What Peterson is trying to do is make the individual feel more confident and ready to take on the world without addressing any of the issues that lead to the hopeless situation they find themselves in. The social and economic hierarchies that have developed in the west, in his view, are what they are. While not perfect, they are the best of all systems up to now and every attempt to change or even to tweak them is seen as dangerous. His 12 Rules For Life are a mixture of advice on how to play the dominance game a little better, how to ground oneself with routines in times of crisis and how to improve one’s personal relationships. For many, this is by far better than nothing.
But it is based on the idea that there is such a thing as a fixed hierarchy. From a study on serotonin levels and their relation to pecking order positions in lobsters, Peterson assumes that the fact that hierarchies predate capitalism and poststructuralist theories of oppression, their existence was biologically determined, or in Jung’s words, an archetype. Since serotonin works as an antidepressant in lobsters as well as humans, with higher levels corresponding with aiming for higher places in pecking orders, social hierarchies were unavoidable. Moreover, the flattening of hierarchies (more equality) leads to depression and loss of an upward trajectory.
Even if I pretended for a moment to be a Social Darwinist, this is not very convincing. Humans have developed language as a tool to organise their social dynamics. Many species are so similar to humans that they even can communicate with us, such as cats, dogs, dolphins, chimpanzees or bonobos. But all of these species have differently organised social dynamics and hierarchies, so that even a biological determinist needs to acknowledge that social hierarchies are much more fluid than lobsters crawling on top of each other.
