Peterson's 12 Rules for Life v2.0-- actual book discussion

[Belacqua]

Chapter two, eh?  That's the part where he loses his shit and starts mumbling about christian mythology, lol.  Outta be a riot.

I downloaded the book and read the second chapter, just to see what the fuss is about. Here is a summary, and some comments at the end:

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1) The first real point he makes in this chapter (after some preamble) is that there is a difference between the world as it is and the world as it is lived. He doesn't use big words like noumenon and phenomenon, but the distinction, I think, is uncontroversial. He makes it clear that he's talking about the psychological world that we have in our minds. Why this is important becomes clear pretty quickly.

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2) Now he claims that the phenomenal world, as experienced, has basic components. The two he chooses to focus on here are order and chaos. Since he has specified that these are mental categories, he doesn't have to deal with these things in physics or more concrete parts of the world. 

The way he's using the terms, chaos isn't a quality of nature; it's just how we experience things. So if I go somewhere that I'm not familiar with and where I don't speak the language, it is chaos for me but order for the natives.

He makes chaos into a big baggy category. Any situation we don't like, where we're not happy about the apparent outcome or we don't know exactly what to do, goes in this category. 

Order, as a category, is even more fuzzy. It is tradition, biologically determined things, old habits, and many many etc.

He asserts that we feel happy with order and unhappy with chaos. [But is this always true? Some people like risk. Some people travel to enjoy things they aren't familiar with. Too much order gets boring, doesn't it? He doesn't address these things.]

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3) Next he wants to claim that the mental categories of chaos and order evolved with us as animals, and that they have been around for "a billion years." That's a direct quote. 

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4) Now the big trouble starts. He claims that order is and always has been personified by the man, and chaos by the woman. He uses some very dodgy etymology to connect Latin mater -- mother -- with matter. [Does anybody know if this is correct etymology?] And he slides this in with the idea of hylomorphism, that matter would be formless (chaotic) without form (order). This all seems rooted in an old idea he doesn't mention: the medieval belief that when two people make a baby, the daddy supplies the form (morph) and the mommy supplies the matter (hyle). Of course that idea went out when people discovered DNA, if not before. Maybe he will still claim that it's a psychological tenet, not reliant on biological truth. But is it? Both Lucretius and Ovid wrote that men would be chaotic all their lives if the love of women didn't cause them to get civilized. And it's a common trope in our own time that young men are wild until they find a good woman and settle down. In such cases, it's the presence of the woman which brings order. 

If he has some argument to make, or some evidence, as to why man=order and woman=chaos, always, for a billion years, he doesn't tell us here.

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5) And there's one paragraph of pure incel thinking, in which he claims that women, because they are chaos, are picky about mates, and choose good breeders. (He doesn't say Chad and Stacey, but they're implied.) But to me, this is a contradiction. If girls are careful about sexual selection, that's clearly a kind of order, not chaos. It would be chaotic if they weren't choosy. In fact the claim about choosing good breeders to me shows that they are imposing a strict Darwinian, even a eugenically teleological, order. But he skates over that.

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6) Now we get a bunch of sub-Joseph Campbell stuff in which he claims, without evidence, that the dichotomy he has named is symbolized in lots of different cultures. The Star of David, for example, is a man triangle and a woman triangle. [Really?] And a long reading of the Adam and Eve story, apparently assuming that none of his readers is familiar with it.

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7) When at long last we finish with Adam and Eve, the whole chaos/order thing is forgotten, and he asserts that because of the Fall (symbolically of course, not historically) we have a lot of shame. And since, he asserts without evidence, people are better now than they were when Genesis was written, we all ought to have less shame and be nicer to ourselves. 

Conclusion: treat yourself nicely. 

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For me, the whole chapter is a mishmash of references to old ideas that, in their real contexts, make (or at least made) a lot of sense. Like hylomorphism has its uses, but not the one he gives it here. And he asserts all kinds of eternal ("a billion years") truths that are pretty shaky. As I noted, the idea that chaos is always feminine just isn't true. Some people have seen it that way and some haven't.

Nor is it clear why chaos and order should be a more basic dichotomy than other pairs. There was Love vs. Strife (Parmenides), Abundance vs. Lack (Diotima, etc.), the Noble Savage vs. the Hypocritical Citizen (Rousseau). Freud is a little closer, with the Drives vs. Civilized Restraint, but Freud was clear that both are necessary -- it's not good vs. evil. There's a superficial resemblance to Nietzsche, but for the German, chaos is true and permanent while order is an illusion we lay over chaos. 

So to be charitable, we could say that the whole chapter is a kind of poem, not meant to be a clear or scientific argument. It rambles a bit in a way which wouldn't be obvious if it were a sermon or a YouTube video. 

It will be a nice pep talk to an incel who wants a pep talk that sounds sort of deep because it includes references to deep stuff. 

[By the way, I am new to this forum. Hi, y'all.]