12 Rules for Life Study Guide

Jordan Peterson grew up in rural northern Alberta. He studied political science and psychology at the University of Alberta and earned his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from McGill University. His career has varied widely: he’s held blue-collar jobs ranging from dishwasher to railway line worker, and as a clinical psychologist, he’s helped clients manage conditions like depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia. He taught at Harvard University from 1993–1998 and joined the psychology faculty at the University of Toronto in 1998. In October 2016, a protestor filmed Peterson dialoguing with students about a bill passed by the Canadian Parliament which added “gender identity and expression” to the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code. While critiquing aspects of political correctness in general, he specifically argued that the bill would make the use of certain gender pronouns “compelled speech.” The protestor’s video went viral, and after that, Peterson became something of an online celebrity: though he’d been uploading lectures to YouTube since 2013, his follower count climbed into the millions between 2018 and 2021. He took time away from his clinical practice and teaching to finish writing 12 Rules for Life in 2018, and in 2021, he resigned from the University of Toronto in order to focus on writing and podcasting. Peterson has been married to his wife Tammy since 1989 and has two adult children, Mikhaila and Julian.

Peterson has long been fascinated by the defining tragedies of the twentieth century, especially the Holocaust, the Soviet gulags, and the Cold War nuclear standoff between the United States and the U.S.S.R. Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, was a notable influence on Peterson. After criticizing Stalin in private correspondence, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in a Soviet labor camp in 1945—an experience he recounted in a massive three-volume work, The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation—and spent decades living in exile in the West, only returning to Russia in 1994. The Gulag Archipelago helped bring the horrors of the Soviet labor camp system to a wide readership for the first time. The era of the gulags overlapped with a period known as the Cold War, which roughly followed the end of World War II and lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Cold War was marked by geopolitical tension between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, expressed not so much through direct military clashes as through regional proxy wars, nuclear buildup, propaganda, espionage, and other jockeying for global influence. Because Peterson’s childhood and early adult years took place entirely against a Cold War backdrop, it’s not surprising that the ideological standoff—and the looming threat of a nuclear war—weighed so heavily on him, prompting his exploration into the meaning of life, especially in light of humanity’s capacity to inflict suffering. Peterson’s interpretation of religion, especially Christianity and the Bible, is also notably influenced by the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), who looked for patterns, or archetypes, in the human psyche, especially as expressed through things like dreams, mythology, and folklore. Peterson tends to follow Jung in interpreting theological concepts not primarily as objective facts, but as psychological concepts (as in Peterson’s take on Christ’s death on the cross, for example).

Aristotle’s philosophical treatise, Nicomachean Ethics, could be seen as an ancient precursor to 12 Rules, since Aristotle’s object was to identify the best way of life and what happiness consists of. In his book Peterson devotes much space to expounding and interpreting narratives from the Bible, especially Genesis, from an evolutionary psychology and Jungian psychology perspective. Peterson cites Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago as especially significant in helping him explore the meaning of life and suffering. Among influential novelists, Fyodor Dostoevsky is discussed most prominently in 12 Rules, especially his Brothers Karamazov and Notes from Underground. Peterson’s other books are Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1999) and Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life (2021).