Jordan B Peterson
Introduction to Maps of Meaning
Maps of Meaning describes the foundational nature of human existence, asserting that the primary problem confronting humanity is navigation: determining how to move from what currently is to what should be. It identifies the fundamental cry of the time as being for a uniting narrative. Great stories reveal truths that have been known since the beginning of time, serving as a map for navigating reality. The meaning of the journey justifies the inevitable risk involved.
There exist two fundamental perspectives on the world: the materialist view, which considers what the world is made of, and the perspective of experience, which considers how to act in the world. Since all individuals are alive, figuring out how to act in the world is arguably of primary importance and perhaps of primary reality. Action is predicated upon perception; there is no perception independent of action.
The Frame of Perception
Action and attention necessitate framing perception. An indefinite number of details exist in the world, capable of causing one to drown in detail, hence the requirement to focus attention. The structure used to focus attention and sequence actions in relation to a goal is crucial.
A simple frame of perception consists of three parts: a sense of where one currently is, a sense of where one is headed, and the strategy required to organise attention and action to move from the present place to the destination. This structure is necessary because people are navigating creatures.
This viewpoint has been converged upon by several distinct disciplines:
1. Cybernetics:
Cybernetic theorists, originating with Norbert Wiener in the 1940s while working on missile control systems in World War II, established that systems require a beginning place, a target, and a mechanism to decrease the gap between the projectile and the target. This provides a trajectory adjustment framework.
2. Phenomenology:
Phenomenologists, notably Husserl and Heidegger, sought to redefine reality by prioritising experience itself over objective reality. Husserl’s fundamental assertion was that all perception is intentional—it is associated with a goal and moves towards a point. The world inhabited is constituted by the goal.
3. Perceptual Psychology:
Perceptual psychologists observed that there is no perception independent of action. Attention focuses on what is relevant and commands centre stage. This focus is fovea dependent, creating a high-resolution centre point surrounded by a periphery that dissolves into a void.
Phenomenology and Experience
Phenomenologists expressed dissatisfaction with the materialist, reductionist, atheist view of reality, which insisted that the material substructure was the most real. The scientific and enlightenment revolution created a divide between object and subject that prioritised the objective and left the subjective in an abyss of uncertainty and meaninglessness. This constitutes an existential problem, as existence cannot be sustained in a universe devoid of all meaning apart from suffering.
The objective substratum of existence is not tenable in the absence of a perceiver embedded in a world of value and meaning. Perception itself is dependent on action, which is dependent on goal, which is dependent on value. Therefore, phenomenologists prioritised experience.
Phenomena are defined as things that shine forth (from the Greek word phenis thai) or what presents itself. As one moves through the world, certain things shout out, command attention, and become relevant in relationship to one's aims. For example, the biblical burning bush is a phenomenon.
Heidegger, following Husserl, advanced the notion that if the world of experience is intentional and nothing is more primary than the world of experience as it manifests in consciousness, then there is no distinction between experience and being itself. Being, as a concept, is necessarily being towards an aim.
The Structure and Function of Narrative
The frame of perception, being cybernetic, phenomenological, and perceptual, is fundamentally a story. A story serves as a description of a frame of perception.
Post-modernists correctly insisted that all people inhabit a story, even the scientific enterprise, which is nested inside a story concerning the improvement of things. The true science is perceived as serving the good of mankind, which is an upward journey—an a priori frame necessary so that the scientist is not deemed a threat.
The simplest story is the description of movement from Point A to Point B. Great stories are meta-stories, which are narratives about how a story transforms. These are compelling because they deal not only with obstacles to goal-directed pursuit but with obstacles so profound that they necessitate the transformation of the pursuit itself.
Fiction holds great importance because it allows for experimentation with a frame of perception without risk. By adopting the protagonist’s frame, one experiences their emotions, testing the frame.
Motivation, Emotion, and the Value Gradient
The experience of the world is perpetually pitched towards the goal of attention and action, imbuing the frame of experience with significance. The present is defined as insufficient—the unbearable present—because if it were satisfactory, no action would be taken. Action is driven from what is towards what should be.
A value gradient exists in perception itself. One moves from a lesser place to a greater place; the goal must be better than the present location. The question of why one would expend energy is answered by the fact that the goal must have value. This value is signalled by enthusiasm or positive emotion. If a speaker pours energy into telling a story, it signifies a belief that the destination is worth the effort, which is compelling. Enthusiasm, defined as being possessed by the divine (en theos), indicates that the ultimate goal fills one with positive motivation.
Emotion functions as a trajectory adjustment system.
- Positive emotion indicates movement towards the goal, validating the frame of perception.
- Negative emotion indicates deviation from the path, failure of the frame, or that something has gone astray.
Obstacles in the path to the goal, such as other people, elicit negative emotion because they impede progress. Pathways, conversely, are seen phenomenologically as the journey forward.
Motivations as Subpersonalities
Psychologists originally described motivations as drives, suggesting that actions were deterministic chains of reflexes. Behaviourists, despite mastering the details of behaviour and perception through methods like reflex chaining, failed to account for the sophisticated behaviour of animals and human beings. Complex nervous systems interact with the world in a manner that transcends mere deterministic reflex chaining.
Motivations are better conceptualised as instinctual goals. They are not drives but rather subpersonalities. The older and more profound the motivation, the more ancient the neurological system mediating it. Hypothalamic systems mediate fundamental motivational states such as hunger, thirst, temperature, excretion, and defensive aggression. The hypothalamic system mediating exploration is the root of the dopamineergic system, which underlies positive emotion in relationship to a goal.
A motivational state attempts to grip the perceptual frame. When one is angry, the world takes on a simplified, negative phenomenological reality; memories and playful interactions disappear, favouring dominance and defeat. Such states are considered possessions or spirits, often having a mythic nature, such as Aries, the god of war, who personifies a motivational state. These subpersonalities are alive with will.
The Optimal Aim and Developmental Transformation
Consciousness, which formulates the frame and goal abstractly, must ground itself in embodied movement when implementing the frame. This process, where the abstract conception of the good is brought down to earth and embodied, constitutes the incarnation of the spirit in the corporeal world.
The word Sin (Greek hamartia) means to miss the target or the aim. If the world manifests in an unacceptable manner, the aim is likely misaligned. The developmental pathway requires one to replace the misaligned aim with something higher through repentance and atonement (at-one-ment).
The ultimate goal should provide something significant and simultaneously transform the individual as it is pursued, increasing their capacity to posit and pursue better goals. This pathway, which facilitates vision and increases the capacity of intent, is signified by a deep sense of intrinsic meaning.
The pursuit of an optimal frame necessitates adherence to a strict set of constraints:
1. It must allow the individual to thrive now, in the medium term, and in the long run.
2. It must incorporate other people so that they also thrive in the medium to long run, promoting harmony.
3. It must improve as it is implemented, providing enthusiasm and proper regulation of negative emotions.
Children achieve such constraints when they are playing. If one is proficient at generating frames of play or story, enthusiasm and developmental transformation are maximised simultaneously. This upward trajectory is represented symbolically as a Jacob’s Ladder - THE LADDER OF DIVINE ASCENT - or a stairway to heaven.
The biblical story of the temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden illustrates the dangers of misaligned aim. Eve’s temptation was to make herself like God by creating the world of value, defying the intrinsic moral order. The spirit associated with this rebellion is Lucifer, the spirit of the prideful intellect motivated to usurp authority. The core moral lesson is to follow the moral order, abide by it, and not attempt to create it. The ensuing Fall necessitates the transformation of the frame, leading to chaos and reintegration. Wisdom is defined as pursuing a pathway that improves the probability of properly specifying what should be pursued.
The Nature and Origin of Archetypes
Archetypes are defined as the fundamental constituent elements of being. They represent structures of reality and experience that are the most permanent across time and manifest in the largest number of situations. These patterns reflect a very deep reality that is not easily apprehensible. The existence of these structures suggests that the manner in which human beings organise themselves in the world is not arbitrary.
Ontological Status and Permanence
Archetypes are considered hyper real, being more real than the phenomena themselves. They are not merely symbolic representations but reflect a reality that is extraordinarily deep. Something that transcends temporality is held to be profoundly real. The archetypes constitute the underlying structures within which philosophy itself is embedded.
Biological and Evolutionary Roots
The origins of archetypes are fundamentally rooted in the evolutionary and biological necessities of existence. They represent constants of experience that had to be successfully mapped for the survival of individuals and the species over immense spans of time.
1. Selection and Propagation: An archetype is distinguished from a meme (an idea that propagates itself) because the archetype is an idea that has propagated itself across such a massive span of time that it has actually shaped the course of evolution itself. These profound structures are derived from the effect of [[Darwinian]] processes on cognitive and perceptual function.
2. Instantiated Knowledge: Human beings are social beyond comprehension, and the evolutionary pathway has ensured that individuals are unbelievably social. This necessity means that the knowledge constituting the archetypes was instantiated in the behavioural realm, rather than emerging initially in the conceptual realm. These patterns evolved collectively as representations of adaptive behaviour.
3. A Priori Structure: The structures of the universe of possible interpretations are constrained because the infant comes into the world with an inbuilt structure. This is verified physiologically and behaviourally, as motivational systems can be traced back in development for half a billion years. Consequently, the idea that the infant is a blank slate subject to infinite sociological manipulation is not considered the case.
Conceptualisation and Narrative Function
Carl Jung is credited with popularising and differentiating the idea of archetypes. He suggested that human beings are composed of subpersonalities, some of which possess a universal or transcendent character. These entities may be thought about as transcendent entities.
1. Storytelling and Dreams: Archetypes are essentially the knowledge that is common across stories. They represent the fantasy about what might be. The birthplace of mythology and literature is posited to be the dream, sharing an essentially narrative structure. The collective attempt to articulate the oldest of behavioural patterns results in the fantasies of the collective unconscious.
2. Hierarchical Value: The archetypal story structure is the dramatic expression of the necessary human system of values. The patterns found in these foundational stories were selected, edited, and stored because they were acutely memorable and peculiarly functional, having served as the basis for cultures lasting for thousands of years. The ultimate archetype sits at the pinnacle of the abstraction hierarchy of value.
3. Political Force: Integrating narratives, which include political stories, derive their power from drawing on universal archetypes. Political messages must be concerned with subjects that people find important, connecting them deeply to the motivational systems inherent in the biological substructure.
The continuous interplay between the individual's inherent nature and the necessity of social existence results in the development of interpretive frameworks that simplify the world and are bounded by functional systems. These bounded, hypothetically functional systems compete over evolutionary time, and extracting what is common across them yields the fundamental archetypal images of universal morality.
Explored Territory: Conceptual Definition
Explored territory constitutes the domain of the known. It is the environment in which operations are running smoothly, where action guided by expectation results in desired outcomes. This fundamental constituent element of being is synonymous with Order, and is primarily articulated in mythological narratives as Culture.
Order exists within the overarching structure of nature. It is symbolised by the establishment of boundaries and definitions. This domain is often personified as the Great Father, representing the stability of the ancestral spirits, the family, the city, and the nation. Monumental structures carved in stone are a representation of this principle, aiming to instantiate something solid and predictable for everyone to stand upon, thus bringing the past into the present and future on a permanent basis.
Function and Stabilisation
The primary function of explored territory is to provide the necessary framework for individual and collective existence by establishing a space where things work. This structure is indispensable because it informs and protects the individual, guarding against the potential catastrophic influx of chaos.
1. Shared Story and Perception: Order operates through a shared map of the culture. This map consists of mutual expectations and agreed-upon norms that are built directly into the process of perception. The value structure inherent in this system determines what is perceived, rendering virtually everything outside the immediate goal irrelevant. If this shared perceptual and behavioural framework is maintained, the emotions of co-citizens remain stable. If the shared map collapses, interactions immediately devolve into conflict or avoidance, potentially leading to mortal consequences.
2. Social Contract and Action: The culture is the system that compels individuals into submission and Conformity in order to civilise them. This is implemented through the negotiation of joint games, such as the social contract. These games must be functional, lead to attained ends, and be sufficiently desirable that people want to continue playing them across multiple iterations.
3. Cognitive Architecture: The functioning of explored territory maps onto the left hemisphere of the brain, which is specialised for operation in explored territory, language, high-resolution processing, and the activation of precise, expected behaviour.
Ambivalence and Tyranny
Explored territory is inherently ambivalent. While its positive element is protection, its negative consequence is tyranny. The pathological expression of Order manifests when the structure becomes stultifying and crushing, characterised by rigidity and malevolence.
1. Pathological Order: When a culture becomes too rigidly ordered, it degenerates into a tyrannical system. This temptation leads to the building of hyper structures (like the Tower of Babel) in an attempt to replace the Transcendent with human-made authority and achieve Utopia. Such hyper-homogenised, all-inclusive states are inevitably doomed, as too big means definite failure, resulting in internal fragmentation and linguistic incomprehension.
2. The Rigid State: The negative archetypal Father, or tyrannical state, is often represented by the evil brother who corrupts the structure (such as Seth corrupting Osiris). Pharaonic Egypt is portrayed in myth as a tyranny consisting of dry stone, symbolising a rigid, lifeless order. The negative goal of Order is to enforce its predictions and exclude error by commanding compliance through punishment and force, easily leading to tyranny.
The mythological framework posits that the solution to suffering is not static protection or safety, but the capacity to continuously transcend the limitations of the current explored state. The purpose of protection is only to facilitate the development of individuals as fully confident and courageous beings.
Conceptualisation and Duality
Unexplored territory constitutes one of the fundamental constituent elements of being, representing the vast domain of the unknown and the category of potential. It is the realm of what you do not understand at all, serving both as the source of great riches and the force that will probably kill you. This domain is synonymous with Chaos.
The nature of Chaos is inherently ambivalent. The unrealised world, which manifests when an error is made, presents itself simultaneously as something that can take one down and as an infinite source of information and all new information and growth.
Manifestation in Mythology and Nature
The principle of Chaos is consistently personified and dramatised across mythological frameworks, often assimilated to Nature or the Great Mother. Nature is recognised as both a productive biological force and a highly selective entity. This feminine principle holds a fundamental duality, manifesting as both the bountiful source of fertility, food, and beneficial outcomes, and the destructive force encompassing cancer, starvation, and disease.
In mythological narratives, Chaos is frequently represented by the dragon of Chaos or the terrible predator. This monster is an amalgam of ancestral threats, including reptilian elements, raptors, and carnivores, combined into a single, terrifying archetype. The catastrophic influx of Chaos is the core premise of many narratives; for instance, the ultimate chaos story in the archaic biblical texts is the Flood, which serves to wipe out the pre-existing, insufficient world. The negative aspect of the serpent that tempts humanity is derived from this category.
The confrontation with this terrifying entity yields profound rewards, because the terrible predator is invariably the hoarder of treasure. The individual who overcomes the dragon, or extracts the necessary wisdom from the threatening unknown, thereby makes order out of it and feeds the people as a consequence.
Neural Architecture and the Encounter with Error
The functional distinction between the known and unknown maps directly onto the cerebral hemispheres. The capacity for operating in unexplored territory is specialised in the right hemisphere of the brain. This hemisphere is associated with processing the unknown through:
- Negative Emotion: The right hemisphere is highly tuned to signals of threat and uncertainty, registering anomalies and danger.
- Inhibition of Behaviour: The initial response mechanism to the unknown is to freeze, which inhibits immediate action, allowing for evaluation of the threat.
- Image Processing and Holistic Thinking: The right hemisphere manages the rapid comprehension afforded by images, facilitating holistic thinking that generalises across instances for pattern recognition and pattern generation.
The appearance of unexplored territory within the established boundaries of order is signalled psychologically by errorand disjunction. When an expected outcome fails to materialise, the circuitry for responding to the unexpected takes precedence, triggering a brief manifestation of the dragon of Chaos. This moment of error signifies that the previously existing perceptual model is flawed, providing instant evidence that the current system needs to be updated. The unknown must be addressed by individuals, as it is the pathway to new information, differentiating the landscape and the capacity of the explorer. The sequence of encountering Chaos follows a pattern: freeze, then imagine, then explore, then differentiate, and then master the new information.
The Individual: Definition and Role
The Individual constitutes one of the three fundamental constituent elements of being. This element is conceptualised as the knower. The individual is situated within culture, which is in turn nested inside nature, occupying a position akin to standing on an island in the midst of an ocean.
Autonomy and the Logos
The mythological hypothesis posits that the individual is not merely the deterministic product of the interaction between nature and culture. Instead, the Individual possesses a capacity for choices and a destiny that allows them to affect the interplay of nature and culture in determining their own character in a non-deterministic manner.
The individual is the entity that mediates between the domains of Order and Chaos, possessing a spark of divinity. This capacity is often referred to as the Logos or the Word, enabling the individual to participate in the process of continually generating order out of chaos. This transformative role is why the individual is considered sovereign and why their value must be respected by the law.
The Hero and Mastery of Hierarchies
The hero archetype represents the profound meta-story that the individual should be acting out and serves as the image of the fully developed human being. The hero's fundamental role is to traverse between the two domains of the explored and unexplored.
The mythological hero is the representation of the being who is at the top of the set of all possible dominance hierarchies. This pinnacle is symbolically represented by the eye above the pyramid, which signifies the paramount capacity to pay attention. This attention to the relevant details of the world enables the individual to successfully win the battle across sets of dominance hierarchies.
Achieving success across this set of all games requires the individual to play a meta-game. This involves the ability to abstractly represent the world, a cognitive capability that includes generating internal mental avatars (potential selves) and running simulations of potential actions in fictional scenarios. Strategies that prove successful in these simulations are retained and embodied, allowing the individual to kill bad ideas instead of dying when facing challenges. The ultimate victory in the meta-game is being invited to play all subsequent games, rather than winning every single one.