The Provisions of Worldview
I first read 12 Rules For Life in 2017, and I've recently finished a re-read of it, in 2024. I re-read it to know whether it holds up to this day, and whether there is anything new I can glean from the long-winded, spiritually charged writing so indicative of Jordan Peterson's style. This book was written when he was surrounded with some minor controversy – but that's no longer the case. As a far more controversial figure, the simple advice to clean your room, stand up straight, and be precise in your speech seems to be shrouded in layers of additional context based on one's own worldview. And of course that's the case – everything we sense, everything we intuit, is based on some understanding of Reality itself that's deeply entrenched within our consciousness, regardless of whether we choose to explore it.
On Weltanschauung
The word "worldview" is a calque (that is, a root-by-root translation) of the German "Weltanschauung", and that's indicative of the idea's surprisingly late origins of the word in the late 18th century. While the word might not have existed for that long, I find it hard to believe that the idea of a framework of ideas and beliefs that shape one's understanding of the world and all other philosophical considerations hasn't been thought of in the thousands of years of human civilization. Whether we are talking about neolithic religions, belief systems of the Axial Age, or modern humanist philosophies such as Liberalism and Marxism, the understanding of a worldview permeates through all belief structures and manifests itself in the realms of both understanding and doing.
Fundamentally, a worldview must provide a set of beliefs that answer the concerns of epistemology (the study of knowledge), axiology (the study of value), and metaphysics (the study to describe the principles of all there is). Furthermore, a worldview, from my interpretation, is a constructed idea. It's easy for us to believe in grand, overarching narratives that offer an understanding of the world that seems intuitive to us when we consider adopting them, but no such narrative is perfect: it can neither modify itself to cater to our own intuition, nor can it provide all the answers we are looking for. Ideas are dead, and we adopt ideas, mix them up with our own ideas stemming from our own experiences, and make them alive again, but only to ourselves.
Why am I interested in the idea of a Weltanschauung? When I first read 12 Rules For Life, for the lack of a better expression, my mind was blown. I was 19, and the book came at a time when the world was less chaotic, people were less polarized, and my teenage open-mindedness (not implying I'm not open-minded now) was looking for ideas to mutate and attach to my ever-expanding worldview. On re-read, the greatest surprise I've had is that these ideas are no longer influencing me in any great way due to my deep internalization of many of the ideas presented, and in an ironic sense, my enjoyment of the book was negatively affected by the sheer impact it had on me on my first read. My worldview has changed over the past 7 years, and I feel much more equipped in my day-to-day life to apply this intuitive framework to my perception, knowledge acquisition, and action. Does this matter? Is this really a good thing?
"Everything is political"
"Everything is political" is an interesting statement. It's a common view held by many, especially among activists and their supporters. No one can be truly apolitical in a sense because of their worldview. In some narrow sense, this is correct - the same worldview that provides answers to basic philosophical concerns, by extension from the same premises, also provides an opinion regarding how society should be organized, the very fundamental concern of politics itself. George Orwell makes this clear in his essay "Why I Write" (emphasis added):
Political purpose – using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
In my opinion, stemming from my own worldview, this is true in a trivial sense. Everything is political because everything can be viewed in a political lens. In fact, oftentimes, the same thing can be viewed using very different political frameworks in order to come to vastly different conclusions. But how about the apolitical person? The apolitical person perceives, learns and acts. The apolitical person still has a worldview used as a framework to this end. To the apolitical person, nothing has to be perceived as political unless it's explicitly so (e.g., elections, governance etc.).
The statement "everything is political" only really makes sense to someone who already is political, and that's an important thing to note. We are not the reification of political ideas butting our heads against each other in the marketplace of ideas. This trivializes the complexity of the Weltanschauung of every human being. Everything can only be political if you perceive it as such.
The Breadth of Human Understanding
The epithet of "culture war" is unhelpful and unnecessary, and seeks to simplify worldviews into distinct camps. While generalizations have a role to play in epistemology, we must always qualify and justify generalizations to avoid its worst consequences. What the emphasis on what divides us instead of what unites us tends to ignore is that humans are actually pretty similar, all things considered. When observing the essences of praxeology (the study of human action) in everyone's day-to-day life, there is a surprising level of similarity. We need to satisfy our basic physical needs, and act to fulfill those needs. Similarly, and on a more fundamental level, is that everything that goes on inside our heads is, by definition, psychological.
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt is one of my favorite books, as it breaks down the different aspects of our worldview from a psychological perspective based on our intuitive understanding of different moral considerations. This Moral Foundations Theory considers six "tastes" of moral perspectives: care, equality, proportionality, loyalty, authority, and purity. What this theory answers is directly related to the tagline of the book: "Why good people are divided by politics and religion". On a rudimentary level, the overwhelming majority of people do not consider themselves evil. And, taking an optimistic approach, most people aren't evil. Yet, instead of appreciating our differences, we are made to see the other side as evil, or to see neutrality as part of the same evil.
This mindset is counter-productive to any discussion in good faith. Of course, a need to understand the worldview of others doesn't necessitate the approval of said worldview. The universe is messy, and people need some a consensus of some ideas to function in a normal society. There is great injustice to be found all around, and even understanding the worldview of another can be impossible due to the limitations of our intuition.
All that being said, there is much to learn from noticing what makes us similar, and understanding what makes us different. While it cannot close all gaps, knowing about the sheer complexity of how Weltanschauung manifests itself in everyone proffers one approach to going beyond political tribalism and actually listening.