So suffering in life is inevitable. The universe can be unfair. In a hundred million years, nothing we do will likely matter. What does one do in the face of this knowledge?
One response is to take the expedient path. Indulge short-term pleasures and put off long-term commitments. Do what feels the best today - indulge your basest desires all the time. Even lie, cheat, and steal to get what you want. Do these things even if you know it makes your future self worse off than better.
Of course, we know this is what we shouldn’t be doing. We know we should be doing the hard things today to make our lives better in the future. We should suppress our immediate impulses to bring future rewards, like studying today and putting off partying to build the career we really want.
One obstacle is our powerful biological instincts - they kept us alive in the Stone Age, but they’re counterproductive today (overeating 100,000 years ago helped us survive a period of famine; today it leads to obesity). But on a higher conscious level, it’s hard to answer: why? How do we define what’s good and worth doing, and what isn’t?
In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson tackles it this way: it seems intuitively true that certain things can be defined as Evil - most abhorrently, conscious human malevolence. Auschwitz, mass shootings, enslavement, knowing torment of others - these are all things most people believe are bad, even without having to read a philosophy book. You likely believe the world is better off without these things happening.
If there is such a thing as Evil, then Good must be the antithesis of Evil - Good is whatever stops Evil from happening. Good alleviates unnecessary pain and suffering.
In the most extreme of cases, literally fighting evil is good - as typified in the Union’s antislavery stance in the Civil War, and the Allies’ anti-Holocaust stance in World War II. But all actions exist on a spectrum, and resolving even little bits of bad are good. This could mean counseling a friend to get out of a bad situation. This could mean improving your own health, so that you have more ability and time to do good. This could mean empowering others to do good - even by helping people understand what good and evil are, like Peterson is doing.
Doing good has Meaning. When you act with Meaning, you will attain more security and strength than would be granted by a short-sighted concern for your own security. What you do will matter to you. In turn, you’ll feel better about your existence, and the evils and injustices of the world are more tolerable, because you know they can be overcome. Remember Socrates who, believing his principles to be right, retained the strength to speak truth at his trial and accepted his death with resolve.
If you’re the type to bemoan your existence, Peterson argues doing good is the salve - by doing good, you are compensating for the sins of your existence and those of humankind.
Meaning is the mature substitute for expedience. Expedience rejects responsibility; it doesn’t have the wisdom or sophistication to look ahead and plan carefully; it has no courage or sacrifice; it’s the easy way out. Meaning regulates impulses and recognizes the value of making the world better. By providing deeper meaning, Meaning gratifies all impulses.
Ask yourself - how can I make the world a little bit better today? Aim upwards. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix.
Even more deeply - what is your true nature? What must you become, knowing who you truly are? How can you make the world a LOT better, if only you made certain changes in your life? Something valuable, given up, ensures future prosperity.
The greater the change you want to make, the greater the sacrifice might be. Inverting the question - what is the greatest sacrifice you can make, that of what you love most - and what good will come of it? In so doing, you change the structure of reality in your favor.
The above is his main point in the chapter, but Peterson also discusses two other topics:
Self-sacrifice and delayed gratification have been part of human teachings for a long time, and the discovery of its utility goes back even further. Picture in the Stone Age that a tribe brings down a mammoth, and they engorge themselves until they can’t possibly eat any more. But then they have leftover food. They learn that they can go through the labor of preserving the food today for the benefit of having food tomorrow. Even better, they can give this food to a neighboring tribe and expect a return of favor in the future.
These sacrificial behaviors promoted survival, and they gradually became ritualized and dramatized, customs inherited through generations. They became enshrined in moral narratives and religious texts, like the Temptation of Christ. Wandering through the desert for 40 days and nights, Satan tempts Jesus with hedonism (relieving hunger by creating his own bread), egoism (jumping off a peak and relying on God to save him), and materialism (ruling the kingdoms of Earth). Jesus rejects all these temptations of evil and immediate gratification. Instead, he reaches for a higher goal, of transcending desires to do good.
(Shortform note: In one interpretation, these temptations are different paths for Jesus to become a Messiah by demonstrating supernatural powers. He can easily alleviate physical hardships; he can relieve Roman oppression by seizing the kingdoms. Jesus rejects these options - he wants to undergo his trials without powers that ordinary humans don’t have, in effect becoming a practical role model for humans. Instead of making bread for everyone, he sets an example of a practice that can forever solve the problem of hunger for everyone - rejection of immediate gratification and the temptations of evil.)
Despite its tremendous influence, Christianity had a few problems that limited its reach in the modern day:
Nietzsche argues that humans killed God, and they would have to invent their own values in the aftermath. However, ideologies like fascism and communism filled the void instead.
In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson argues that the individual must be constrained and molded by a disciplinary structure before she can act freely and competently. As secularism rose, a void in disciplinary structure grew; filling it was nihilism and susceptibility to new utopian ideas, like fascism. Hence he wrote this book to provide a reworked structure for people to follow.
Chaos is unexplored territory. It’s the things and situations we don’t understand. It’s where you go when you get fired; it’s the threatening stranger on the street; it’s the scary audacious goal you’ve wanted. It’s also the realm of possibility and where new ideas form.
Order is explored territory. It’s stability and structure. It’s your plan for the next day, the comfort of tradition, the customs we use to treat each other. Yet it also can mean concentration camps, fascism, and, less extremely, personal stasis and lack of growth.
We like being in Order. We don’t like when we are forced to leave Order for Chaos, like when tragedy strikes, when you’re cheated on by your partner, or when you’re fired.
But Order isn’t enough - there are still vital things to be learned. The ideal place is to be right in the middle. To have enough Order to feel tethered, but enough Chaos to be challenged and learn new things. This is where meaning is to be found.