Author: Jordan B. Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, author, and cultural critic. His primary areas of research include social, personality and abnormal psychology. He gives special heed to the psychology of religious and ideological belief and evaluation and betterment of personality and performance.
Book: 12 Rules for Life is a self-help book that tries to provide guidance to be a fulfilled, successful, better human being using religion, philosophy, science, and personal stories. Jordan Peterson advocates for principles like fixing yourself before you judge the world, taking responsibility for your own life, or caring for yourself as you would for a loved one. In his view, life is not about happiness, it about meaning, and suffering is an inevitable be part of it.
Opinion: I bought this book because I had watched Jordan Peterson´s videos and listened to his podcast for years since he become viral in 2016-17. Even if I do not agree with many of his ideas and methodology (full of pseudoscience), I think that many of his points are interesting and difficult to see elsewhere as they go against mainstream political correctness. He is pretty brave in this regard. However, this book has nothing to do with the ideas of JP I was looking for. In my view, he tries to overcomplicate everything and spends too much time reflecting on passages of the bible that have nothing to do with the concrete rule he tries to explain. On the positive side: (i) I think that every rule is helpful and contains an interesting idea behind it. (ii) I agree with many of his philosophical reflections like the general critic of nihilism, and (iii) his view of societies as dominance hierarchies as illustrated with Lobsters is in my view much more accurate than most people would admit. To sum up, a long book with many interesting ideas and some bullshit that has been overcomplicated mainly with references to the bible that could be summarized in c.80 pages instead of 370.
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