Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

Content Warning: This part of the guide discusses mental illness, addiction, and some of the author’s controversial views, notably on gender roles, and will describe those positions without endorsing or condemning them. 

Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychologist, professor, and public intellectual. A native of Alberta, he became fascinated with the work of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung (himself a protégé of Sigmund Freud), and returned to pursue studies in psychology, eventually earning a PhD from McGill University. For many years, Peterson was both a professor at Harvard University and a clinical practitioner. In 1998, he accepted a professorship at the University of Toronto, where he would stay for many years, and began publishing YouTube videos that would later inform his growing fame. In 1999, he published Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, an exhaustive study of how the teachings of world religions can provide insights into the fundamental workings of the human mind. 

In 2013, Peterson started uploading some of his academic content to YouTube, but he did not become a public figure until 2016, when he publicly opposed the Canadian government’s (ultimately successful) effort to include gender identity and expression as protected classes against discrimination. Peterson then reached new levels of fame with the publication of 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos in 2018. A major bestseller, it also set off extensive public discourse, especially on the prospect of a crisis facing young men, and whether gender differences are rooted in biological fact or cultural construction (with Peterson’s own arguments leaning toward the former). In this work, as in others, he draws upon ancient myths and religious texts, along with the works of novelists like Fyodor Dostoevsky, whom Peterson admires for his championing of traditional values against the fashionable ideologies of his day, especially socialism. In this respect, he is drawing on the influence of Jung, who looked to myth to find ‘archetypes’ of personality traits which he viewed as identifying central truths about the human condition. 

Since 12 Rules for Life, Peterson has developed a large following and become a target of much criticism. Fans view him as a polymath who draws on various sources of knowledge to challenge a suffocating intellectual orthodoxy, while critics accuse him of dressing up standard conservative and right-wing talking points in academic garb. Peterson regularly insists that he is a “classical liberal” committed to free speech rather than a particular political ideology, but he has also produced content for the conservative Daily Wire. His YouTube clips have received hundreds of millions of views. He has been married to Tammy Roberts since 1982, and they have a son, Julian, and a daughter, Mikaela. Mikaela had many health challenges as a child, including juvenile arthritis, and adopted an all-beef diet which she claims has worked wonders, convincing her father to adopt the same diet. Peterson has also struggled with mental illness, including an addiction to benzodiazepine. Discussing his and his family’s health problems has led Peterson to take an interest in wellness treatments as well as self-help rooted in literature and psychology.