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Peterson is an incredibly Marmite-y figure at the moment. Half the world curse him as an alt-right, anti-feminist ranter, whilst the other half welcome him as a breath of fresh air. He puts backsides on seats, giving talks to audiences of thousands of people. He has now given up his academic career as professor of psychology at Toronto University, to write and to tour the world giving talks to the public.

I found this book Marmite-y too, not in the sense that I loved or hated it, but rather in the sense that I kept agreeing and disagreeing fairly vehemently with his ideas - to the extent it was a rather bumpy read. A lot of the book is encouraging people to be their best selves, with self-help and how-to-live-your-best-life aphorisms, which I found helpful. On the other hand I found the dichotomy he created between Order and Chaos to be a bit odd, and the way he described 'order' as masculine and 'chaos' as feminine to be even more odd.

He is provocative. I was interested in what he said about hierarchy, and that being the natural state of society amongst humans, from our early history down to today. He didn't say much though about ameliorating this state of affairs, but rather that we should accept that people are hugely diverse in their talents and abilities, and in the levels of success they will achieve. In a culture where guilt is often regarded as neurotic, he argues that without the experience of guilt we would be psychopaths. He believes that cultures evolve over vast stretches of time, and that in jettisoning old traditions we can cause problems. "We tinker with our ways of social being without appreciated the long term effects." One of the major themes in the book is that he is adamant that people should speak the truth at all times, which gave me something to think about. I would have found it helpful if he'd elaborated on that some more.

He refers to the Bible on several occasions, he says it was "thrown up, out of the deep by the collective human imagination." He goes on to say that "its careful and respectful study can reveal things to us about what we believe and how we do and should act that can be discovered in almost no other manner." At several points in the book he uses Bible stories to illustrate what he sees as human or psychological truths, (and I think he has done a series of lectures based on the Bible too.)

I can easily see why some people love or hate Peterson's ideas, they are both original and provocative. However my main criticism of the book is pedestrian. He never says anything in ten words when he can use fifty.

I haven't taken my usual notes for the book - but Sean Goh's review gives some excellent notes for anyone who is interested.

/review/show...

Peterson's talks and interviews are interesting, and the best one I think was a podcast with Matt Ridley...