How Many of the ‘12 Rules for Life’ Has Jordan Peterson Broken so Far?

That too, in a single room-cleaning day.

Clipart by the author.

I could start by telling you how I once idolized Jordan Peterson and how his interpretation of Carl Jung changed my life. That’s an easy starting point almost everyone takes when it comes to Jordan Meaterson.

But I’m not gonna do that. Because that feels a little embarrassing. Also, it isn’t relevant.

The question isn’t whether Jordan Peterson changed my life. The question is whether Jordan Peterson can survive Jordan Peterson.

To keep things fair, I’ll only be using a single Jubilee debate.

Partly because Peterson has generated enough content to keep a graduate student employed until retirement.

Mostly because it’s funnier to see how many of his own rules he can break in one afternoon.

Now, before this introduction becomes more substantial than the subject it was meant to introduce, let’s proceed. Here are the rules he broke in the Jubilee video, in order.

Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back.

Well, it would be harsh for me to expect Peterson to stand up through the entire sit-down.

But if you look at this image, there are two people on the table, and only one of them is maintaining a composed, straight shoulder-back posture, and that is not Peterson.

Screenshot from YouTube

According to Peterson, posture isn’t just posture. It’s a biological signal stretching back hundreds of millions of years.

This image is unfortunate because while the lobster hierarchy has many levels, challenging the table for dominance is not traditionally one of them.

To make matters worse, Peterson appears to have mistaken crayfish for lobsters. So yes. The 1st rule itself is based on a misinterpretation. At least, it’s on brand.

Verdict: Rule broken.

Rule 2: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.

If Peterson genuinely cared about Peterson, he would never have gone anywhere near Jubilee.

After listening to him for years and later studying the topics he talked about, here’s what I found about how Peterson's special word salad is prepared to perfection:

1. Make a claim based on a weak, distorted, or oversimplified understanding.
2. Get challenged by someone who knows the subject better.
3. Refuse to update and instead retreat into semantic maneuvering, abstraction, or indignation.

His entire act depends on turning straightforward questions into philosophical hostage situations.

In most interviews, people are too polite to interrupt, too intimidated to challenge him, or too confused to notice he never answered the question.

Jubilee removes all three advantages. The format keeps dragging him back to the original question until the performance starts looking less like wisdom and more like what it always was: a very elaborate escape attempt.

Verdict: Rule broken.

Rule 3: Make friends with people who want the best for you.

I know that it’s out of bounds. But I can’t help it. He has apparently befriended a stylist who likes to dress him like this.

Newsweek

Coming to the Jubilee video, not only did Peterson agree to a Jubilee video, but he also agreed to appear in a “1 Christian vs 20 Atheists.”

And that was a bad bad idea. Especially for a man who treats the question “Are you a Christian?” like a federal interrogation.

If he were surrounded by people who actually wanted the best for him, we wouldn’t see him frantically launching an investigation into whether Christians, atheists, numbers, and rooms truly exist.

So much so that Jubilee actually had to change the title later to protect Peterson’s image. But that’s not fooling anyone.

Verdict: Rule broken.

Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.

Anyone who has seen Peterson in both interviews with Cathy Newman and the Jubilee video already knows how he has not only broken the rule but crushed it into powder.

Back in the Cathy Newman interview, Peterson was already slippery. He still redefined words, escaped uncomfortable questions, and treated straightforward answers like a controlled substance.

But he did it with patience. He smiled, joked, and let the audience feel like they were watching a professor. In the Jubilee video, he is defensive, irritable, combative, and easily provoked.

Screenshots from YouTube

Now, to be fair, it’s not just him getting more impulsive. There’s another hidden reason why the comparison feels so unflattering.

The reason the Cathy Newman interview became legendary is that Newman helped Peterson look good. She frequently:

• interrupted him
• mischaracterized his position
• used loaded framing
• pushed weak arguments

That allowed Peterson to spend much of the interview doing what he does best: correcting people.

Jubilee removes that advantage. The participants are not especially hostile. They are not trying to trap him. Most of them are simply asking him to defend what he actually believes.

The Peterson of 2018 could hide behind Cathy Newman being wrong. The Peterson of 2025 had to face people who had done the reading.

Yet, the deterioration in composure is a clear downgrade.

Verdict: Rule broken.

Rule 5: Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.

Again. Out of bounds. But here’s an image of Mikhaila Peterson with the one and only (thankfully) Andrew The Tate.

Twitter

Yet, we have the first Peterson rule that he didn’t break during the Jubilee video.

Verdict: N/A

Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.

Peterson’s opening claim was:

“Atheists reject God, but they don’t understand what they’re rejecting.”

Later in the video, when Danny refused to get distracted from the question of whether Peterson was a Christian or not, he ended up saying:

“I could be either of them, but I don’t have to tell you.”

So he wants to tell people what they believe, but doesn’t want to make his position clear on what he himself believes.

That isn’t cleaning your room. That’s putting a “Do Not Enter” sign on the only room that matters.

Verdict: Rule broken.

Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).

One of the atheists in the show, David, did something interesting. He applied Peterson’s own logic (an atheist can’t reject God because they don’t understand it)against him.

He introduced Lono, a Polynesian deity, whom Peterson admitted knowing nothing about. This created a problem.

If rejecting something without understanding it is intellectually irresponsible, then Peterson should be equally concerned about every deity he knows nothing about.

Again, David wasn’t defending Lono. He was testing Peterson’s principle.

At that point, Peterson had two options.

1. The meaningful option was to admit that his opening claim was too broad.
2. The expedient option was to start arguing about whether ignorance necessarily implies rejection.

Peterson chose the second option immediately.

Verdict: Rule broken.

Rule 8: Tell the truth, or at least don’t lie.

What if I shake your hand, look straight into your eyes, and fart, and then have the audacity to muster the most pissed off expression possible, only to ask: “Did you just fart?”

One of Peterson’s favorite tricks is to take an interpretation and quietly promote it to the rank of a definition.

Peterson’s opening claim was that atheists reject God without understanding Him. Greg, one of the atheists, responded by clearly defining the God he rejects.

The supernatural, omnipotent, omniscient creator God that Christians normally mean when they use the word.

In response, Peterson started muddying the water by playing around with the definition of God. Now, God is conscience.

This is something Greg had preempted at the very beginning of the conversation.

A painting can be emotionally moving. A car can be physically moving. The same word can have multiple meanings.

But if I say, “The Mona Lisa is moving,” and you respond, “No, it isn’t. It’s nailed to the wall,” it’s you who doesn’t understand how things work, not me.

Yet, that’s exactly what Peterson ended up doing. He even claimed that Elijah and Cardinal Newman back up his ‘conscience = God’ interpretation.

In reality, they didn’t. Elijah’s story can be interpreted as associating God with a quiet inner voice. Newman argued that conscience points toward God and reflects divine authority.

Neither of them defined God as conscience.

Peterson took “points toward” and, with a straight face, upgraded it to “is.” So the roads that lead to Rome are indeed Rome.

Verdict: Rule broken.

Rule 9: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.

The first candidate to face Peterson in this video was Cade. He had spent years studying to become a traditional Catholic priest.

Meanwhile, Peterson’s formal training is in psychology, not theology.

So naturally, Peterson’s first instinct was to explain Christianity to Cade.

Not only that. He immediately informed Cade that something about his religious journey had gone wrong.

When Cade asked what exactly had gone wrong, Peterson admitted:

“I don’t know. That might take a long time to figure out.”

Most people identify the problem before diagnosing it. Peterson diagnosed it first and scheduled the investigation for later. No wonder why Peterson’s License threatened for a divorce.

Verdict: Rule broken.

Rule 10: Be precise in your speech.

It’s so obvious that I won’t even bother with any explanations here. Just a quick example.

Parker: Do you believe in the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good notion of God?

Peterson: What do you mean by believe?

Parker: Do you think it to be true?

Peterson: That’s the circular definition. What do you mean by believe?

Combine this with everything we discussed so far. It’s not even funny at this point. If he wanted to be precise with his speech, he should have claimed:

“Atheists reject God, but they don’t understand what I mean by God or how I use words for that matter.”

Verdict: Rule broken.

Rule 11: Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.

Again. Look at this face and tell me that he wouldn’t push you off your skateboard if you piss him off. Well, we will never find out.

Screenshots from YouTube

Fortunately for him, there weren’t any kids skateboarding around him during the video.

Verdict: N/A

Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.

What do you mean by cat? What do you mean by street? What do you mean by encounter? And most importantly, what do you mean by pet?

Photo by Ahmet Yüksek

Verdict: N/A

So he broke 9 out of 12 rules in a single evening, and that’s only because he couldn’t physically break the other 3 rules at that moment.

While I came into this article trying to count how many rules Peterson broke, I left with a deeper appreciation for the people at Jubilee.

Imagine spending an entire afternoon trying to get a straight answer out of a clinical psychologist who treats every noun like an unsolved murder.

At one point, the self-proclaimed intellectual refused to participate in a thought exercise.

And somehow ended up implying that if you’re hiding Jews from Nazis, the real problem is all the mistakes that got you into that situation.

Now I’m left wondering what mistakes I made along the way that I had to write this instead of launching my own Kar Academy.