Jordan Peterson - 12 Rules for Life - An Antidote to Chaos

I draw here and will many times again in the course of this book on my clinical experience (as I have, already, on my personal history). I have tried to keep the moral of the stories intact, while disguising the details for the sake of the privacy of those involved. I hope I got the balance right.

And this is all true, note, whether there is—or is not— actually such a powerful figure, “in the sky” :)

In keeping with this observation is the fact that the word Set is an etymological precursor to the word Satan. See Murdock, D.M. (2009). Christ in Egypt: the Horus-Jesus connection . Seattle, WA: Stellar House, p. 75.

For anyone who thinks this is somehow unrealistic, given the concrete material reality and genuine suffering that is associated with privation, I would once again recommend Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago , which contains a series of exceptionally profound discussions about proper ethical behavior and its exaggerated rather than diminished importance in situations of extreme want and suffering.

Here, again, I have disguised many of the details of this case, to maintain the privacy of those involved, while attempting to maintain the central meaning of the events.

The strategy of speaking to individuals is not only vital to the delivery of any message, it’s a useful antidote to fear of public speaking. No one wants to be stared at by hundreds of unfriendly, judgmental eyes. However, almost everybody can talk to just one attentive person. So, if you have to deliver a speech (another terrible phrase) then do that. Talk to the individuals in the audience—and don’t hide: not behind the podium, not with downcast eyes, not by speaking too quietly or mumbling, not by apologizing for your lack of brilliance or preparedness, not behind ideas that are not yours, and not behind clichés.

This is why, for example, it has taken us far longer than we originally assumed to make robots that could function autonomously in the world. The problem of perception is far more difficult than our immediate effortless access to our own perceptions predisposes us to infer. In fact, the problem of perception is so difficult that it stalled the early progress of artificial intelligence almost fatally (from the perspective of that time), as we discovered that disembodied abstract reason could not solve even simple real-world problems. Pioneers such as Rodney Brooks proposed in the late 1980s and early ’90s that bodies in action were necessary preconditions to the parsing of the world into manageable things, and the AI revolution regained its confidence and momentum.

The recording is available at Peterson, J.B. (2002). Slaying the Dragon Within Us. Lecture, originally broadcast by TVO: available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REjUkEj1O_0

Names and other details have been changed for the sake of privacy.

37-28/28 = 9/28 = 32 percent.

35-29/35 = 6/35 = 17 percent.

Solzhenitsyn, A.I. (1975). The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An experiment in literary investigation (Vol. 2). (T.P. Whitney, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row, p. 626.

If you want to do some serious thinking about lobsters, this is a good place to start: Corson, T. (2005). The secret life of lobsters: How fishermen and scientists are unraveling the mysteries of our favorite crustacean . New York: Harper Perennial.

Schjelderup-Ebbe, & T. (1935). Social behavior of birds . Clark University Press. Retrieved from http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1935-19907-007; see also Price, J. S., & Sloman, L. (1987). “Depression as yielding behavior: An animal model based on Schjelderup-Ebbe’s pecking order.” Ethology and Sociobiology , 8, 85–98.

Sapolsky, R. M. (2004). “Social status and health in humans and other animals.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 33 , 393–418.

Rutishauser, R. L., Basu, A. C., Cromarty, S. I., & Kravitz, E. A. (2004). “Long-term consequences of agonistic interactions between socially naive juvenile American lobsters (Homarus americanus).” The Biological Bulletin, 207 , 183–7.

Kravitz, E.A. (2000). “Serotonin and aggression: Insights gained from a lobster model system and speculations on the role of amine neurons in a complex behavior.” Journal of Comparative Physiology, 186 , 221-238.

Huber, R., & Kravitz, E. A. (1995). “A quantitative analysis of agonistic behavior in juvenile American lobsters ( Homarus americanus L. )”. Brain, Behavior and Evolution, 46, 72–83.

Yeh S-R, Fricke RA, Edwards DH (1996) “The effect of social experience on serotonergic modulation of the escape circuit of crayfish.” Science, 271 , 366–369.

Huber, R., Smith, K., Delago, A., Isaksson, K., & Kravitz, E. A. (1997). “Serotonin and aggressive motivation in crustaceans: Altering the decision to retreat.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 94 , 5939–42.

Antonsen, B. L., & Paul, D. H. (1997). “Serotonin and octopamine elicit stereotypical agonistic behaviors in the squat lobster Munida quadrispina ( Anomura, Galatheidae ).” Journal of Comparative Physiology A: Sensory, Neural, and Behavioral Physiology, 181 , 501–510.

Credit Suisse (2015, Oct). Global Wealth Report 2015 , p. 11. Retrieved from https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fileID=F2425415-DCA7-80B8-EAD989AF9341D47E

Fenner, T., Levene, M., & Loizou, G. (2010). “Predicting the long tail of book sales: Unearthing the power-law exponent.” Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications, 389 , 2416–2421.

de Solla Price, D. J. (1963). Little science, big science . New York: Columbia University Press.

As theorized by Wolff, J.O. & Peterson, J.A. (1998). “An offspring-defense hypothesis for territoriality in female mammals.” Ethology, Ecology & Evolution, 10 , 227-239; Generalized to crustaceans by Figler, M.H., Blank, G.S. & Peek, H.V.S (2001). “Maternal territoriality as an offspring defense strategy in red swamp crayfish ( Procambarus clarkii, Girard ).” Aggressive Behavior, 27 , 391-403.

Waal, F. B. M. de (2007). Chimpanzee politics: Power and sex among apes . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press; Waal, F. B. M. de (1996). Good natured: The origins of right and wrong in humans and other animals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bracken-Grissom, H. D., Ahyong, S. T., Wilkinson, R. D., Feldmann, R. M., Schweitzer, C. E., Breinholt, J. W., Crandall, K. A. (2014). “The emergence of lobsters: Phylogenetic relationships, morphological evolution and divergence time comparisons of an ancient group.” Systematic Biology, 63 , 457–479.