Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018)

Even more problematic is the insistence logically stemming from the presumption of social corruption that all individual problems, no matter how rare, must be solved by cultural restructuring, no matter how radical. Our society faces the increasing call to deconstruct its stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people who do not or will not fit into the categories upon which even our perceptions are based. This is not a good thing. Each person’s private trouble cannot be solved by a social revolution, because revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous. We have learned to live together and organize our complex societies slowly and incrementally, over vast stretches of time, and we do not understand with sufficient exactitude why what we are doing works. Thus, altering our ways of social being carelessly in the name of some ideological shibboleth (diversity springs to mind) is likely to produce far more trouble than good, given the suffering that even small revolutions generally produce.

— Jordan Peterson on Revolution

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Even more problematic is the insistence logically stemming from the presumption of social corruption that all individual problems, no matter how rare, must be solved by cultural restructuring, no matter how radical. Our society faces the increasing call to deconstruct its stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people who do not or will not fit into the categories upon which even our perceptions are based. This is not a good thing. Each person’s private trouble cannot be solved by a social revolution, because revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous. We have learned to live together and organize our complex societies slowly and incrementally, over vast stretches of time, and we do not understand with sufficient exactitude why what we are doing works. Thus, altering our ways of social being carelessly in the name of some ideological shibboleth (diversity springs to mind) is likely to produce far more trouble than good, given the suffering that even small revolutions generally produce." in the context of "Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

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Source: Wikiquote: "Revolution" (P) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Jordan Peterson

About Jordan Peterson

Jordan Bernt Peterson (born June 12, 1962) is a Canadian clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1999), 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2017), Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life (2021) and We Who Wrestle With God (2024)