Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom. Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.
Lobsters have shoulders?
What starts off as bleak biologically determinist account of social life and just about anything, turns into a spirited self-help pep talk. Lobsters play a central role where this more or less solitary creature gains territory/security thru dominance. He proceeds with a cartoon story depicting a lobster struggle for supremacy. From this victorious position, more benefits naturally accrue, i.e. sex, progeny, and living resources. This story is then transferred onto human realities, where wealth, renown and other inequities are attributed to inherent inequities between individuals.
Voilà! Current record wealth inequities are due to the naturally supreme qualities of the rich folk who own it in the same way that handsome celebrities have access to all the sex that ordinary plain folk yearn for. So, give it up, sucker. Accept nature. You can’t see it, you may yearn otherwise, but it’s operating and that’s it that’s all.
Or is it? From this dead end, he proposes a remedy of self-help which involves mostly a series of physical acts that will effect a rise in self-esteem, not to mention, increase in serotonin levels to permit the overcoming of circumstances. This is the Stand up straight, with your shoulders back stuff.
All this reveals to me, one more time, that Peterson has missed the last fifty years. First, again surprisingly as a shrink, he seems to be very incautious about confirmation bias. It is a big leap from lobsters to wealth inequality and celebrity. He does mention the work of primatologist Frans De Waal who has pointed out the complex political nature of dominance in chimps, critters significantly closer to us, but the overall notion of benefits accruing to dominance holds. Little to zero mention of luck, inheritance or political power in his scheme. He has not paid attention to Pikkety and those who have.
The self-help is kind of sweet, and mentions things most clear thinking people would recommend. But it’s all about the individual and the work the person has to do to overcome. Political forces in everyday don’t appear to have any significance. No wonder he cannot fathom movements like #MeToo and other efforts to gain minority equity.