Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

During a speaking tour in North America, Europe, and Australia, Peterson was stunned at his ability to draw crowds everywhere he went, as his online videos generated hundreds of millions of views. People regularly thanked him and his lectures for helping them change their lives for the better. He thinks about his live lectures, where the measure of success is getting an audience to remain utterly silent, and finds that the most successful topic in that regard is responsibility. Peterson surmises that the appeal of this topic is the result of a culture too focused on rights and insufficiently focused on responsibility. He turns to the late-19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously announced that God was dead, meaning that rational inquiry had triumphed over a belief in the supernatural. As a result, Nietzsche predicted that people would fall into nihilism or adopt secular religions, also known as ideologies, which promised an idealized social order created entirely through human effort rather than divine intervention (a theme also explored in the novels of Dostoevsky, especially Demons). Nietzsche’s solution to this civilizational crisis was the Übermensch, “the individual strong enough to create his own values, project them onto valueless reality, and then abide by them” (164).