8th November 2020
This is an attempt to extract the gist of Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning lectures. It might be useful, because the videos are quite long (a total of 30h) and the book Maps of Meaning is demanding and complex as well. Twelve Rules for Life doesn't offer as much details as MoM, so I thought someone may want to quickly read through the content of the lectures to remember some important ideas.
This is a pure summary, I didn't change anything here, I'm not providing any analysis or explanation. My only addition is a few examples that might clarify some more complex points.
A small caveat; the following might be a bit chaotic, as Dr Peterson likes to jump from topic to topic mid-paragraph. I didn't correct that here, because 1) it was too much work, 2) it might preserve the feeling of the lecture.
So, here it is. Life might actually have meaning and here's the theory of it.
Genesis of Maps of Meaning
After 1945 the world split into two major opposing camps: the West (NATO) and the Soviet Bloc (Warsaw Pact), which armed themselves in deadly hydrogen bombs and threatened to destroy one another. An atomic conflict seemed very likely, as a mere accident or a human error could have started it. Many times we were close to a catastrophe: during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the American nukes were ready to be fired.
One of the reasons for the Cold War was the different approach to the issue of wealth inequality. After the Industrial Revolution, inequality was a real problem. In 1895 the average Westerner lived on a dolar a day in today's money. The fate of the poor was described by George Orwell, among others. In his book The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell wrote about the lives of English coal miners – their work conditions were horrible.
The West decided to follow the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, John Locke and the english tradition of democracy, while the USSR based their worldview on a rationalistic, marxist ideology, which posited that the rich necessarily oppress the poor, so the totality of wealth must be forcibly equalized among people.
The marxists haven't reached their posited utopia – to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities. Their policies have lead to the death of millions of people in the Soviet Union instead.
One of the reasons for the failure of marxism was the fact, that the communists completely ignored the phenomenon of the Pareto distribution.
The Pareto principle is a statistic that predicts how wealth and a lot of other things distribute itself among people. It shows that almost everyone has nothing or close to nothing, while a tiny minority gets most of a certain thing. It's applicable to a huge number of domains.
Please take a look at the blue line on the graph. Let's assume that the vertical axis is the population and the horizontal is wealth. We can see that almost all the people have almost nothing, while a tiny minority achieve the highest value.
Some real-world examples are:
- a tiny minority of people accumulating almost all the wealth of a society
- only a few books selling almost all the copies
- one corporation owning a huge proportion of a market (e.g. Apple)
- wealth distribution among memebers of Chicago drug gang
Wealth distribution follows the Pareto principle, because success breeds success and failure breeds failure. Money attracts more money, while poverty is hard to escape. If someone starts to succeed even a bit, it becomes easier and easier for him to succeed even more. If someone fails, it's very difficult to get back on their feet.
People fail, among other reasons, because there's massive differences in their abilities. Smartest people get to where they can make a lot of money faster. Unfortunately, it's not possible to make people smarter. Also, money is extremely difficult to handle properly, so if someone is at the bottom (unemployed, lonely, addicted), merely giving him money won't improve his life.
Forcible redistribution of wealth has thus lead the USSR to catastrophies. These in turn contributed to its dissolution and the West winning the Cold War. Luckily, at the moment there are no global political camps that would be hostile due to axiomatic reasons. Altough the Chinese say that they're marxists, actually they are not – they're a hybrid regime that's more interested in technological progress than war over principles.
In light of all the above, Dr Peterson says that during the Cold War, in the 1980's he was obssessing over the question: Why would people produce two hostile camps and threaten to destroy the world with weapons of mass destruction? This question lead him to the consideration of belief systems. The West inherited theirs from the Greeks, Romans, Jews and Christians, while the USSR believed in a materialistic, rational philosophy that was created by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and other thinkers.
But what did it actually mean to believe something? And why risk the death of yourself and other people to protect your belief? It would seem that people were really, really commited to their beliefs. What were the reasons for it?
The importance of belief
Dr Peterson notes that belief is something that's not only connected with abstract, economic, religious or philosophical ideas. Every human being constantly acts out their beliefs and also imposes some expectations on other people. Students listening to a class share a certain belief system. They listen to the professor and expect him to act a certain way - share some knowledge with them. The shared belief system allows them to sit there peacefully and get what they want – the knowledge about the world.
People want to act out their belief systems and achieve certain goals. If that's what happens, they feel secure and confident, as they have not only gotten what they want, but also validated their beliefs.
The match between what a person believes and how other people actually act is extremely important. The students believe that Dr Peterson will peacefully conduct the lecture. If he suddenly smashed someone's laptop, the students' match between expectation and reality would suddenly dissolve – they would find themselves in chaos, in unexplored territory. They wouldn't know where they were and how to behave.
Knowing were you are means being in a state where your belief system is matched to the reality. Most of human territory is actually other people and the dominance hierarchy that encompasses all of us. If you properly act within that structure, you get what you want. A violent or insane person is not in the dominance hierarchy – they are unexplored territory. That's why we avoid such people, as we have no idea how they will behave.
It's also important to note that territory is spacio-temporal. A place that's safe now, might not be safe the next minute. If a territory suddenly becomes unsafe, people experience a prey response – they freeze and try to avert their gaze from the predator.
Dr Peterson understood that belief systems regulate emotions. A theory makes a person feel secure because it explains the world. It explains the world because other people believe in the same theory and if both parties act out the theory, they both get what they want. It's the coming together of the theory and the outcome that makes life.
The matching of belief systems and acting them out is a predicate for a functioning society. It saves people from anxiety and death. Thus people have every reason to defend their belief system, as it's their territory. If people's theory is destroyed, chaos ensues.
The origin of values
A belief system is a set of moral guidelines that tell us how to perceive and act.
Without it, without a hierarchy of value, be it conscious or subconscious, we can't even look at anything. During our day, we ignore almost everything and focus solely on the things that are connected with our goals. That suggests that we do have a hierarchy of value – some things are valued more than others. Things that don't matter are ignored all the time.
An unintegrated person is a collection of arguing sub-personalities. An integrated person is someone who understands their values. That gives their more control over their life.
Dr Peterson takes a phenomenological approach, that means he focuses on phenomena experienced by people, instead of searching for the objective, ontological truth. What you experience is real. Although it's subjective, the fundamental reality of life is pain, as hurting people cannot argue that it's just a reaction of the nervous system. No. We act as if pain was real.
Moral systems tell us how to act and what to see. A shared moral system keeps peoples' emotions under control and fulfills their motivational needs.
David Hume said that it's not possible to derive an ought from an is. Knowing certain facts doesn't tell us how to implement them in your life. Knowing that people behave in a certain way doesn't mean that they should behave that way.
Sam Harris said that values can be derived from rationality, but Jordan Peterson doesn't think it's possible. Values have to emerge on their own. Marxism was an attempt to derive values from rationality and it failed miserably, thus Peterson accepts Hume's argument.
It's not possible to rationally decide what we value more or less. Should the UN spend money on cancer, AIDS or education? Some valuing must take part in the decision process.
Since the scientific revolution, science has been criticizing religious systems (partially rightfully so), which were uniting societies and telling people what's valueable. The problem is, science doesn't know what constitutes morality. Science can produce a hydrogen bomb, but it won't tell us whether it's okay to use it.
According to Nietzsche, the West has been running on the fumes of Christianity, which organized our societies under a common morality. One of the core beliefs of Christianity is that each individual has something divine within them. That principle is embedded in our law – in the presumption of innocence. The law has to bow down to the individual, even if he was convicted and reprehensible.
Without an idea like this, a mere accusation was enough to make people stone another person. It's almost impossible that something like presumption of innocence exists.
The idea that everyone has something divine in them is not scientific, but still highly functional. Societies that believed it flourished up to now. Rights of the individual and voting is a consequence of the divine nature of the individual. That's nested in our metaphysical beliefs according to Nietzsche. He thought that if you wipe out the cornerstone beliefs, you will wipe out the whole system. And that's been happening. Since he observed the death of God, some Western societies have been swinging heavily from left to right – from communism to nazism.
The western democracies have been quite stable, though, but it might not be possible without the underlying metaphysics.
Scientific and pragmatic truth
Dr Peterson believes that there's two types of truth: scientific truth and pragmatic truth. The former is easy to understand, but the latter is much deeper. Pragmatic truths are truths that improve the chances of our further life and reproduction maximally. It's a darwinian idea. During our evolution it was not the most important thing to understand the world scientificaly. The most important thing was to survive. Thus, a human being is an embodied truth that has about 80 years to live and reproduce. It's a product of 3 billion years of evolution and we don't know a better way of acting. Our rational (and irrational) systems are nested within the darwinian framework and are based on pragmatic truths. We care about being alive and our theories are tools that help us stay alive, and not necessarily find out what's scientificly true.
Eric Neumann wrote a book called The Origins and History of Consciousness, in which he explained that human beings have a central narrative, which is the dramatic expression of our systems of value. It's built into our nature, and we're not infinitely maleable by culture – postmodernists wouldn't agree.
Camille Paglia says that people should learn about art, literature, poetry, fiction, religion and music. That's because they show abstract, dramaticized guidelines on how to properly act in the world, across a broad range of situations.
It's possible that tribal people were initiated with music into the culture of their tribe. It was an invitation to a drama. Great dramas are more real than real, they are hyperreal.
What makes an interesting story? It should have a problem that someone has managed to solve. If you listen to such a story, it becomes free wisdom for you. You will know how to deal with such an issue without actually having to figure it out on your own.
The classic story is - someone has a problem – they're in chaos, in unexplored territory, and then they find a way out of it. Chaos is when what you're doing and what's happening in the world stop matching. The more disruption the more distabiled you will be. Nothing that you assumed was real is real anymore. We like to see people organizing their character or their tools and come out the other side better than it was. That was what a comedy was. Tragedy was when chaos won.
Truth and meta-truth
According to Dr Peterson, people constantly tell each other stories about how they dealt with a certain problem. If common themes are extracted from many such stories, we acquire a disstilled wisdom – the knowledge how to tackle different issues. That's what happens within literature. Everyday stories are being aggregated and disstilled. A great work is an aggregation of e.g. a thousand mundane stories, which a brilliant writer can use to describe a profound character transformation.
Stories about events that didn't happen are called fiction. However fiction is not necessarily untrue. People don't want to read about true things, as the truth is your everyday, mundane life. People need meta-truths, which are disstilled truths applicable across domains.
Dr Peterson asks why would people watch animated movies like the very popular Disney's Pinokio. Pinokio is a series of low-resolution drawings, that tell a weird and absurd story of a puppet that wants to become a human being. However, people how received Pinokio with great enthusiasm, because they felt that this animation touched upon something important. But is Pinokio true? That depends on what we mean by truth.
Our society thinks that scientific truth is the ultimate truth. But we don't act as if it's true. We're captivated by things that are not predicated on scientific assumptions. Objective, scientific truth is not the most important thing that people want. People want to know how to act. People want to know the meaning of life.
Articulate knowledge is embedded in inarticulate knowledge which is made of art, literature and high culture in general.
Carl Jung believed that our structured knowledge, scientific thought was the explored territory and beyond that was the unexplored territory of knowledge that we were meeting with our creative imagination through art, intuition and insight. Outside of that field, there's also all the things we don't know anything about. It's important not only to grasp the structured knowledge, but also to explore and embody the wisdom of the unstructured surround. Without that understanding, we won't be able to incorporate the spirit of our ancestors who built our civilization, and to maintain the culture.
Suffering and meaning
But why should we maintain our culture and not let it die? According to Dr Peterson, we should do it, because that's what gives life meaning. Meaning in life is proportionate to the amount of responsibility an individual adopts. Meaning arises when we care for our children, friends and family, or pursue a career that suits us.
People need a load, a heavy burden. If they don't have responsibilities, they suffer. Dr Peterson takes an existentialist approach – he believes that we can tell what people believe by watching how they act. Everyone acts as if they believed their pain was real, no one tries to debate away their headache, by reducing it to talk about neuron activity.
Many religions focus a lot on pain. Christians have the crucified Jesus as their symbol, the Jews always commemorate past suffering and the central dogma of the Buddhists is that life is suffering. People do act as if they believed that their pain is actually real.
But, why is life suffering? Because we can be broken, hurt and killed and we know it. We know that we will die. Real self-consciousness is the knowledge of our borders. Humans are the first species to have discovered the future and that lets us makes plans for it, but it also made us realize that we'll die. This fact might make us question the point of our existence. Why live and strive, if we will eventually turn to dust?
The optimistic things is, the amount of responsibility we adopt increases the amount of our meaningful engagement. And maybe our responsibility should primarily be the reduction of human suffering.
If pain makes us doubt the meaning of life then the antidote to that should be striving for the cessation of suffering.
There's a mode of being that makes us good people and a part of it is the alleviation of suffering.
Some religious stories and fairy tales have been remembered for a very long time, as they offered moral guidelines on how to act. Great stories have been also written by modern authors, like Dostoevski, who would create powerful, rational characters in his books and make them face and debate the protagonists.
Nietzsche said that if a person has a why, they will bear almost any how. Moral systems predicated on dramas orient us in life and thus it's really important to understand them.
Meaning is extremely important for human beings. That's why in Auschwitz nazis tortured people mocking their need for meaningful work – Arbeit Macht Frei. Guards would take a prisoner and make him carry bags of wet salt from one side of a vast camp to another. And then carry it back and put it in the same place. That was a parody of meaning.
People need meaning. We need to know what should we devote our life to. We need to know if there's anything we should be aiming at. Unfortunately, the modern education seems to destroy all the traditional moral systems that the students bring from home and leaves them bereft of any values.
The framework through which we look at the world is actually a story. The basic story is – you're someplace that's insufficient and you're aiming at a better place. You bring it together with action. It's a value laden framework.
It's not easy to determine what the optimal value laden framework is. What are the optimal values? Are they completely relative? Was the war between the West and USSR arbitrary? Were our axioms arbitrary? Is moral relativism correct? Should everything be settled by force?
The difference between the Western and the Soviet system was that Western culture evolved and was grounded in fundamental stories, that addressed something real. And Marxism was an imposed, man-made rationalistic structure.
The Fundamental Structure of Stories
The following picture represents the fundamental constituent elements of stories.
According to Dr Peterson, ideologies are fragmentary meta-narratives. They address only a part of the fundamental structure. They are powerful, because they are rooted in it, but their partiality makes them insufficient and destructive.
Knowing the story structure might immunize people against ideologies.
The most fundamental thing is chaos. Chaos is what people don't understand at all. They come in contact with it in bits and pieces. Chaos is when the two towers fell. It's when our story falls apart. Chaos is the descent to the underworld. On the other hand, order is when we do what we want to do, and what we want to happen happens.
Chaos is when we do what we're supposed to do to get what we want and it doesn't happen. It has different levels. The worst form of chaos is when we do something wrong, that we knew we shouldn't have done, because something bad could happen, and the bad thing does happen. That is hell.
Looking back at the picture, the Archetypal Son is the individual, she/he exists in the culture, which in turn is placed in nature. Nature is mother nature, because it gives birth to everything and nurtures them and culture is father culture, because the fundamental dominance hierarchies in primates are masculine. Females are nature from the darwinian perspective, because it's women who select which males will reproduce.
Culture is the judgemental father. Our families and friends constantly judge our behaviour and reputation. Culture is like a meta-person that's constantly watching us. It's real not in a scientific manner, but in an another way.
Nature has two elements – the creative and destructive. It produces plant, animals and people, but it also creates earthquakes, diseases, viruses and floods. Culture is tyrannical, as you have to forcibly shape yourself to coexist with people, but it has also a positive, protective element.
Thus, we can metaphoricaly say that the individual is standing on an island in a middle of an ocean.
The individual is both a hero and a villian. Meta-villians and a meta-heroes are religious characters.As an example, please look at Norse mythology. Odin is the archetypal father who has two sons – Thor – the world-redeeming hero and Loki – the destructive trickster.
It's somewhat paradoxical, but the human capacity for evil is an ofshoot of empathy. Empathy makes us know what other people feel, so we also have the awareness what will hurt others. In the biblical story of Genesis the first people gained knowledge of good and evil along with self-consciousness – they saw how naked and fragile human beings were, and from that moment they knew what to do to hurt people.
People are the only animals that can aim their malevolence. Thus, it's very important to understand one's own capacity for evil. A person who doesn't know they're evil, are even more evil that they think they are. And the most evil people don't know that they're evil at all.
In all religions the world is a battleground of the good and the evil. The culture is always both the wise king and the tyrant. Our evil side is constantly resentful of the suffering and the limitations of being. And it has good reasons for it.
In Dostoevski's The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan – the rational atheist lays out an argument before his brother Alyosha, an idealistic monastic novitiate. Ivan narrates a story of a family abusing their child and says that a world in which terrible evil can happen to the helpless should not be.
However, if we act that resentment out, everything will be much worse. Dr Peterson gives the example of Carl Panzram, a serial killer and rapist, who was motivated by the hatred towards existence and raped 1200 men, killed dozens and tried to start a war.
The individual is the person who explores and masters or looks away. Wherever we go there's us, the society and the match between what we're doing and what's happening. We enter unexplored territory when what we do and what we expect to happen stop matching.
If a snake comes into our house it turns into unexplored territory. Wherever we are, when things aren't working how they are supposed to work – that's chaos.
Chaos is when we do not know what to do. However, our organisms actually know what to do in such situation. We freeze and we pay more attention. Cortisol and adrenaline is being produced in large quantities. We're getting ready to fight or flee. We cannot remain in that state for long though, as it requires a lot of energy. If that stress response doesn't switch off, that's PTSD. It makes people depressed, anxious and makes them age faster, as our body burns up a lot of resources in order to prepare for an emergency. That's why people will fight to defend their territory, which is their moral systems, as they don't want to default to the stress response, which switches on once we fall into moral chaos.
People have such a response when they're betrayed, ill or experience a death in their family. Betrayal is the hardest of them all, because it causes the collapse of your represenation of the past, present and future. Past – your relationship with that person was a lie. Present – are you gullible, stupid, blinded, naive? Future – you had common plans which collapse. Reversion to chaos is the travel to the underworld – people fail, and them sort themselves out, they're back to the world of living.
The mythological hero is the person that traverses through order and chaos.
Pinocchio
Dr Peterson says that it's really peculiar that people would pay money to see a story like Pinocchio. That would suggest there's something important to it. It's important to note that sometimes we understand things that we don't know we understand, in ways which we don't understand.
Pinocchio is a symboli masterpiece and it begins with a song – When you wish upon a star. Stars are things that are in heaven and also amazing people – models for emulation, upon which our ideals are projected. Stars are otherworldly and they are the light that shines in the darkness. People wish upon stars, because they represent an unknown infinity that transcends the mundane.
We admire some people and not admire others. We admire those that have something that we also wish we had. That provides us a hint as to our unconscious value system. If we ask ourselves what do we admire, the answer might come from the depths of our psyche.
To wish upon a star is to raise our eyes over the horizon and focus on something transcendent, to focus on the absolute - on the light that shines in the darkness, the source of ilumination. Aiming above the mundane has the potential to transform human spirit, so it's important to aim at something high.
Future authoring programe. Past authoring programme.
Dr Peterson talks about the benefits of writing about our past and future.
People often won't aim at any goals, because if they did, they might fail. And in order to know what we want, what to aim at, first we have to discover who we were in the past and who we are know.
It's good to write about important events that shaped who we are. If we have an old memory that still causes an emotional impact, it mean that we might have not solved the problem that situation has faced us with. It's a threat, it's territory that hasn't been mastered. It might be hard to integrate it, but by doing so we would feel much better in the future.
Writing about the future, we should focus on the things we need for life. Friends, intimate relationship, family, career, hobbies, health, responsible use of substances. People will not achieve things that they don't aim for, so it's really important to formulate those things.
Dr Peterson proposes an excersise: write 15 minutes without caring about grammar - how would you help yourself if you really wanted to help yourself. After that, write what would happen if you'd let yourself go and degenerate.
Positive emotion is mostly generated by evidence that we're moving towards something that we value. It's not generated by acomplishment. If we're aiming at something worthwhile, progress gives us dopamine kicks.
We should aim at something realistic, that we could get, that's quite hard and important. We should make ourselves better at pursuing things and increasing our competence. We should aim at somehting realistic, that you could get, that's quite hard and important, that would also benefit our family and the community.
If we do so, the world of narrative will open up for us.
author – Jordan Peterson
summary – dd
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