The books

Though video/audio is probably the best way to get a taste for Peterson’s work, his two published books are great condensations of the main ideas.

12 Rules for Life - is probably one of the most silently best-selling books of our time, as the New York Times has other priorities.

It’s an incredibly useful and well written book, but I feel that it only touches on some of the deeper archetypal material, so, it’s not a comprehensive look at Peterson’s thinking. It’s the tasting menu in a three Michelin star restaurant. You should come back for more.

Maps of Meaning - his first book, very convoluted and abstract in language, but it does describe the core of his thinking in more detail than any other format he’s engaged with. The recorded course on Youtube is probably the easiest way of internalising this information, though.

But if you’d like to delve deeper into the Peterson rabbit hole, here are some of the books that influenced him and I found inspiring as well:

Man’s search for meaning by Victor Frankel - a deeply philosophical memoir of life and death in a nazi concentration camp

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - we had it on our bookshelf growing up. I remembered the cover, but it seemed uninteresting. “What’s a gulag, mom?” Little did I know it was probably the straw that broke Soviet Union’s back. Disturbing, but excellent.

The painted bird by Jerzy Kosiński is one of the most terrifying books I have ever read. It’s a shattering account of tribalism and man’s inhumanity to man - all seen through the eyes of a small orphan child roaming through villages in a nondescript Eastern Europe during war-time. We’ve forgotten what our culture means when we say “evil”. This book is a chilling reminder.

I know that it feels frightening to venture off the culturally beaten path and crack open books by dissenters, but in this case, there is enlightenment to be found. Jordan Peterson might be the stupid person’s smart person, or he might be a guy simply stating truths that you have to be smart to ignore.

