Beyond Order by Jordan Peterson review – a ragbag of self-help dictums

There is too much messianic passion and not enough enlightening psychology in Peterson's follow-up to the bestselling 12 Rules for Life

Few books in recent years have had quite so noisy a cultural impact as Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. With its odd mixture of Darwinian determinism, Jungian myth-interpretation and Heideggerian ontology (Being written with a capital B!), it was an unlikely self-help manual and an even unlikelier bestseller. But its dozen behavioural rules for leading a meaningful life rode a steep wave of frustration with the shibboleths of postmodernity.

Peterson's radical traditionalism was seen as a bracing corrective to the notion that there was no objective truth, only a matrix of prejudicial power relations. Social hierarchies, he argued, were the product of evolution rather than of capitalist exploitation.