Jordan Peterson on Friendship
Rule 3: Make Friends with People who want the Best for You
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
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I realize that we have spoken about many topics related to marriage and family on this site but we haven’t yet touched on friendship. In Sex After Kids: 10 Ways to Improve Your Love Life, we mention that a fulfilling intimate life is the fruit of becoming friends with your spouse. In this growing digital age, it is becoming harder to define what exactly a friend is, what friendship requires, and what a healthy friendship looks like. In Rule 3, Peterson speaks of choosing friends that draw us up toward our ideal good. We can improve the quality of our life by improving the quality of our friendships.
“...those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it.”
Jordan Peterson’s description of friendship and what it means to be a true friend begins with his bildungsroman. After living in a small town where people had little to do and much less ambition, he moved to a larger city and made friends with people who were like-minded and “aiming upward.” This helped him bolster his own ambition. Moving to a new town also allowed him to start anew, since “in the chaos there are new possibilities.”
Not everyone who left his hometown left it for the better. He writes of other acquaintances who held onto old notions and fell into the same bad circles of friends. They surrounded themselves with people who made them feel better about themselves, but who did not help them improve their life.
Peterson asks, why do some people choose to spend time with those who draw the worst out of them?
He outlines 4 main reasons:
1. Rescuing others
We might feel compelled to be friends with someone because they have a special need. But “not everyone who is failing is a victim,” Peterson points out.
My thoughts: For example, a young person motivated by social justice may seek to befriend someone in order to make lasting and positive changes in that person’s life and in the world. They are motivated by an ideological goal, but the person they are saving becomes a something and not a someone–their friendship becomes less about the person and more about the cause that they are trying to pursue. Since in this case the friend becomes a means and not an end, the friendship is one of utility, according to Aristotle’s discussions on friendship, and is not a relationship of equals.
2. Exploiting others
Some people amplify their own suffering in order to draw people towards them.
My thoughts: I have been in the situation where a person who I have just met begins to tell me about a difficult personal experience they have just had, perhaps it is a difficult situation from the past, or even a present struggle with their health. They tell me in a way that invokes pity. According to Matthew Kelly in his book The Seven Levels of Intimacy, we draw people into a more intimate relationship with ourselves when we open up about painful events of our past: faults, fears and failures are at the top of the intimacy scale, just below legitimate needs. By opening up about deep hurts too quickly, the new “friend” may feel compelled to a forced intimacy with someone they hardly know. The problem is that there is no established trust. At best, it comes off as a desperate attempt at friendship, and may develop into a friendship that is centred around one person’s needs.
3. Narcissism
A person offers to make a commitment to someone that is more than they can offer, but when they realize they cannot follow-through, they blame the person they were trying to save. So Peterson asks, “How do you know that your attempts to pull someone up won’t instead bring them–or you–further down?”
My thoughts: I want to clarify a distinction that Peterson is making between the first point, where he describes a person who is sincerely looking to help another person, and in this point, where he describes a person who is looking to help someone to help themselves. It’s easier to look virtuous when you are giving help rather than receiving it. You can read more about narcissism here.
4. The Easy Route
A person chooses bad friends because they don’t want to be challenged by someone who is doing better than them in life.
My thoughts: I find that when life is challenging, I don’t want to be around people who challenge me. For example, after I started having children, I noticed that I kept to friends who were similar to myself in faith, values, and outlook on life. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be friends with other people, I just didn’t have the energy to argue with people. As a university student, I was more open to people who were different from me, but I think in becoming a parent, I became more protective of my values and lifestyle. Depending on our situation in life, our tolerance for challenge may change. And it’s natural to be attracted to people who make us feel comfortable. But I think Peterson here is making a distinction between people who draw out the worst in us and those who encourage us to be our best.
Good intentions: 3 reasons Why we shouldn’t try to be friends with someone in order to “save” them
Delinquency spreads: Since it is harder to go up than to go down, if the person you are friends with is not intent on improving their life, or has poor lifestyle choices and doesn’t want to change, these will influence you negatively.
The problem of enabling: Peterson poignantly asks if pity saves. Are we helping the suffering person or are we encouraging them to remain as they are?
Actualizing victimhood: The problem with seeing someone only as a victim is that the other person is then encouraged to bear no responsibility for what has happened to them. Without responsibility, there is no personal agency.
“Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble.”
What makes a good friend?
People who have a good opinion of their self-worth and who take responsibility for their lives. People who believe they deserve better and call us out on it when we fail to meet their reasonable standards.
People who believe that friendship is a “reciprocal arrangement:” friendship demands loyalty, which is not blind, but is negotiated fairly and honestly.
We are not morally obliged to help someone who is making the world a worse place. It’s not selfish to separate ourselves from people who are not good for us, even if we see that they are failing.
We need to choose people who are generally pleased by our successes, not threatened by them.
A good friend will not tolerate your cynicism and destructiveness. They will encourage you to do good to others and correct you when you do not. They will help you achieve what you most need.
Make friends with people who want the best for you.
“[E]very good example is a fateful challenge, and every hero, a judge.”
—Jordan Peterson, Rule 3, An Antidote to Chaos
Other thoughts:
Although Peterson doesn’t name it outright, he often touches on the mental health condition of co-dependency, in which a person feels compelled to be friends with someone who is hurting them. Co-dependency can happen in a relationship of abuse, alcoholism, addiction, or other destructive behaviours. The co-dependent person may feel an exaggerated sense of responsibility toward a person, a tendency to confuse love with pity, a tendency to do more than their share in relationships, and a sense of guilt when asserting their own needs. You can read more about co-dependency here.
If you want to read more about what a healthy friendship looks like, I like Stephen R. Covey’s Seven Habits for Highly Effective People. His win-win, win-lose, and lose-lose model is helpful for identifying whether a relationship is balanced and reciprocal.
As a teenager, I appreciated Covey’s son Sean Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens, since it taught me how to be a good friend and how to work with people who were different from me—in an entertaining and teen-appropriate way.
For younger kids, aged 6-8, I recommend the Arthur series chapter books by Marc Brown, he does a great job teaching children memorable lessons about friendship.
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