Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

by Jordan B. Peterson

Orwell described the great flaw of socialism, and the reason for its frequent failure to attract and maintain democratic power (at least in Britain). Orwell said, essentially, that socialists did not really like the poor. They merely hated the rich.2 His idea struck horne instantly. 50cialist ideology served to mask resentment and hatred, bred by failure. Many of the party activists I had encountered were using the ideals of social justice to rationalize their pursuit of personal revenge. Whose fault was it that I was poor or uneducated and unadmired? Obviously, the fault of the rich, well-schooled and respected. How convenient, then, that the demands of revenge and abstract justice dovetailed! It was only right to obtain recompense from those more fortunate than me.

erstwhile

When I moved to the main campus at the University of Alberta, however, my interest disappeared. I was taught that people were motivated by rational forces; that human beliefs and actions were determined by economic pressures. This did not seem sufficient explanation. I could not believe (and still do not) that commodities-"natural resources," for example-had intrinsic and self-evident value. In the absence of such value, the worth of things had to be socially or culturally (or even individually) determined. This act of determination appeared to me moraf-appeared to me to be a consequence of the moral philosophy adopted by the society, culture or person in question. What people valued, economically, merely reflected what they believed to be important. This meant that real motivation had to lie in the domain of value, of morality. The political scientists I studied with did not see this, or did not think it was relevant.

illusory;

disquietude.

prosaically,

adjunct

This discovery truly upset me. I was not who I thought I was. Surprisingly, however, the desire to stab someone with my pen disappeared. In retrospect, I would say that the behavioral urge had manifested itself in explicit knowledge-had been translated from emotion and image to concrete realization-and had no further "reason" to exist. The "impulse" had only occurred, because of the question I was attempting to answer: "How can men do terrible things to one another?" I meant other men, of course-bad men-but I had still asked the question. There was no reason for me to assurne that I would receive a predictable or personally meaningless answer.

the things I "believed" were things I thought sounded good, admirable, respectable, courageous. They weren't my things, however-I had stolen them. Most of them I had taken from books. Having "understood" them, abstractly, I presumed I had a right to them-presumed that I could adopt them, as if they were mine: presumed that they were me. My head was stuffed full of the ideas of others; stuffed full of arguments I could not logically refute. I did not know then that an irrefutable argument is not necessarily true, nor that the right to identify with certain ideas had to be earned.

read something by earl Jung, at about this time, that helped me understand what I was experiencing. 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

I dreamed apocalyptic dreams of this intensity two or three times a week for a year or more, while I attended university classes and worked-as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on in my mind. Something I had no familiarity with was happening, however. I was being affected, simultaneously, by events on two "planes." On the first plane were the normal, predictable, everyday occurrences that I shared with everybody else. On the second plane, however (unique to me, or so I thought) existed dreadful images and unbearably intense emotional states. This idiosyncratic, subjective world-which everyone normally treated as illusory-seemed to me at that time to lie somehow behind the world everyone knew and regarded as real. But what did real mean? The closer I looked, the less comprehensible things became. Where was the real? What was at the bottom of it all? I did not feel I could live without knowing.

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 societies who flout these absolutes-in ignorance or in willfu1 opposition-are doomed to misery and eventual dissolution.

I learned, finally, that the terrible aspect oflife might actually be a necessary precondition for the existence oflife-and that it is possible to regard that precondition, in...

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.

Rejection of the unknown is tantamount to "identification with the devil," the mythological counterpart and eternal adversary of the world-creating exploratory hero. Such rejection and identification is a consequence of Luciferian pride, wh ich states: all that I know is all that is necessary to know. This pride is totalitarian assumption of omnisdence-is adoption of God's place by "reason"- is something that inevitably generates astate of personal and sodal being indistinguishable from hell. This hell develops because creative exploration-impossible, without (humble) acknowledgment of the unknown-constitutes the pr...

stultific...

"savior"-who upholds his association with the creative Word in the face of death, and despite group pressure to conform. Identification with the hero serves to decrease the unbearable motivational valence of the unknown; furthermore, provides the individual with astandpoint that simultaneously transcends and maintains the group.

schema

The automatie attribution of meaning to things-or the failure to distinguish between them initially-is a characteristic of narrative, of myth, not of scientific thought. Narrative accurately captures the nature of raw experience. Things are scary, people are irritating, events are promising, food is satisf)ring--at least in terms of our basic experience. The modern mind, which regards itself as having transcended the domain of the magieal, is nonetheless still endlessly capable of"irrational" (read motivated) reactions. We fall under the spell of

And, in truth-in reallife-to know what something is still means to know two things about it: its motivation al relevance, and the specific nature of its sensory qualities.

We need to know what things are not to know what they are but to keep track of what they mean-to und erstand what they signif)r for our behavior.

corporeal,

imbued

When one gives up Christian belief [for example] one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality.... Christianity is a system, a consistently thought out and comp/ete view of things. Jf one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces: one has nothing of any consequence left in one's hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know what is good for hirn and what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows. Christian morality is a command: its origin is transcendental; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticize; it possesses truth only if God is truth-it stands or falls with the belief in God. Jf [modern Westemers] really do believe they know, of their own accord, "intuitively," what is good and evil; if they consequently think they no longer have need of Christianity as a guarantee of morality; that is merely the consequence of the ascendancy of Christian evaluation and an expression of the strength and depth of this ascendancy: so that the origin of [modern] morality has been forgotten, so that the highly conditional nature of its right to exist is no longer feltY If the presuppositions of a theory have been invalidated, argues Nietzsche, then the theory has been invalidated. But in this case the "theory" survives. The fundamental tenets of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition continue to govern every aspect of the actual individual behavior and basic values of the typical West...

Our systems of post-experimental thought and our systems of motivation and action therefore co-exist in paradoxical union. One is "up-to-date"; the other, archaic. One is scientific; the other, traditional, even superstitious. We have become atheistic in our description, but remain evidently religious-that is, moral-in our disposition. What we accept as true and how we act are no longer commensurate. We carry on as if our experience has meaning-as if our activities have transcendent value-but we are unable to justif)r this belief intellectually. We have become trapped by our own capacity for abstraction: it provides us with accurate descriptive information but also undermines our belief in the utility and meaning of existence. This problem has frequently been regarded as tragic

We find ourse1ves in an absurd and unfortunate situation-when our thoughts turn, involuntarily, to consideration of our situation. It seems impossible to be1ieve that life is intrinsically, re1igiously meaningful. We continue to act and think "as if"-as if nothing fundamental has really changed. This does not change the fact that our integrity has vanished. The great forces of empiricism and rationality and the great technique of the experiment have killed myth, and it cannot be resurrected-or so it seems. We still act out the precepts of our forebears, nonethe1ess, although we can no longer justiry our actions. Our behavior is shaped (at least in the ideal) by the same mythic rules-thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not coverthat guided our ancestors for the thousands of years they lived without benefit of formal empirical thought. This means that those rules are so powerful-so necessary, at least-that they maintain their existence (and expand their domain) even in the presence of explicit theories that undermine their validity. That is a mystery. And here is another: How is it that complex and admirable ancient civilizations could have deve10ped and flourished, initially, if they were predicated upon nonsense? (If a culture survives, and grows, does that not indicate in some profound way that the ideas it is based upon are valid? If myths are mere superstitious proto-theories, why did they work? Why were they remembered? Our

great rationalist ideologies, after all-fascist, say, or communist-demonstrated their essential uselessness within the space of mere generations, despite their intellectually compelling nature. Traditional societies, predicated on religious notions, have survived-essentially unchanged, in some cases, for tens of thousands of years. How can this longevity be understood?) Is it actually sensible to argue that persistently successful traditions are based on ideas that are simply wrong, regardless of their utility?

We have made the great mistake of assuming that the "world of spirit" described by those who preceded us was the modern "world of matter," primitively conceptualized. This is not true-at least not in the simple manner we generally believe. The cosmos described by mythology was not the same place known to the practitioners of modern science-but that does not mean it was not real. We have not yet found God above, nor the devil below, because we do not yet understand where "above" and "below" might be found. We do not know what our ancestors were talking about. This is not surprising, because they did not "know," either (and it didn't really matter to them that they did not know). Consider this archaic creation myth17 from Sumer-the "birthplace ofhistory":

Myth is not primitive proto-science. It is a qualitatively different phenomenon. Science might be considered "description of the world with regards to those aspects that are consensually apprehensible" or "specification of the most effective mode of reaching an end (given a defined end)." Myth can be more accurately regarded as "description of the world as it signifies (for action)." The mythic universe is a pi ace to act, not a place to perceive. Myth describes things in terms of their unique or shared affective valence, their value, their motivational significance. The Sky (An) and the Earth (Ki) of the Sumerians are not the sky and earth of modern man, therefore; they are the Great Father and Mother of all things (induding the thing-En-lil, who is actually a process-that in some sense gave rise to them).

The empirical endeavor is devoted to objective description of what is-to determination of wh at it is about a given phenomena that can be consensually validated and described. The objects of this process may be those of the past, the present, or the future, and may be static or dynamic in nature: a good scientific theory allows for prediction and control ofbecoming (of "transformation") as well as being. However, the "affect" that an encounter

The painstaking empirical process of identification, communication and comparison has proved to be a strikingly effective means for specif)ring the nature of the relatively invariant features of the collectively apprehensible world. Unfortunately, this useful methodology cannot be applied to determination of consideration of what should be, to specification of the direction that things should take (which means, to description of the future we should construct, as a consequence of our actions). Such acts of valuation necessarily constitute moral decisions. We can use information generated in consequence of the application of science to guide those decisions, but not to tell us if they are correct. We lack a process of verification, in the moral domain, that is as powerful or as universally acceptable as the experimental (empirical) method in the realm of description. This absence does not allow us to sidestep the problem. No functioning society or individual can avoid rendering moral judgment, regardless of what might be said or imagined about the necessity of such judgment. Action presupposes valuation, or its implicit or "unconscious" equivalent. To act is literally to manifest preference about one set of possibilities, contrasted with an infinite set of alternatives. If we wish to live, we must act. Acting, we value. Lacking omniscience, painfully, we must make decisions, in the absence of sufficient information. It is, traditionally speaking, our knowledge of good and e...

Perhaps this is because planned, logical and intelligible systems fail to make allowance for the irrational, transcendent, incomprehensible and often ridiculous aspect of human character, as described by Dostoevsky:

The known is explored territory, a place of stability and familiarity; it is the "city of God," as profanely realized. It finds metaphorical embodiment in myths and narratives describing the community, the kingdom or the state. Such myths and narratives guide our ability to understand the particular, bounded motivational significance of the present, experienced in relation to some identifiable desired future, and allow us to construct and interpret appropriate patterns of action, from within the confines of that schema. We all produce determinate models of what is, and what should be, and how to transform one into the other. We produce these models by balancing our own desires, as they find expression in fantasy and action, with those of the others-individuals, families and communities-that we habitually encounter. "How to act," constitutes the most essential aspect of the social contract; the domain of the known is, therefore, the "territory" we inhabit with all those who share our implicit and explicit traditions and beliefs. Myths describe the existence of this "shared and determinate territory" as a fixed aspect of existence-which it is, as the fact of culture is an unchanging aspect of the human environment.

Mythological representations of the world-which are representations of reality as a forum for action-portray the dynamic interrelationship between all three constituent elements of human experience. The eternal unknown-nature, metaphorically speaking, creative and destructive, source and destination of all determinant things-is generally ascribed an affectively ambivalent feminine character (as the "mother" and eventual "devourer" of everyone and everything). The eternal known, in contrast-culture, defined territory, tyrannical and protective, predictable, disciplined and restrictive, cumulative consequence of heroic or exploratory behavior-is typically considered masculine (in contradistinction to "mother" nature). The eternal knower, finally-the process that mediates between the known and the unknown-is the knight who slays the dragon of chaos, the herD who replaces disorder and confusion with clarity and certainty, the sun god who eternally slays the forces of darkness, and the "word" that engenders cosmic creation.

Enough has been learned in the last half-century of inquiry into intellectual and emotional function to enable the development of a provisional general theory of emotional regulation. Description of the role that reaction to novelty or anomaly plays in human information processing is clearly central to such a theory. A compelling body of evidence suggests that our affective, cognitive and behavioral responses to the unknown or unpredictable are "hardwired"; suggests that these responses constitute inborn structural elements of the processes of consciousness itself. We attend, involuntarily, to those things that occur contrary to our predictions-that occur despite our desires, as expressed in expectation. That involuntary attention comprises a large part of what we refer to when we say "consciousness." Our initial attention constitutes the first step in the process by which we come to adjust our behavior and our interpretive schemas to the world of experience-assuming that we do so; constitutes as weIl the first step we take when we modif)r the world to make it what we desire, instead of what it is currently.

ranging from that which we fear most to that which we desire most intently.

present-who is hurt when someone "less deserving" is promoted before hirn ("one is best punished," after all, "for one's virtues"35).

of what we should do. But we compare our interpretation of the world as it unfolds in the present' to the desired world, in imagination, not to mere expectation; we compare what we have (in interpretation) to what we want, rather than to what we merely think will be. Our goal setting, and consequent striving, is motivated: we chase what we desire, in our constant attempts to optimize our affective states. (Of course, we use our behavior to ensure that our dreams come true; that is healthy "adaptation." But we still compare what is happening to what we want-to what we desire to be-not merely to what we cold-bloodedly expect.)

contain two fundamental and mutually interdependent poles, one present, the other future. The present is sensory experience as it is currently manifested to us-as we currently understand it-granted motivational significance according to our current knowledge and desires. The future is an image or partial image of perfection, to which we compare the present, insofar as we understand its significance.

paradise, encounter with chaos,Jall and redemption.

Thus the exploratory capacity of the brain "builds" the world of the familiar (the known), from the world

of the unfamiliar (the unknown).

The meaning we attribute to objects or situations is not stable. What is important to one man is not necessarily important to another; likewise, the needs and desires of the child differ from those of the adult. The meaning of things depends to a profound and ultimately undeterminable degree upon the relationship of those things to the goal we currently have in mind. Meaning shifts when goals change. Such change necessarily transforms the contingent expectations and desires that accompany those goals. We experience "things" personally and idiosyncratically, despite broad interpersonal agreement about the value of things. The goals we pursue singly-the outcomes we expect and desire as individualsdetermine the meaning of our experience. The existential psychotherapist Viktor Frankl relates a story from his experiences as a Nazi death camp inmate that makes this point most strikingly:

Nothing produces terror and fear like a concentration camp-unless the camp encountered is better than the camp expected. Our hopes, desires and wishes-which are always conditional-define the context within which the things and situations we encounter take on determinate significance; define even the context within which we understand "thing" or "situation." We presume that things have a more or less fixed meaning, because we share a more or less f1Xed "condition" with others-at least with those others who are familiar to us, who share our presumptions and worldviews. Those (culturally determined) things we take for granted-and which are, therefore, invisible-determine our affective responses to "environmental stimuli." We assurne that such things are permanent attributes of the world; but they are not. Our situations-and, therefore, our "contexts of interpretation"-can change dramatically, at any moment. We are indeed fortunate (and, generally, oblivious of that fortune) when they do not.

"ifyou knew the present position and momentum of every particle in the universe, you could determine all future positions and momenta." You can't know all present positions and momenta: the measurement

Skinner addressed this problem by limiting his concern to experimental situations so simple that only immediate reinforcement history pfayed a context-determining role. This "implicit" limit enabled hirn to sidestep the fundamental issue, and to make inappropriate generalizations. It didn't matter how a rat related to his mother six months earlier if you could make hirn "food-deprived" enough. The (short-term) fact of the food deprivation, for example, overrode individual rat differences-at least in the experimental condition under questionand could therefore usefully be ignored. Similarly, if you starve human beings, you can be reasonably sure that they will become concerned with food. However, even in this extreme case, you cannot predict how this concern will manifest itself, or what (ethical) considerations might play an intermediate, or even determining, role. Alexander Solzhenitsyn examined this very problem during the time he spent in the Soviet "Gulag Archipelago" (the Soviet prison camp system):

orthogonal,

To ignore one good, therefore, is to risk all. To ignore the demands of one necessary subsystem is merely to ensure that it will speak later with the voice of the unjustly oppressed; is to ensure that it will grip our fantasy, unexpectedly, and make of the future something unpredictable. Our "optimal paths" therefore, must be properly inclusive, from the perspective of our internal community, our basic physiology.