STAND UP STRAIGHT WITH YOUR SHOULDERS BACK

It starts with lobsters. You have to understand about the lobsters.

Not lobsters, exactly, but the ancestors of lobsters. The ancestors of lobsters were around at least 350-million years ago, and 350-million years is a Very Long Time.

The thing about lobsters, according to Peterson, is that the males fight each other to establish dominance, and the females all want to mate with the dominant males. We are not so different, his argument goes. (Except for the part where female lobsters squirt pheromone-laced urine out of their faces to entice the males, but Peterson doesn’t mention that.)

There are lots of animals Peterson could have used to make this point, like elk or lions or elephant seals, all of which compete for females and none of which pee out of their faces. But he chose lobsters, and I have to think it’s because anything that’s been around that long has clearly figured itself out.

Rule 1 is to stand up straight with your shoulders back. Don’t be a pathetic lobster, basically, though lobsters don’t have shoulders, as such.

I took a literal approach one Monday morning. I stacked my laptop and monitor on top of some dictionaries and sat up very straight, with my shoulders back, for hours.

The pain started in the small of my back around 10 a.m. and radiated up from there. By early afternoon, I was finding excuses to hunch over, even for a few seconds, to get some relief.

I didn’t feel any more dominant than usual. But I couldn’t stop thinking about lobsters, so I called a marine biologist in Halifax, Boris Worm, to ask if we really are just like them. He said no. “The main hallmark of our own species is that we’re social creatures, right? And the only reason we survived is that we perfected social cooperation,” he said. “A lobster does none of these things. A lobster’s essentially a glorified insect.”

Worm thinks humans are attracted to each other for all kinds of reasons, not just dominance. All species will try to find high-quality mates, he said, but that can mean a lot of different things for humans. Basically, he said, we’re more complicated than a crustacean.

I wanted to agree, but I wasn’t sure. I thought Peterson might counter that we’re not nearly as complex as we like to think.