[Spoiler Warning: If you have not read 12 Rules for Life, intend to, and do not wish to know ahead of time what the chapters are about, do not read this.]

Just about every day or two, a new op-ed or essay on Jordan Peterson pops up somewhere on the internet. I know because I have been checking. Today’s op-ed appeared in Politico, for example. There was also another one in Forbes. Friday’s was in The New York Times. Two years ago, he was a regular old clinical psychologist and tenured professor of psychology at the University of Toronto who lectured and wrote scientific papers, but it appears that Jordan Peterson has gone and made himself famous. In case you have not already watched a video of angry protesters screaming and pounding windows at a recent Peterson event; or in case you haven’t read this article insinuating that Peterson is “a peddler of poisonous and potentially murderous ideas;” or this other article, in which his book is called “sincere” yet “oppressive;” or this essay, likening Peterson to Richard Spencer; or this other one, associating him with Adolf Hitler, well—you are missing out on the drama.

Peterson is reviled by many on the Progressive Left. He first sparked controversy in 2016 when he posted a video to YouTube announcing his refusal to comply with Canadian bill C-16, which prohibits discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act on the basis of gender identity and expression. Peterson argued that the bill was a threat to freedom of speech and to Western Civilization. Since then, he has received further media coverage for criticizing political correctness, postmodernism, identity politics, and modern academia. There was also a much-watched, cringe-worthy gender gap interview with Cathy Newman. (If you have not seen the Cathy Newman debate and are the type of person who would enjoy watching Peterson very politely refute Newman’s strawman arguments for thirty minutes, I highly recommend it.) Tucker Carlson of Fox News called the Newman/Peterson debate “one of the great interviews of all time.” But certainly not because it was actually great.

Not everyone hates Jordan Peterson. His self-help book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, published earlier this year, currently occupies the #1 spot for nonfiction on Amazon Charts (which ranks the top 20 most-read and most-sold books on Amazon, Audible, and Kindle), and has been on that chart for ten weeks. Peterson is a prolific YouTuber; as of April 2018, his videos have received more than 48 million views. David Brooks of The New York Times wrote that Jordan Peterson might be “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now.” David French of National Review called 12 Rules for Life, “a book for our times,” and “a beacon of light” designed “to help a person look in the mirror and respect the person he or she sees.”

Several weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to understand what all the fuss was about, so I purchased and read Peterson’s book. And I liked it. While I normally do not enjoy philosophically messy books full of passages from the Bible, quotes from the Tao Te Ching, and fulsome usage of the word “Being,” I found the overall thesis of 12 Rules for Life to be on-point and genuinely helpful. 12 Rules for Life is a self-help book written in essay style, with each chapter focusing on a pro-tip for how to make your life less chaotic and terrible. Each essay/rule/chapter incorporates personal experience, a bit of history, some scientific research, a huge amount of religious text, and philosophy, with Peterson’s interpretation integrating everything together. But for a book that is about how to turn chaos into order, Peterson’s method is ironically chaotic. 12 Rules is positively overflowing with philosophical interpretations of ancient myths that tie back to each chapter name and provide much of the evidence for why each rule should be considered worthwhile. Each chapter moves in so many directions that the rules themselves can get a little lost in Peterson’s philosophizing. To add to that, the names of the chapters do not always do a great job of essentializing the content of the rules themselves. I can see why some readers might get lost in it all. Peterson seldom presents linear arguments, defines his terms, or uses empirical evidence to justify his worldview. Plus, not everyone agrees that just because an idea is ancient, it is correct or useful. But in spite of these problems, and in spite of the fact that I disagree with many of Peterson’s ideas about atheism and the utility of religion, I still really liked 12 Rules for Life. Why? Because despite the method by which he arrived at them, the twelve rules themselves are actually really good.

See for yourself. One driving idea in 12 Rules for Life is the notion that in spite of the pain that comes along with it, life just might be worth living well. You cannot truly know if existence is good or terrible if you do not try to discover the answer to that question courageously and honestly. Peterson spends a major portion of the book discussing the problem of suffering and evil. For Peterson, human evil undeniably exists. The capacity for evil is inside everyone. Pain and suffering also exist, regardless of evil. Evil emerges from a chaotic mind: from dishonesty, evasion, cowardice, and complacency mixed with personal suffering. One of Peterson’s theses is that these four negative traits (dishonesty, evasion, cowardice, and complacency), when combined with pain, can coalesce within a person to produce a deep-seated hatred or resentment of existence, which leads to evil. In order to make your life better—and to avoid evil and improve the world—four fundamental human virtues must be embraced: honesty, focus, willpower, and courage.

Any critique of Peterson’s ideas must stem from an honest understanding of the material. If you miss the crux of the rules themselves, you miss the point. Because the chapters can get a little chaotic, I went back through each of the essays and pulled out what I see as being the essential heart of each rule. Here are the rules as I best understand them. The chapter titles/rule names are numbered in bold, with my synopses in bullet points below.

Stand up straight with your shoulders back. Even if you do not feel confident, capable, or powerful, act as if you are. Adopt a physical and spiritual posture of courage, competence, and strength. This will create a positive physiological feedback loop in your brain and in your spirit, increasing the probability that good things will happen to you and emboldening you to continue improving yourself. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. People often hold themselves in contempt because they feel that they are inadequate, ugly, cowardly, and guilty of evil. You can replace your shame and misery with natural pride by willfully deciding to help yourself. Responsible, rational, fully awake self-help is the only way to begin making your world better. Make friends with people who want the best for you. Not everyone wishes to do the work to become a better person. People will often choose friends who reinforce their delusions of victimhood and enable their decision not to change. Good, healthy friends will not tolerate destructiveness or self-denial; instead, they will help bolster your resolve to become better. Make friends with heroic people, even though it will require more strength and bravery than befriending those who do not wish to be disturbed in their comfortable journey downward. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. Most of us possess an internal critic that denigrates our efforts and tells us that our life is a failure. This critic does not offer a rational, profound analysis; it offers only a subconscious, nihilistic cliché aimed at self-destruction. Instead of letting that dark, irrational voice affect your vision, aim your sights higher—toward consciously chosen values that can be achieved by focusing on reality and improving what can actually be improved. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. It is necessary to discipline children because they are not born with the behaviors and knowledge needed to succeed in life. To reject the responsibility of discipline means to set your children up to suffer and fail. Carefully and effectively teach your children the skills that reality requires and the behaviors that make you want to be around them. This sets them up for positive experiences with their peers and the world. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. While it may be tempting to blame and condemn existence when life gets painful, it is extremely irresponsible to judge reality as insufficient when you yourself are full of faults. It is possible that your own dishonesty, cowardice, weakness, or bad habits are contributing to your suffering. Since metaphysical reality cannot be changed, the only way to aim at lessening your pain is by trying to fix your faults as soon as possible. Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient). Always choose actions that require courage and conviction rather than actions that provide easy, immediate relief from pain and discomfort. Impulsive actions are often subtly malevolent or destructive and serve to hide whatever skeletons are in the closet; but careful, planned choices make life meaningful and help you build up future values. Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie. Do not be willfully blind to reality, and do not lie to yourself about your life. A dishonest life leads to unhappiness and weakness of character, which together create a personal hell and are precursors to evil actions. Conform to reality rather than to a deception, even though it is difficult. Self deceit and willful blindness corrupt the human soul, but truth reduces chaos and makes reality habitable. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t. Real conversation is exploration. Meditate as you converse in order to learn something new about reality. True listening and true speaking can only occur when both participants are driven by a desire for truth itself. Be precise in your speech. People are full of inner chaos. If you want to sort through the mess and be reborn, say precisely what you mean so that you can find out what you mean so that you can rid yourself of undifferentiated chaos, which paralyzes and confuses. Clarity of thought is necessary to turn chaos into order. Only when the problems of the past become ordered can you decide what you’d like the future to be and thus move toward that future. Do not bother children when they are skateboarding. Embrace masculinity and help it to flourish. Regardless of what contemporary academics and philosophers may advocate, tough, smart, competent men are wanted by women and needed for successful society. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street. Pay careful attention to the beautiful, silly, ridiculous little things in life. To persevere through incredible pain and loss, people must see the good in existence.

That’s it. Those are the rules. Twelve Rules for Life is not really about lobsters, skateboarding, or cat petting at all. In essence, the book is just a guide for broken and confused people to repair their souls in a reality-based, non-mystical way (which sounds a bit odd when you consider the enormous emphasis Peterson places on Bible stories and religious myth, but it is what it is, and he has his reasons). Perhaps that is why the Twelve Rules have been called banal and unremarkable by critics. After all, Peterson isn’t claiming to be the sole translator of divine golden plates buried in the ground, revealed to him by an angel, that only he can read with special spectacles and mystical seeing stones. All he’s really saying is that chaos is terrifying, and in order to avoid the pain caused by chaos, people will often choose to live in a blurry self-delusion rather than do the hard work it takes to confront reality. Which is true. People do that. If you wish to turn your personal chaos into order, there are things you should do and things you should not do in order to achieve that. That’s it. That’s the book.

So then, why do so many people who are looked up to in our culture claim that Jordan Peterson is a fascist, white supremacist, authoritarian proto-dictator seeking to stir up hordes of immature white men who are yearning for a hero to tell them it’s time to yank back patriarchal societal power from women and minorities? Well, for one, there’s the political thing. Peterson has taken a very public stance on issues that leftists are particularly sensitive about. But 12 Rules for Life is not a political book. Peterson is an experienced clinical psychologist, and his book is fundamentally a treatise on human psychology—not politics.

Critics seem to be basing much of their criticism on the assumption that Peterson’s book is written for men and is meant to address a specifically masculine problem. This framing is convenient for reviewers who wish to shoehorn Peterson’s ideas into the realm of the “alt-right,” where 12 Rules for Life absolutely does not belong. David Livingstone Smith and John Kaag of Foreign Policy write that Peterson’s book is meant to play upon the “insecurities of men who see their traditional identities slipping away and are resentful of the prospect of being displaced by members of marginalized and subordinated groups.” But where in the world are these reviewers getting this idea? Maybe the insecure man angle stems from the fact that supposedly, a majority of Peterson’s fans are male, or maybe it comes from a shallow reading of chapter two of 12 Rules for Life where Peterson discusses chaos and order in terms of the masculine and the feminine. Peterson also compares chaos and order to yin and yang, underworld vs. world, nature vs. society, unknown vs. known. But this is ancient metaphor, and Peterson understands fully where he is going with it, although his critics appear not to. Smith and Kaag sum up Peterson as saying that, “the threat of being overwhelmed by chaos is the threat of being overwhelmed by femininity,” and “At the core of Peterson’s social program is the idea that the onslaught of femininity must be resisted. Men need to get tough and dominant.” But this is a deep, tendentious, and willful misreading of Jordan Peterson. To pin Peterson as a misogynist is to do what Cathy Newman did, which is read (or listen) not for the purpose of understanding, but for the purpose of creating a strawman that will be easier to take down. By framing 12 Rules for Life as a book written specifically for men, critics are trying to force the book into a narrative in which it just doesn’t fit.

I say this as a woman. Not once, in all of the 368 pages of Peterson’s book, did his advice strike me as “for men” rather than for me. Just look at the four fundamental virtues Peterson’s rules boil down to: honesty, courage, focus, and willpower. These virtues apply just as relevantly to women as they do to men. In fact, it could be argued that women perhaps would benefit more than men by incorporating these virtues (I’ll save that argument for a separate essay). Regardless, Peterson’s rules are no more manly or masculine than drinking water every day, eating, or looking both ways before you cross the street are. In my view, there is no question that critics are not reading Peterson’s book honestly. They are reading for the purpose of seeking retribution, taking revenge against Peterson because he earned himself a place in the spotlight by taking a side in the culture wars.

Critics may try to disguise their political beef with Peterson as “genuine disagreement” over his ideas, but I do not see evidence that such disagreement is genuine. For example, Houman Barekat of The Los Angeles Review of Books writes, “What he’s advocating here isn’t just that his reader adopt a philosophy of radical resilience in relation to his or her own life, but that all compassion toward others be renounced; the reader ought to see other people’s struggles as their just deserts — the culmination of their moral shortcomings — and treat them accordingly. It is an ugly, mean-spirited treatise against human kindness.” This sounds exactly like some of the common strawman accusations yielded against Ayn Rand by people who have never seriously tried to understand her ideas. Did Houman Barekat even read 12 Rules for Life? If so, where did Peterson ever say or imply that all compassion toward others be renounced? If anything, the book implies the exact opposite. I can see why not everyone would be inclined to love 12 Rules for Life, and I can understand why some readers might get bogged down in the overabundance of religious metaphor and why some people might find Peterson’s philosophizing too over-the-top, too confusing, too annoying, or incoherent. But the rules themselves are objectively helpful for improving one’s life. These rules are not new, shocking, or partisan (although, they are principled).

The notion that 12 Rules is a white supremacist, fascist, authoritarian, or misogynistic macho-man book is absurd. Which seems more likely: that Jordan Peterson really is a Nazi, white-supremacist fascist, or that these reviewers just have an axe to grind? If you read what Jordan Peterson actually says in the book, the answer to that question should be self-evident. If every person on earth were to choose just one of Peterson’s rules out of the twelve and actually live by it, it seems likely to me that the world would be drastically improved, so much so that we would probably not even recognize it. Because of this, it also seems probable that the critics who hate Jordan Peterson most passionately and desire to demolish him most ferociously are exactly the people who would most benefit from his 12 Rules for Life.