Norm Peterson Quotes

Women’s anger, publicly and loudly expressed, is all of that: unnatural, chaotic, upsetting to how power is supposed to work. Women’s determination to voice that fury toward men in 2017 and 2018 had led those men to feel some fraction of the anxiety that nonwhite non-men feel daily. That these men experience any anxiety or discomfort is intolerable enough that in 2018, a Canadian clinical psychologist named Jordan Peterson became a mega-bestselling author of a kind of men’s manifesto, called 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. “Order is where the people around you act according to well-understood social norms. . . . Chaos, by contrast, is where—or when—something unexpected happens.” And just in case it wasn’t clear, Peterson sexes both sides of the paradigm; according to Taoist symbolism, he claims, “Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart.” Chaos is the thing that Peterson and his devout readers were searching for an antidote to in their struggle to reimpose . . . order.

If you are suffering—well, that’s the norm. People are limited and life is tragic. If your suffering is unbearable, however, and you are starting to become corrupted, here’s something to think about.

New York: "I had only the vaguest of ideas of why I was there and certainly nothing that I would recognized as a pastoral vocation. I didn't know it at the time, but what I absorbed in my subconscious, which eventually surfaced years later, was a developing conviction that the most effective strategy for change, for revolution - at least on the large scale that the kingdom of God involves - comes from a minority working from the margins. I could not have articulated it then, but my seminary experience later germinated into the embrace of a vocational identity as necessarily minority, that a minority people working from the margins has the best chance of being a community capable of penetrating the noncommunity, the mob, the depersonalized function-defined crowd that is the sociological norm of America.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world and I’m wearing Milkbone underwear.” —Norm Peterson, Cheers

The ties that bind younger generations to the broader community are reciprocal, that is, when young people feel that the community cares about them and that they have a say in community affairs, they are more likely to identify with the community’s goals and to want to commit to its service. The evidence from prevention and community youth development studies is clear: When youths feel connected to others in the institutions of their communities, they are less likely to violate the norms and more likely to serve the common good of those communities.