12 Rules for Life

Peterson, a clinical psychologist and former University of Toronto professor, organises the book as twelve rules, each with an essay drawing on clinical practice, evolutionary biology, mythology, religious texts and literature, particularly Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jung and Solzhenitsyn.

The rules include standing up straight with shoulders back, treating yourself like someone you are responsible for helping, making friends with people who want the best for you, comparing yourself to who you were yesterday rather than to someone else today, not letting children do things that make you dislike them, setting your own house in order before criticising the world, pursuing what is meaningful rather than what is expedient, telling the truth, assuming the person you are listening to knows something you do not, being precise in speech, not bothering children when they are skateboarding, and petting a cat when you encounter one.

The underlying argument is that life involves unavoidable suffering, that meaning comes from voluntarily accepting responsibility, and that order and chaos must be balanced rather than one eliminated. Peterson's opening argument about lobster serotonin and dominance hierarchies is used to claim that hierarchy is biologically ancient rather than a recent social construction, and it is the most disputed passage in the book.

The criticisms are substantial. Biologists dispute the lobster argument as a misapplication of a distant evolutionary comparison. The interpretation of myth is idiosyncratic and not accepted by scholars in those fields. The prose is dense and digressive, and the connection between the stated rule and the essay is often loose. Peterson's political prominence means readers frequently evaluate the book by his public positions. The material on responsibility, on truthfulness in speech and on comparing yourself to your own past is the part with clinical grounding.