Maps of Meaning

“I became simultaneously disenchanted with the study of political science, my erstwhile major. I had adopted that discipline so I could learn more about the structure of human beliefs (and for the practical, career-oriented reasons described previously). It remained very interesting to me when I was at junior college, where I was introduced to the history of political philosophy. 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 moral—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.” 

Peterson grounds his philosophical inquiries in his own experience and doubt. Purely rationalist explanations of reality discomfit him because he intuitively grasps that human behavior encompasses the irrational. Neither does a Marxist theory of the world offer all the answers, since to Peterson commodities do not have a universal, or intrinsic, value. Instead, the value of commodities varies and depends on the morality of any given culture. Though Peterson’s ideas here are interesting, they do not fully explain how the value of certain commodities, like oil, have a global impact—or why the worth of a commodity or item increasingly conflates with its currency value.

“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 willful opposition—are doomed to misery and eventual dissolution.” 

Peterson’s subtle point here is that acknowledging subjectivity does not equal accepting that morality is relative. In other words, just because belief systems vary, the idea of “to each their own” is not necessarily valid. Despite the multiplicity of belief systems, certain moral absolutes exist that we must follow.

“Modern investigation into the role of novelty in emotion and thought began with the Russians—E.N. Sokolov, O. Vinogradova, A.R. Luria (and, more recently, E. Goldberg)— who adopted an approach to human function that is in many ways unique. Their tradition apparently stems from Pavlov, who viewed the reflex arc as a phenomenon of central importance, and from the Marxist intellectual legacy, which regarded work—creative action—as the defining feature of man. Whatever the specific historical precedents, it is most definitely the case that the Russians have regarded motor output and its abstract equivalents as the critically relevant aspect of human existence. This intellectual position distinguished them, historically, from their Western counterparts, who tend(ed) to view the brain as an information-processing machine, akin to the computer. Psychologists in the West have concentrated their energies on determining how the brain determines what is out there, so to speak, from the objective viewpoint. The Russians, by contrast, have devoted themselves to the role of the brain in governing behavior, and in generating the affects or emotions associated with that behavior.” 

Peterson is highly influenced by Russian philosophers, scientists, and writers, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, E.N. Sokolov, and A.I. Solzhenitsyn. He credits Russian scientists such as Sokolov for helping him develop his theory of the importance of novelty or change in human experience. The Russian psychologists and neuroscientists whom he mentions here regard the mind as an engine that generates behavior rather than a unit that processes existing behavior.

“The ‘way’ is the path of life and its purpose. More accurately, the content of the way is the specific path of life. The form of the way, its most fundamental aspect, is the apparently intrinsic or heritable possibility of positing or of being guided by a central idea. This apparently intrinsic form finds its expression in the tendency of each individual, generation after generation, to first ask and subsequently seek an answer to the question “what is the meaning of life?”

Whether in Eastern Taoism or in Christianity, an ideal “way” of being exists. The way appears in response to an idealized goal, such as (in Christian doctrine) abstaining from sin to reach heaven after death—yet the way is not the means to an end but the end itself. The way gives life meaning and purpose.

“We live in the aftermath of the great statist experiments of the twentieth century, after all conducted, as Nietzsche prophesized: ‘In the doctrine of socialism there is hidden, rather badly, a ‘will to negate life’; the human beings or races that think up such a doctrine must be bungled. Indeed, I should wish that a few great experiments might prove that in a socialist society life negates itself, cuts off its own roots.” 

For Peterson, socialism carries the innate threat of statism, a political system in which the state exerts tyrannical socioeconomic control. Nietzsche recognized this threat decades before the rise of 20th-century communist regimes. Nietzsche thought (and Peterson concurs) that socialism negates life because as an ideology it does not encompass the reality and totality of human experience. Although Peterson’s concerns about totalitarianism are valid, tyrants and extremists can misuse (and have misused) almost all human systems, including religion. Conversely, just as religious doctrine can be meaningful, so can a socialist outlook.

“Fear is not conditioned; security is unlearned, in the presence of particular things or contexts, as a consequence of violation of explicit or implicit presupposition. Classical behavioral psychology is wrong in the same manner our folk presumptions are wrong: fear is not secondary, not learned; security is secondary, learned. Everything not explored is tainted, a priori, with apprehension. Any thing or situation that undermines the foundations of the familiar and secure is therefore to be feared.” 

Peterson turns on its head the tenet of psychoanalysis that humans learn fear. According to Peterson, fear is innate and primal because of its association with the unknown that precedes creation. The human brain carries evolutionary and ancestral memory of this unknown and is hence hard-wired to feel fear. The presence of primitive brain systems such as the amygdala proves this hypothesis, according to Peterson. In this context, humans learn security—which culture and tradition symbolize.

“The knower is the creative explorer, the ego, the I, the eye, the phallus, the plow, the subject, consciousness, the illuminated or enlightened one, the trickster, the fool, the hero, the coward; spirit (as opposed to matter, as opposed to dogma); the sun, son of the unknown and the known (son of the Great Mother and the Great Father). The central character in a story must play the role of hero or deceiver; must represent the sun (or, alternatively, the adversary—the power that eternally opposes the ‘dominion of the light’).” 

The book lists the manifestations of the knower, the seeker, or the revolutionary hero. Interestingly, these manifestations cover the gamut of archetypes from the sun to the power that opposes light, and from the hero to the fool and coward. This yoking together of contraries is typical of Peterson, who often uses ideas such as brave cowardice. Symbolically, the many-faced hero reveals that good and evil are both part of the human experience and that heroes must constantly grapple with the evil within and around them to carve their own way.

“The explicit stress placed by the Judeo-Christian tradition on the primacy of the word and its metaphorical equivalents makes it somewhat unique in the pantheon of creation myths. The early Jews were perhaps the first to clearly posit that activity in the mythically masculine domain of spirit was linked in some integral manner to the construction and establishment of experience as such. It is impossible to understand why the Judeo-Christian tradition has had such immense power—or to comprehend the nature of the relationship between the psyche and the world—without analyzing the network of meaning that makes up the doctrine of the Word.” 

In Genesis, the first book of the Bible (which is important in both Jewish and Christian theology), God’s word engenders creation: “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” (Genesis 1:3. ESV) Thus, the Bible establishes the primacy of the word. The word symbolizes creative power, the power of reason, and language. This philosophical definition corresponds with ideas in many contemporary disciplines, including neuropsychology, where reason and language are among the brain’s highest functions, and linguistics and narratology, where language creates reality. In later Christian theology, Logos (or the Word) becomes entirely fused with Christ, the savior. (Logos is, in effect, another name for Christ). The state in which word, meaning, and action coalesce is the highest state of human evolution, as the hero Christ exemplifies.

“I dreamed I saw my maternal grandmother sitting by the bank of a swimming pool, that was also a river. In real life, she had been a victim of Alzheimer’s disease, and had regressed, before her death, to a semi-conscious state. In the dream, as well, she had lost her capacity for self-control. Her genital region was exposed, dimly; it had the appearance of a thick mat of hair. She was stroking herself, absent-mindedly. She walked over to me, with a handful of pubic hair, compacted into something resembling a large artist’s paint-brush. She pushed this at my face. I raised my arm, several times, to deflect her hand; finally, unwilling to hurt her, or interfere with her any farther, I let her have her way. She stroked my face with the brush, gently, and said, like a child, ‘isn’t it soft?’ I looked at her ruined face and said, ‘yes, Grandma, it’s soft.’

Peterson’s dream about his deceased grandmother contains classic archetypes associated with the unknown, including wildness, death, decay, and the presence of female genitalia, symbolizing for Jungians the Great Mother. For Peterson, the dream’s peculiar form—its blurring of boundaries between the infantile, sexual, and maternal—shows that fear of the unknown is never far from consciousness. The unknown is terrible because it is a state that fuses madness with reason—and existence with non-existence. Later in the dream, a white bear steps from behind the grandmother, and Peterson kills the bear by drowning it. Peterson’s father then makes an appearance, comforting him. Thus, the sequence symbolizes masculine and orderly culture protecting an individual from the threat of feminine chaos.

“The Sumerians considered themselves destined to ‘clothe and feed’ such gods, because they viewed themselves as the servants, in a sense, of what we would call instinctive forces, ‘elicited’ by the ‘environment.’ Such forces can be reasonably regarded as the Sumerians regarded them—as deities inhabiting a ‘supracelestial place,’ extant prior to the dawn of humanity. Erotic attraction, for example—a powerful god—has a developmental history that predates the emergence of humanity, is associated with relatively ‘innate’ releasing ‘stimuli’ (those that characterize erotic beauty), is of terrible power, and has an existence ‘transcending’ that of any individual who is currently ‘possessed.’ Pan, the Greek god of nature, produced/represented fear (produced ‘panic’); Ares or the Roman Mars, warlike fury and aggression. We no longer personify such ‘instincts,’ except for the purposes of literary embellishment, so we don’t think of them ‘existing’ in a ‘place’ (like heaven, for example). But the idea that such instincts inhabit a space—and that wars occur in that space—is a metaphor of exceeding power and explanatory utility. Transpersonal motive forces do wage war with one another over vast spans of time; are each forced to come to terms with their powerful ‘opponents’ in the intrapsychic hierarchy.” 

Second-order gods in many mythologies—such as the children of the first-order Sumerian Gods, Tiamat and Apsu—are deities associated with emotions and instincts. If the first-order Gods are a step just out of primordial chaos, the secondary gods symbolize a primitive and immediate state of human experience, governed by primal emotions, such as fear, anger, and lust. Latter-day deities of living cultures tend to be more benevolent, orderly, and reasonable, such as Marduk in Sumerian mythology and Christ in Christian theology. This corresponds, to some extent, with the individual’s development from wild to cultured. Nevertheless, the wild and the primal are a continuing part of human neurobiology, which emphasizes the importance of honoring instincts, as the Sumerians did in worshipping and appeasing their second-order Gods.

“The Great Father is order, vs. chaos; the past, vs. the present; the old, vs. the young. He is the ancestral spirit whose force extends beyond the grave, who must be kept at bay with potent and humble ritual. He is the single personality composed of the consequences of the eternal war between all the great heroes of the past, and he stands over the developing individual, in the guise of the actual father, like a god. The Great Father is the old emperor, dangerously out of date—a powerful warrior in his youth, now under the spell of a hostile force. He is the eternal impediment to the virgin bride, the tyrannical father who wishes to keep his fruitful daughter firmly under his control. He is the authoritarian who rules the land ravaged by drought; keeper of the castle in which everything has been brought to a standstill.” 

Like the hero, the Great Father archetype has a dual or “bivalent” nature. He protects but can also suffocate. This archetype plays out across myth, literature, and drama where the hero often must defeat or kill his own tyrannical or ineffectual father to revive the land. A father of a daughter is the gatekeeper of chastity and sexuality who would forever keep his child in a static, infantile, childlike state. While the Great Father suffices during childhood (both literal and metaphorical), his authority must give way as the child develops so that they can carve out their own path.

“That is—the Rousseau who repeatedly placed his own children in foundling asylums because their existence was inconvenient to him (and, we must presuppose, detrimental to the flowering of his intrinsic goodness). Anyway, the fervent hope of every undisciplined person (even an undisciplined genius) is that his current worthlessness and stupidity is someone else’s fault. If in the best of cases it is society’s fault, then society can be made to pay. This sleight-of-hand maneuver transforms the undisciplined into the admirable rebel, at least in his own eyes, and allows him to seek unjustified revenge in the disguise of the revolutionary hero. A more absurd parody of heroic behavior can hardly be imagined.” 

Peterson critiques a patient who claims that his indiscipline is an act of freedom, a la influential Geneva-born philosopher Jean Jacques Rosseau (1712-1778), who held that humans, innately good, could live in communion with nature, away from fake social structures. For Peterson, Rosseau’s perceived rejection of structures is a symptom of deep spiritual malaise, since in rejecting such structures the philosopher ostensibly rejected the Great Father. Although most progressive schools today follow Rosseau’s ideas of child-centered and developmentally appropriate education, Rousseau was far from the perfect father to his own children. By his own account, Rosseau deposited each of his five children at the foundling hospital shortly after their birth, which was close to a death sentence in 18th-century France since orphanages were poorly staffed and infested with disease. For Peterson, Rosseau’s personal life is proof that his theory of the innate goodness of man was flawed. Worse, weak-willed people, like his patient, often use such flawed ideas to abdicate personal responsibility.

“Dad, if we killed a dragon, we could use his skin as armor, couldn’t we? Wouldn’t that be a good idea?”

This statement, which Peterson’s then three-year-old daughter Mikhaila made during spontaneous play, plays out an unconscious archetypal behavior: the defeat of the terrible aspect of the Great Mother to release her benign and protective manifestation. The dragon symbolizes uroboros and the Great Mother, its skin her protective mantle. The fact that a young child evokes this universal story during play strengthens Peterson’s hypothesis about the ancient and implicit nature of mythic memory.

“Mikhaila: Julian’s eyes falled out

and then

he falled into pieces

Dad: (what sort of pieces?)

Mikhaila: Julian pieces

and the bones falled out too

then

a hole got him

and there was water in it

and when he came out he was big

Mom: (Julian isn’t a baby anymore?)

Mikhaila: No he’s a big boy

and a bug with legs got him out

‘cause bugs can swim

and the hole was in the park

and it moved into the back yard

and he falled in it

a tree burned

and left the hole.” 

Mikhaila’s dream represents her anxiety about her younger brother, whom she called “baby” growing up. However, it is more than just an expression of a repressed fear; it also represents the archetype of rebirth essential to human evolution. Even though she is only three, Mikhaila’s unconscious has access to shared, sophisticated images that express the process of her brother’s growing up. He undergoes a symbolic death, unites with the Great Mother (hole, water), and reemerges as a “big boy.”

“The Great Mother aborts children, and is the dead fetus; breeds pestilence, and is the plague; she makes of the skull something gruesomely compelling, and is all skulls herself. To unveil her is to risk madness, to gaze over the abyss, to lose the way, to remember the repressed trauma. She is the molester of children, the golem, the bogey-man, the monster in the swamp, the rotting cadaverous zombie who threatens the living. She is progenitor of the devil, the ‘strange son of chaos.’ She is the serpent, and Eve, the temptress; she is the femme fatale, the insect in the ointment, the hidden cancer, the chronic sickness, the plague of locusts, the cause of drought, the poisoned water. She uses erotic pleasure as bait to keep the world alive and breeding; she is a gothic monster, who feeds on the blood of the living.” 

Peterson’s descriptions of the negative aspects of the Great Mother archetype are vivid and draw on manifestations of chaos and the unknown in many cultures. However, a feminist reading could argue that some of these descriptions reveal misogynist distaste of the female body. One may also argue that such archetypes developed precisely because of the fear of the feminine in patriarchal societies, into which humans organized thousands of years ago. Additionally, cultures in which Goddess worship is active tend to both celebrate and fear the terrifying aspects of female divinity. For example, the Hindu Goddess Kali’s benevolent form, Durga, is also a subject of worship in India and Nepal. The book spends more time emphasizing the terrifying rather than the benign aspect of the Great Mother, revealing a subtle bias toward Western-centric and puritanical notions of the dangerous, corrupting feminine.

“Many of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures recognized unquestionably as ‘great’—Nietzsche, Darwin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Freud, Jung, Piaget—were additionally characterized by lengthy periods of profound psychological unrest and uncertainty. Their ‘psychopathology,’ a term ridiculous in this context, was generated as a consequence of the revolutionary nature of their personal experience (their action, fantasy and thought). It is no great leap of comparative psychology to see their role in our society as analogous to that of the archaic religious leader and healer.” 

Examples of the seeker or the revolutionary hero, these paradigm-disrupting thinkers all experienced great psychological turmoil in their lives. Like the shamans of archaic societies, they lived in societies that could see them as psychologically disturbed or “mad.” Nonetheless, their uncertainty and self-doubt are archetypally heroic states, such as Christ grappling with Satan’s temptation. A hero’s path confronts inner and outer darkness. Because heroes symbolize a more evolved consciousness, they constantly experience the threat of the unknown. Their heroism necessitates a journey into the unknown despite the awareness of death.

“The ancient Scandinavians believed, for example—in keeping with this general conceptualization that a great serpent lived underneath Yggdrasil, the world-tree, and gnawed at its roots, trying forever to destroy it. (Yggdrasil was constantly revivified, however, by the springs of ‘magical water’ that also lay underneath it).”

The symbol of the world-tree with its roots in water is embedded across many cultures, including Scandinavian and Norse mythologies. Yggdrasil represents the world-tree as a bridge or “way” between chaos and spiritual evolution. The serpent’s gnawing symbolizes the constant presence of chaos or uroboros threatening to eclipse the way into eternal confusion. The magical water is the benevolent aspect of the Great Mother, who nourishes the world-tree even as she threatens it.

“Elaine Pagels has recently written a book, The Origin of Satan in which she describes how the idea of the devil as the eternal enemy of Christ enabled those who profess Christianity to persecute those who do not. The presuppositions of the persecutor are, for example: ‘the devil is the enemy, the Jew is not a Christian—the Jew is an enemy, the Jew is the devil.’ Pagels presents the not unreasonable and justifiably popular hypothesis that the invention of Satan was motivated by desire to transform the act of persecuting others into a moral virtue. It appears, however, that the historical ‘developmental path’ of the ‘idea of the adversary’ is somewhat more complex. Transpersonal notions of the breadth of the ‘image of the Devil’ cannot emerge as a consequence of conscious motivation, because their development requires many centuries of transgenerational work (which cannot be easily ‘organized’). The image of the devil, although endlessly applied to rationalize the subjugation of others (as all great ideas can be subverted) emerged as a consequence of endless genuine attempts to encapsulate the ‘personality’ of evil.”

In The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics (1995), historian Elaine Pagels suggests that different generations of Christians used the idea of the Devil, or Satan, as a tool to marginalize and persecute dissidents and minorities. Peterson acknowledges that Pagels’s hypothesis is valid to the extent that people can subvert any idea to further evil, but he posits that it falls short in explaining the archetype of Satan. According to Peterson, the idea of Satan symbolizes the self-aware personality that assumes omniscience rather than humility and thus serves as a cautionary template to recognize tyrants.

“The dogma of original sin forces every individual to regard himself as the (potential) immediate source of evil and to locate the terrible underworld of mythology and its denizens in intrapsychic space. It is no wonder that this idea has become unpopular: nonetheless, evil exists somewhere. It remains difficult not to see hypocrisy in the souls of those who wish to localize it somewhere else.”

Contrary to the idea that the Original Sin doctrine suggests that humans must live in perpetual guilt, Peterson suggests a thoughtful reinterpretation of the dogma as a call for accountability. One can easily imagine that hell and evil are other people; Original Sin forces humans to contemplate and remedy their own errors.

“The very name has an uncanny aspect: horrifying, ironical, allegorical. Camp—that is summer sun and holiday, satirical comedy and masquerade, military rule, obedience and efficiency: death camp—the very devil’s idea of a joke, of camp; black humor and vacation paradise; the dystopian state induced in reality by diligent pursuit of fantastic ideal, ideological purity, statist heaven on earth. Concentration camp—that is concentration of people in arbitrary association, restriction of movement and thought to a particular area; concentration of the processes of human life, distillation, reduction to essence, forcing attention to, concentration on, the central values underlying human endeavor.” 

Peterson examines the semantics of the term “concentration camp” in one of the book’s most powerful and impactful descriptions. The contradictory, banally horrifying term juxtaposes “camp”—and its association with summer fun and childhood vacations in one sense, and masquerade and humor in the other—with the ominous “concentration,” which evokes not only intense focus but also the cramming of many things (or humans) into a small space, concentrated as if inhuman. Peterson’s revulsion at the term signifies his genuine aversion to the endless human capacity for evil. However, lest we forget that we too are culpable in the problem of global evil, Peterson asserts, “Camp life is still human existence, analogous to normal life in all its facets” (Page 343).

“Failure to transcend group identification is, in the final analysis, as pathological as failure to leave childhood.” 

Here Peterson expands on what happens when people do not evolve beyond the group-apprenticeship stage. While apprenticeship to a tribe or tradition is important in the formative stages of the individual (and the psyche), it is a phase that we are meant to outgrow, like childhood. Subsuming one’s identity permanently to a group means submitting to the static, decaying, and tyrannical aspects of the Great Father.

“The prima materia (alternatively: the ‘round chaos’ or the alchemical uroboros) is the unknown as matter and, simultaneously, as effect upon imagination and behavior (inseparable pre-experimentally): is God as substance and effect of substance. The prima materia is the ‘precosmogonic egg,’ the dragon of chaos—the eternal source from which spirit and knowledge and matter and world arise. It is the unknown that simultaneously generates new phenomena, when explored; the unknown that serves as the source of the ‘information’ that comes to constitute the determinate experiencing subject. The alchemists therefore granted the prima materia a ‘half-chemical, half-mythological’ definition: For one alchemist, it was quicksilver, for others it was ore, iron, gold, lead, salt, sulphur, vinegar, water, air, fire, earth, blood, water of life, lapis, poison, spirit, cloud, dew, sky, shadow, sea, mother, moon, serpent…” 

Peterson explains the arcane and esoteric nature of the “prima materia,” which in alchemy is the ubiquitous, requisite starting material to create the philosopher’s stone. This material is the unknown substance, the “tincture” or “powder,” that might transform base metals into precious ones and generate the elixir of life. Prima materia is present everywhere and nowhere; it may be in the form of metal, liquid, organic and inorganic substances, or symbols. Underlying the evocative representation is the fact that anything can be prima materia—which implies that anything, even base lead or iron, can be transformed into the philosopher’s stone, that elixir of life. Prima materia, then is a metaphor for matter awaiting refinement into spirit—and for humans poised to transform into their highest self.

“From the mythic viewpoint, however, every individual is unique—is a new set of experiences, a new universe; has been granted the ability to bring something new into being; is capable of participating in the act of creation itself. It is the expression of this capacity for creative action that makes the tragic conditions of life tolerable, bearable—remarkable, miraculous.” 

This quote echoes the title of the book’s last section, “The Divinity of Interest,” and encapsulates one of the book’s chief tenets: that individual subjective experience is itself valuable. Individual experience and growth can provide information that redeems the individual as well as the larger group. Thus, the interest of the individual is adaptive and divine—and, when one follows it heroically, generates meaning.