steve Paikin since 2008.

In 2013, Peterson began recording his lectures ("Personality and Its Transformations", "Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief") and uploading them to YouTube. His YouTube channel has gathered more than 600,000 subscribers and his videos have received more than 35 million views as of January 2018. He has also appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, The Gavin McInnes Show, Steven Crowder's Louder with Crowder, Dave Rubin's The Rubin Report, Stefan Molyneux's Freedomain Radio, h3h3Productions's H3 Podcast, Sam Harris's Waking Up podcast, Gad Saad's The Saad Truth series and other online shows. In December 2016, Peterson started his own podcast, The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, which has 37 episodes as of January 10, 2018, including academic guests such as Camille Paglia, Martin Daly, and James W. Pennebaker, while on his channel he has also interviewed Stephen Hicks, Richard J. Haier, and Jonathan Haidt among others. In January 2017, he hired a production team to film his psychology lectures at the University of Toronto.

Peterson with his colleagues Robert O. Pihl, Daniel Higgins, and Michaela Schippers produced a writing therapy program with series of online writing exercises, titled the Self Authoring Suite. It includes the Past Authoring Program, a guided autobiography; two Present Authoring Programs, which allow the participant to analyze their personality faults and virtues in terms of the Big Five personality model; and the Future Authoring Program, which guides participants through the process of planning their desired futures. The latter program was used with McGill University undergraduates on academic probation to improve their grades, as well since 2011 at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. The Self Authoring Programs were developed partially from research by James W. Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin and Gary Latham at the Rotman School of Management of the University of Toronto. Pennebaker demonstrated that writing about traumatic or uncertain events and situations improved mental and physical health, while Latham demonstrated that personal planning exercises help make people more productive. According to Peterson, more than 10,000 students have used the program as of January 2017, with drop-out rates decreasing by 25% and GPAs rising by 20%.

In May 2017 he started new project, titled "The psychological significance of the Biblical stories", a series of live theatre lectures in which he analyzes archetypal narratives in Genesis as patterns of behaviour vital for both personal, social and cultural stability.

His upcoming book "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos" will be released on January 23rd, 2018. It was released in the UK on January 16th. Dr. Peterson is currently on tour throughout North America, Europe and Australia.

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Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2018
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Matthew Hosier
5.0 out of 5 stars A needed voice
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 27, 2018
310 people found this helpful
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PatrickHGormley
5.0 out of 5 stars Good but needs more teasing out
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 2, 2018
61 people found this helpful
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Mark
1.0 out of 5 stars Unstructured gibberish
Reviewed in Germany on July 9, 2018
86 people found this helpful
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John Twisleton
5.0 out of 5 stars Got me talking to myself and others!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 7, 2018
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John Twisleton
5.0 out of 5 stars Got me talking to myself and others!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 7, 2018
How had thinking so simple, clear, direct, deep and traditional found a voice on BBC and gone viral on YouTube? This lay behind my ordering Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson’s new book on how to live your life that I imagined would be in a different league from other self-help books. I wasn’t disappointed so that the book set me to inner dialogue with the social activist, indulgent parent and softee churchman that’s me. This showed I was following two of the author’s twelve rules: ‘treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping… assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t’.

I struggled with the individualist focus until I grasped it would be the natural approach of a psychologist i.e. set your own house in order before you criticise the world (another of Peterson’s rules) and the book’s being marketed as self-help. As the author opened up how social activism can be fuelled by grievance more than generosity I recalled spiritual counsel on holiness as key to fruitful activism, how much you do mattering less than how much love’s in the action. Another thing that grated with me was his ‘realism’ about winner-takes-all human achievement and new take on Matthew 25:29, ‘the Matthew Principle … the harshest statement ever attributed to Christ: “to those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.” Peterson defends hierarchy in business and elsewhere as something forged by achievement. ‘The order that is most real is the order that is most unchanging - and that is not necessarily the order that is most easily seen. The leaf, when perceived, might blind the observer to the tree. The tree can blind him to the forest. And some things that are most real (such as the ever-present dominance hierarchy) cannot be “seen” at all’’.

Seeing, opening eyes to what’s real, however unpalatable, is a refrain flowing through this hard hitting, controversial book. I found the heavily illustrated section on parenting insightful. ‘You can discipline your children, or you can turn that responsibility over to the harsh, uncaring judgmental world - and the motivation for the latter decision should never be confused with love… Infants are like blind people, searching for a wall. They have to push forward, and test, to see where the actual boundaries lie (and those are too-seldom where they are said to be)... What no means, in the final analysis, is always “If you continue to do that, something you do not like will happen to you.” Otherwise it means nothing. Or, worse, it means “another nonsensical nothing muttered by ignorable adults.” Or, worse still, it means, “all adults are ineffectual and weak.”’

As softee churchman I’m embarrassed by the Sermon on the Mount and few writers have so winsomely used it to invite I pull my socks up as Peterson does. ‘Aim high’ is his frequent rejoinder true to Christ. ‘Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today. Don’t waste time questioning how you know what you’re doing is wrong, if you are certain that it is’. The book starts with the rule to ‘stand up straight with your shoulders back’ and goes on to encourage ‘metaphysical standing up’ based on positive self-regard linked to the meaning of life. The central section of the book is on pursuing what’s meaningful rather than what’s expedient. It contains Dostoyevsky’s story of Christ brought before a cynical, ruthless Inquisitor representing the worst aspect of the church’s legalistic dogmatism. Christ endures him, kisses and confounds him in a pointer to his divinity triumphing historically over sinful human failings in his church. Religion is important to Peterson - Christianity especially - but this as the pursuit of goodness more than obedience, though that unfashionable quality is addressed throughout ‘12 Rules for Life’.

The book’s sub-heading is ‘antidote to chaos’. ‘We require routine and tradition. That’s order. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown - and that is also not good. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path. Each of the twelve rules of this book - and their accompanying essays - therefore provide a guide to being there. “There” is the dividing line between order and chaos. That’s where we are simultaneously stable enough, exploring enough, transforming enough, repairing enough, and cooperating enough. It’s there we find the meaning that justifies life and its inevitable suffering.’ One of the richest theological themes is on how meaning can be brought to suffering among, for example, those who place faith in God’s kingdom and the triumph of truth. The author is burdened by the intense evil of Soviet communism - he quotes Solzhenitsyn - Hitler and the Holocaust seeing the biblical narrative illuminating the source of this evil in human refusal to walk with God. ‘If we wish to take care of ourselves properly, we would have to respect ourselves - but we don’t, because we are - not least in our own eyes - fallen creatures. If we lived in Truth; if we spoke the Truth - then we could walk with God once again, and respect ourselves, and others, and the world. Then we might treat ourselves like people we cared for. We might strive to set the world straight. We might orient it toward Heaven, where we would want people we cared for to dwell, instead of Hell, where our resentment and hatred would eternally sentence everyone.’ Jordan Peterson has some intriguing thoughts on creation. Maybe God, who is without limitation, acted to form limited beings so as to increase his glory through choices by human beings made in his image to grow into his likeness. The power of the book is in its wake-up call to such transformation, the gaining of character through suffering and refusal to hide from what’s true.

In defence of free speech Jordan Peterson recently challenged a Canadian human rights law forcing professors to address trans students by their preferred pronouns which has brought him mixed fame. This book digs deep into what helps individual flourishing. It is a positive yet challenging thesis and some of the challenge is to current rethinking of gender and male-female relations. ‘Our society faces the increasing call to deconstruct its stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people who do not or will not fit into the categories upon which even our perceptions are based. This is not a good thing. Each person’s private trouble cannot be solved by a social revolution, because revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous... the so-called oppression of patriarchy was instead an imperfect collective attempt by men and women, stretching over millennia, to free each other from privation, disease and drudgery’.

If Peterson pays a price for standing against the tide this is not evident in the book where the main autobiographical detail concerns the health crisis of his daughter and another price paid: that of prolonged suffering and its impact on his family. They look for what’s meaningful and sustaining and find wisdom to shrink their time frame and live day by day rather than looking months and years ahead. This tactical approach complements the strategic thrust of a book rich with insights and illustrations about seeking a vision of transformation and following lines to accomplish that end. It is powerful in its realism about human waywardness and the problem of evil as well as in its applause of ancient wisdom including Christianity. ‘Life is short, and you don’t have time to figure everything out on your own. The wisdom of the past was hard-earned and your dead ancestors may have something useful to tell you’. That’s a pragmatic quotation to conclude this appreciation of a book about adopting life-changing principles that will get people talking and hopefully get some of them changing for the better.
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Handlos
5.0 out of 5 stars Pflichtlektüre
Reviewed in Germany on August 6, 2019
220 people found this helpful
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