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Feb 14, 2018fledge rated this title 2.5 out of 5 stars
On a scale of 0 to 2, where 0 = I want my time/money back 1 = I read/watched it once; that's enough 2 = I need to ponder this; I'd like to see it/read it again, not necessarily soon "12 Rules . . . " rates a 1. The actual rules -- I've forgotten half of them already -- are run-of-the mill, practical stuff. Not bad advice at all. Stand up straight. Pull your shoulders back. Tell the truth -- or at least don't lie. Lying leads to hell. Pet dogs and cats. Ante up. Gut it out. Fight chaos with order. Start small. Improve things incrementally. Compound growth applies to small improvements. Life is suffering. Nihilism leads to great evil. Skateboarders should be left alone. Peterson's bedrock belief, the one we can all agree on, he says, is that suffering is wrong. To him, we must seek the balance between chaos and order, the yin and the yang. The upward-pointing triangle (the male) of the Star of David balances the downward-pointing triangle (the female) of the symbol. Time is deep. Darwinian evolution proves that men and women are different. Archetypes of all sorts are drawn in because they represent hard-won truth from untold millennia past. He's fond of Biblical quotes and the archetypes derived from them because they express "truthiness" and not The Truth. He's made Being, in a Wittgenstein sense, integral to the book, and alludes to it as a kind of individual and personal pinnacle, as someone today might use the word "woke." Not quite, but that's the general idea. He's fond of psychologists, particularly Jung. A lot of that pschologicomolizing strikes me as cherry-picking or wishful thinking.