Of course, one of the most celebrated guidebooks for the Detached Manipulator "shadow" form of the masculine Magician archetype of maturity is Machiavelli's The Prince (1532).
Disclosure: I was in the Jesuits for a time (1979-1987). I did my theological studies at the University of Toronto. However, today I would describe myself as a theistic humanist, as distinct from an atheistic humanist (also known as a secular humanist).
Now, the Wikipedia entry about Professor Peterson says, "In a 2017 interview, Peterson was asked if he was a Christian; he responded, 'I suppose the most straightforward answer to that is yes.' In 2018, Peterson emphasized that his concept of Christianity differs from the term as it is generally understood. To Peterson, the ethical responsibility of a Christian is to imitate Christ; he believes that this means 'something like you need to take responsibility for the evil in the world as if you were responsible for it . . . to understand the direction of the world, whether its toward heaven or hell.' When asked if he believes in God, Peterson responded: 'I think the proper response to that is no, but I'm afraid He might exist.'"
In any event, I see the present essay as open to unequivocally theistic persons, on the one hand, and, on the other, also open to unequivocally atheistic persons, because I do not myself advance an unequivocally theistic position as such in it. In a certain sense, I see it as a kind of exercise in what is known in Jesuit spirituality as discernment of spirits, but writ large, so to speak. In the present essay, I am, in effect, setting up my insights and my references to certain books as alternative sources of thought not only to Professor Peterson's 1999 book and his 2018 self-help book and his various YouTube videos, but also to certain forms of political correctness that are popular in academia today. In all humility and modesty, I offer what I say in the present essay for any and all persons who might be interested in the alternative sources of thought that I mention here, usually with bibliographic references.
In Professor Peterson's 1999 book, he does not refer to any of the five books co-authored by Professor Moore and Gillette in the early 1990s. However, in my estimate, Professor Moore has developed Jung's thought about the archetypes in the human psyche far more insightfully than Professor Peterson has.
Now, even though Professor Moore and Gillette wrote about the four masculine archetypes of maturity, they postulated four parallel feminine archetypes of maturity in the human psyche. The archetypes of maturity involved in proper assertiveness are the masculine Warrior archetype and the feminine Warrior archetype. Professor Moore and Gillette claim that each archetype of maturity involves two "shadow" forms and one optimal form something akin to the mean between the extremes. Moreover, certain people might oscillate alternatively between the two "shadow" forms of one or more of the archetypes of maturity, but without advancing decisively to the optimal form(s).
If we add the eight "shadow" forms of the four masculine archetypes of maturity with the four optimal forms, then we might characterize Professor Moore and Gillette as operationally defining and explaining 12 forms that might be compared with Professor Peterson's operationally defined and explained 12 Rules.
Now, both the masculine and the feminine Warrior archetypes include two "shadow" forms that Professor Moore and Gillette colorfully name the Sadist and the Masochist. Their names for the "shadow" forms of the other three archetypes of maturity are also colorful. In contrast with the eight colorfully named "shadow" forms of the archetypes of maturity, each archetype of maturity has only one optimal form, but the optimal forms are not given colorful names each is just known as the optimal form of the archetype in question.)
Now, the main title of Alberti and Emmons' self-help book about assertiveness, mentioned above, suggests that they envisioned their readers as people who are stuck in the Masochist "shadow" Warrior forms. In addition, the conservative NYT columnist David Brooks' profile, mentioned above, of the "implied reader" of Professor Peterson's 2018 self-help book suggests that those young men are also stuck in the Masochist "shadow" Warrior form.
However, in my estimate, Professor Peterson himself is stuck in the Sadist "shadow" form of the masculine Warrior archetype of maturity, and he is also simultaneously stuck in the Tyrant "shadow" form of the King archetype of masculine maturity. In my estimate, he has not yet learned how to access the optimal forms of either the masculine Warrior archetype of maturity or the King archetype of masculine maturity. Nevertheless, Professor Peterson's 12 Rules for Life may be a useful set of self-help prescriptions for certain young men today to use.
However, in my estimate, the women engaged in political-correctness zealotry are also stuck in the Sadist "shadow" form of the feminine Warrior archetype of maturity and also simultaneously in the Tyrant "shadow" form of the Queen archetype of feminine maturity. Similarly, the men engaged in political-correctness zealotry are stuck in the Sadist "shadow" form of the masculine Warrior archetype of maturity and also simultaneously in the Tyrant "shadow" form of the King archetype of masculine maturity.
As a rule, culture warriors are stuck in the Sadist "shadow" Warrior forms of the archetypes of maturity and also simultaneously stuck in the Tyrant "shadow" forms of the Royal archetypes of maturity (the King and the Queen). For example, the alt-right people named in Andrew Marantz's new book Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation (New York: Viking, 2019) are stuck in the Sadist "shadow" Warrior forms of the archetypes of maturity. But the optimal forms of the Warrior archetypes of maturity are pro-social, not anti-social, and so are the optimal forms of the Royal archetypes of maturity (the King and the Queen).
Various forms of zealotry, not only political-correctness zealotry, but also anti-abortion zealotry can bestow on the zealots a heightened sense of power and purpose in life. Consequently, for zealots to ratchet down their zealotry may be problematic, to say the least.
But I want to return for a moment to the hyphenated term warrior-king, as exemplified in the Iliad not only by Achilles but also be numerous other characters portrayed as warrior-kings and by King David in the Hebrew Bible. Can men today become warrior-kings in their own psyches and lives? That is, can men today learn how to access the optimal forms of both the King archetype of maturity and the masculine Warrior archetype of maturity? Put differently, what if men today tend to specialize in accessing the optimal form of the masculine Warrior archetype, but neglect the task of learning how to access the optimal form of the King archetype of maturity?
If we were to think of the kind of inner leveraging process suggested by the hyphenated term warrior-king, then we might wonder if other inner leveraging processes are involved in the tasks of learning how to access the optimal forms of the masculine Magician archetype of maturity and the masculine Lover archetype of maturity.
In addition, if we were to think of inner leveraging processes involved in learning how to access the optimal forms of the four masculine archetypes of maturity, then we might also wonder if other inner leveraging processes are involved involving the four feminine archetypes of maturity in the human psyche.
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