Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

by Jordan B. Peterson

George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier.

Orwell said, essentially, that socialists did not really like the poor. They merely hated the rich.2

Anyone who was out to change the world by changing others was to be regarded with suspicion.

It was not socialist ideology that posed the problem, then, but ideology as such. Ideology divided the world up simplistically into those who thought and acted properly, and those who did not.

Ideology enabled the believer to hide from his own unpleasant and inadmissible fantasies and wishes. Such realizations upset my beliefs (even my faith in beliefs), and the plans I had formulated as a consequence of these beliefs. I could no longer tell who was good and who was bad, so to speak-so I no longer knew whom to support, or whom to fight.

little man

It was Jung who formulated the concept of persona: the mask that "feigned individuality."3 Adoption of such a mask, according to Jung, allowed each of us-and those around us-to believe that we were authentie. Jung said: When we analyse the persona we strip off the mask, and discover that what seemed to be individual is at bottom collective; in other words, that the persona was only a mask of the collective psyche. Fundamentally the persona is nothing real: it is a compromise between individual and society as to what a man should appear to be. He takes a name, earns a tide, exercises a function, he is this or that. In a certain sense all this is real, yet in relation to the essential individuality of the person concerned it is only a secondary reality, a compromise formation, in making which others often have a greater share than he. The persona is a semblance, a two-dimensional reality, to give it a nickname.4

It must be admitted that the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious can often assurne grotesque and horrible forms in dreams and fantasies, so that even the most hard-boiled rationalist is not immune from shattering nightmares and haunting fears.1

The psychological elucidation of". [dream and fantasy] images, which cannot be passed over in silence or blindly ignored, leads logically into the depths of religious phenomenology. The history of religion in its widest sense (including therefore mythology, folklore, and primitive psychology) is a treasure-house of archetypal forms from which the doctor can draw helpful parallels and enlightening comparisons for the purpose of calming and clarifying a consciousness that is all at sea. It is absolutely necessary to supply these fantastic images that rise up so strange and threatening before the mind's eye with some kind of context so as to make them more intelligible. Experience has shown that the best way to do this is by means of comparative mythological material.8

I discovered that beliefs make the world, in a very real way-that beliefs are the world, in a more than metaphysical sense. This discovery has not turned me into a moral relativist, however: quite the contrary. I have become convinced that the world-that-is-belief is orderly; that there are universal moral absolutes (although these are structured such that a diverse range of human opinion remains both possible and beneficial). I believe that individuals and s...

The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, as weil as a place of things. We describe the world as a place of things, using the formal methods of science. The techniques of narrative, however-myth, literature and drama-portray the world as a forum for action. The two forms of representation have been unnecessarily set at odds, because we have not yet formed a clear picture of their respective domains. The domain of the former is the objective world-what is, from the perspective of intersubjective perception. The domain of the latter is the world of value-what is and what should be, from the perspective of emotion and action.

The world as forum for action is composed, essentially, of three constituent elements, wh ich tend to manifest themselves in typical patterns of metaphoric representation. First is unexplored territory-the Great Mother, nature, creative and destructive, source and final resting place of all determinate things. Second is explored territory-the Great Father, culture, protective and tyrannical, cumulative ancestral wisdom. Third is the process that mediates between unexplored and explored territory-the Divine Son, the archetypal individual, creative exploratory Word and vengeful adversary. We are adapted to this world of divine characters, much as to the objective world. The fact of this adaptation implies that the environment is in "reality" a forum for action, as weil as a place of things.

Unprotected exposure to unexplored territory produces fear. The individual is protected from such fear as a consequence of ritual imitation of the Great Father-as a consequence of the adoption of group identity, which restricts the meaning of things, and confers predictability on sodal interactions. When identification with the group is made absolute, however-when everything has to be controlled, when the unknown is no longer allowed to exist-the creative exploratory process that updates the group...

The former manner of interpretation-more primordial, and less clearly understood-finds its expression in the arts or humanities, in ritual, drama, literature and mythology.

The latter manner of interpretation-the world as place of things-finds its formal expression in the methods and theories of science.