Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief - Jordan Peterson - 5 - Story and Metastory (Part 1) (Lecture Notes)

The world is too complex to properly conceive, as are you, so we simplify the world as a place to act rather than to merely perceive. The story is the simplest unit of useful information with the regards to action and perception that you can be offered.

You make a complex model of the world and hold it our mind, and if it matches, you’re good. All is oriented. But evidence of an affair disorients you. You are taken aback and reorient yourself for action. You have a physiological response, marking that person as a threat. This emotional response creates trauma that might go on for years in a complex learning process of understanding and re-orienting yourself. You engage in exploratory work to update your model of reality.

What makes a chair a chair? We speak of its usefulness instead of its appearance. Anything that can be sat on becomes a chair. Monet painted the same hay stacks in different seasons and contexts to show how the same object changes in different contexts. Postmodernism similarly says a text is so complex and the reader’s interpretation is so complex that we can never get to the actual meaning of the text.

Dan Simon made the now infamous video of three people dressed in white and three in black. They run around in circles passing a basketball to each other. You are to count how many times the white team passes the basketball to each other. While this is happening, a man in a gorilla costume comes out, stops in the center of the screen, and walks away. Many people, keeping their eyes on the basketball, never see the gorilla.

You are blinder than you think you are and notice less of the world than you think you do. The center of your vision is high resolution, but the periphery gets fuzzy. How do you decide what to point your eyes at? There are an infinite number of things if your field of perception. You make a partial model of the world on which you’re currently operating, with some goal in mind, and compare that to a model of the world as it is currently unfolding. But your perception of the world as it unfolds is also a model. You don’t see anomalies between them unless they upset your current pursuit. What you value determines what you see. You miss everything else.

The brain circuit we use when we curse is the same in monkeys when they signal there is a predator. We don’t have just one linguistic circuit, as we see in people with Tourette’s syndrome. The circuit for swearing is different than for other circuits of speaking. It’s a simple expression in monkeys—there is a predator, run and hide. With this comes aggression. You computer stops working, so you swear and hit it. Then you try simplistic fixes—check the power, check the outlet, etc. then it gets more complex, or so complex you should take it to a specialist.

People who are depressed or have an anxiety disorder are prone to catastrophize. Every little thing that goes wrong shakes the entire system. You argue with a mate and jump to, “Are relationships worth it at all?” You read something tragic in the news, “Is it worth being alive?” Those high in neuroticism have a disproportionate negative response to every little change, positive or negative, because the whole environment now feels like a threat.

When you get a flat tire, you don’t buy a new car, you find the most useful and simple tool possible to fix it because you have little time and energy. When you argue in a relationship, be as specific as possible in solving your problem or the conversation will become unhinged and you start asking whether you should even be together.

If you’re well socialized enough, you understand how the game works: be polite so people’s emotions aren’t upended. People want to preserve their culture so that everyone plays the game correctly. Culture is a game, not just a set of beliefs. Wolves keep themselves organized in packs by playing wolf games, not by having wolf beliefs.

Some think we have all the facts, but disagree on interpretations. But we don’t have all the facts. We simplify reality with ideologies. Both our perceptions and our opinions are biased. The thing-in-itself is a hypothetical entity because we can never see anything as it is. We see things as tools, asking what we can use them for in relation to our goals.

We can’t see the thing-in-itself because it’s too complex, so we compress things according to our aims. We pack a world in low resolution and hope the word is unpacked in the other person’s mind when we share ideas through words. This is why we use simple words and concepts with children.

Christian fundamentalists and atheistic scientists have the same problem. Fundamentalists believe that Biblical myths are scientific truths, like Genesis. Scientists say they are wrong, so dismiss the myths. People who wrote ancient literature did not think scientifically, neither do we, and neither do most scientists. We all have confirmation bias, but a scientist tries to falsify what he wants to be true. Modern scientific thinking emerged with Bacon and Newton about 500 years ago and the Greeks were the precursors.

Science doesn’t tell you what to value. It gives you facts. For atheists, scientific facts replace old Biblical myths, so we should discard them as archaic and useless. Christian fundamentalists try to shoehorn scientific facts into their mythology which doesn’t work, trying to put evolution and Genesis together. They both miss the point of myth.

You don’t just need one way of looking at the world. “What’s the world made of?” and, “How should you conduct yourself while you’re alive?” are questions that can’t be answered by the same approach. They are in two different domains. One is a place of objects, the other of actions.

You have to have a value system. Your emotional health and interactions with others depend on it. Science can’t validate your values, so do you say they don’t matter? Where does that leave you? You’re left with no rational for taking any action or even for living, so you say, why do anything at all if everything is meaningless and we’re all going to die one day? Who cares if children freeze to death in the winter when we’re all gonna be dead in a million years? This is the wrong frame of reference. The parameters are set too far. We need to narrow them, then the reasons become clear why we should help starving children.

Shakespeare: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances . . .” Life is a like a drama. We want a good guy and a bad guy. We want to see good and bad both in and between characters. We are compelled because we want to learn what a good and bad person is. Next to music, humans universally like stories. Are they a waste of time? No, a story is a context in which we behave.

Sometimes people’s lives become so complex that they would rather be dead, especially if life can no longer be managed from taking too many hits at once. People come to therapy because life is too complicated and they start to break down and need help being put back together again.

There are five big temperaments: extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. Liberals are high in openness and low on conscientiousness, conservatives are the opposite. Some people are so open they’re completely disorganized and they jump from one thing to another. They are interesting to talk to, but can’t get their lives together because they are interested in absolutely everything and their attention flitters from one thing to the next. They are very intelligent, always thinking outside of the box. If they are low in conscientiousness, they see no utility in order.

Orderly people want everything in its separate place and properly structured. They like to have boxes next to boxes on shelves with everything labeled, being where it belongs. Conscientious people are high in disgust sensitivity, which happens when things that shouldn’t be touching touch. It’s a boundary violation. How close or distant should we be in society? Some tend to only enjoy being with people who are like them and have a low tolerance for people different than them. Those high in openness say to open the borders, those high in conscientious say to build a wall as high as possible.

In your house, you allow those you can tolerate the best and leave the rest out. God knows what they will do. Discrimination is a good thing, especially when picking sexual partners. Almost everyone is racially prejudiced when it comes to choosing sexual partners. We discriminate by age, physical attractiveness, health, strength, wealth, and education. We have an understanding: “You get to say no to me if I get to say no to you.” It’s fair.

Falling in love is the ultimate exclusionary act—you’re special and everyone else is not. In Huxley’s Brave New World everyone belongs to everyone else. There is no discrimination. This doesn’t work.

The internet allows you more information and sensory experience in one day than anyone without the internet has had in a lifetime.

Your mind and emotions are embedded in your body. Your brain is not limited to your head, but distributed through your whole body via the nervous system. You don’t have a brain in a body just like you don’t have a soul in body. The soul/body dichotomy has become the brain/body dichotomy and even the mind/body dichotomy. This is a holdover of the Enlightenment idea that the soul should never be contaminated by the body and reason should never be contaminated by emotion, so emotion must be repressed, inhibited, or controlled.

Thinking does not create an objective representation of the world, but conceptualizes the world so we can practice how to be in it. We want to successfully manifest what needs to be done to survive and reproduce in the world.

Your brain has frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes as well as a motor cortex, sensory cortex, and medulla oblongata, each of which have specialized functions. Your prefrontal cortex allows you to create avatars and imagine how they will behave in the world.

Intelligence and conscientiousness have nothing to do with each other. Abstraction is separating thinking from action. You have to be able to think before you do, or you are thought of as impulsive. The reason you think is so you can act better.

Memory is not an accurate or objective representation of events, but who cares? Most of your life is not worth remembering. You mine your experience for information you can bring into the future.

PTSD happens from betrayal, abandonment, and loss, so your mind forces you to keep going over it until you retool your perceptions to avoid going through it again. We often think we did something wrong so we should change something. The trauma causes you to think everything you did must be wrong. Do a situational analysis to extract out information from your past to know how to behave in the future. This is the pragmatic element of thought.

There is no such thing as a uniform set of emotions or motivations. Different parts of the brain contribute to motivations and emotions, which when defined, are simplifications. We don’t know exactly how to define them.

Motivations set goals, while emotions track progress toward goals. Motivation tells you what to aim at, then as you act toward your goal, you have positive emotions. Anything that gets in your way produces negative emotions.

What do you do when you come up against a problem so big it is better to give up and do something else altogether? You don’t want to be stuck in counter-productive persistence.

Motivation is not a goal, it’s not a drive, and it’s not a behavior. It’s a personality—it has a viewpoint, thoughts, perceptions, and action tendencies. You see this in addiction. Alcoholics lie all the time, creating rationalizations, using words as tools to get what they want. Once they get the drug, they reinforce their lies, getting better at it to keep meeting their goals.

Anxiety makes you stop, pain makes you flee. These are indicators toward action. You don’t want to go anywhere where the hypothalamus is activated, which helps us avoid places where we would need to panic or escape.

A frame makes everything else irrelevant. It keeps you moving in the direction you are moving. Your attention is divided between: does it help me, get in my way, or is it irrelevant? Hallucinogens make everything relevant. The whole world comes alive and everything is interesting, but you can’t be that scattered. PTSD does the same, causing you to lose focus by making you hyper vigilant to everything. You want to be in a place where you can focus your attention and act in line with your goals.

Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief - Jordan Peterson - 4 - Marionettes and Individuals (Part 3) (Lecture Notes)

Jung said people’s shadows reach all the way down to hell. We have malevolent impulses that ally us other evil people. It’s terrifying, but you can draw from it and understand your capabilities. You aren’t harmless, and you can use that understanding to protect yourself. 

Breaking Bad is a good example of Walter White being possessed by his shadow side. He’s a normal guy until put into abnormal circumstances. He’s not a good guy turned bad, but he’s bitter and resentful, didn’t accomplish what he wanted as an entrepreneur and ended up a high school teacher, so he walks down a road and gets tangled up more and more on a dark path.

Ordinary Men is similar, about boys raised by Hitler’s Youth propaganda. One step at a time, they are brought to a point where they end up shooting pregnant women in the back of the head.

With the Holocaust, we are implored to never forget—to remember and never to repeat. This means knowing what leads up to it, which means ordinary, “good” people like you and me can play a part in such a thing.

Demagogues stir up a sense of victimhood, which becomes pathological. “They” are hurting and oppressing us, so we are going to get them before they get us. You can’t assume that there are neat boxes like oppressors and oppressed and that you are a victim. You can’t be stuck in class resentment. When the communists invaded Russia, they punished the efficient and productive peasant farmers, and in resentment and jealousy, the intellectuals called them parasites and profiteers. Angry mobs of losers whose resentment was stirred by intellectuals—“you can’t make something with your life and it’s all their fault”—surrounded these farms and forced the peasants onto trains. As a result, six million Ukrainians starved to death in the 1920s, right down to cannibalism. Whenever people are beating the victim drum and they speak for others in apparent empathy, this can go bad, because they aren’t saints.

Every human being is in a tragic enterprise. You’re a biological being that is imperfect. You’re going to be sick, so is everyone you love, and you’re all going to end up dead.

Pinocchio is off to school where the Fox meets him and shows him empathy. He convinced Pinocchio that he is sick—a victim—and offered to take him to Pleasure Island, a place of whimsy and fun. Pinocchio can give up responsibility.

What gives life meaning? Tragedy gives it its negative meaning. When nihilists says life is meaningless, they mean there is no transcendent meaning, not that they don’t experience meaning. Everyone lives as if life is meaningful. Setting goals that you value, being actively engaged in something worthwhile, gives your life positive meaning.

Incentive reward, based on dopamine, keeps you moving forward and brings you less pain, like a hurt athlete who plays through the game, then feels it after. How happy are you about your progress? How much progress, in relation to what? What is the ultimate purpose you place at the top of your hierarchy? Serving that brings the most fulfillment. This also helps to control negative emotions.

Impulsive and short-term hedonism makes you happy in the immediate present, but you’ll pay for it, just like with drugs and alcohol. You keep doing it to keep pushing the problem into the future. It’s not a long-term solution. Conscientious people don’t feel going good unless they are working. They are working hard now, suffering more, to ensure stability in the future. But conscientiousness only works in a developed society where all of your hard work can’t be easily stolen from you.

If I’m a victim, everyone else owes me something, and I don’t have to take any responsibility. It might be that the sense of meaning life can provide is based on the amount of responsibility you’re willing to take on. It’s a weight, and difficult to take on, but if you find pleasure and reduce pain and anxiety, then the more weighty the goal, the greater the pleasure. When you are doing something you really believe in, you are engaged, time passes quickly, and you aren’t bored and looking for distractions.

Maybe the nihilists are right, life is meaningless, so you can live as a hedonist and not take on any responsibility, but you’ll just wander and feel the meaningless of life.

Imagine you have a child who is neurotic, high on negative emotion, and often sick with minor ailments. You let the child stay home from school, but everyday? You have to push them to their limits so they can figure out what they can do or they won’t make it in the world. Maybe a mother wants her child to stay home with her and never leave because she has an abusive and neglectful husband.

Lampwick is a play on Lucifer, bringer of light. He’s a kid who has become prematurely cynical. Some kids are neglected and abused so end up anti-social and others end up conscientious and responsible.

They get on a boat and are off to Pleasure Island which looks like an amusement park. Why are there so many amusement parks in horror film? Because people who have nothing better to do are behaving stupidly and being fleeced. Psychopaths have to keep moving to find new rubes, just like amusement parks. It’s all short-term pleasure and meaning divorced from reality. An Island is not connected to the real world, it’s divorced from it. It’s an escape from the real world. It’s enforced hedonism, a place where you’re going to have fun because that’s what it’s for.

Lampwick has a strut, a bravado, a mimicry of being high on the dominance hierarchy, meant to impress, but is a lie. Bravado and bullying is shallow. Once you stand up to bullies, they disappear, back down, or respect you.

There is a model home on the Island meant for destruction that the kids can set on fire, trash, and destroy. They bring down high culture, civilization, and see no value in hard work and sacrifice. This is also in the story of Cain and Abel. If you’re not doing very well, and it’s your own fault, and you see the achievements of others in front of you, it confronts what you’re not. You feel judged, so you want to destroy it so you have nothing to contrast with your lack of achievement.

God tells Cain to worry about the sin lurking at his door before worrying about the structure of reality. Killing Abel out of resentment and taking revenge against God is not unlike those who shoot up schools and aren’t clear on whom they are taking revenge.

Black cloaked figures with glowing eyes start closing the doors to the Island. The boys are offered bread and circuses, but were instead enticed into a trap. Totalitarian states offer degeneration, and as culture crumbles, they are offered stupid amusements for distraction.

Pinocchio ends up in a bar with Lampwick playing pool. He teaches Pinocchio to smoke and he hates it, but says he likes it. The Cricket emerges on the eight ball and begins pontificating. Lampwick makes fun of Pinocchio for listening to the cricket. In adolescence, boys tease other boys for not taking risks—for being mama’s boys and following the rules. The Cricket stomps off wanting to leave Treasure Island, when he sees a slave ship holding donkeys in crates to be shipped off to do slave work.

There is a half boy/half donkey who cries for his mom. The coachman says he’s not ready yet because he still had the power of independent speech. To brae is to be fully fit for slavery. Like someone trapped in ideology, all of their speech is loyal and indoctrinated. The person is gone.

The coachman says “You’ve had your fun, and now you’re going to pay for it.”

Lampwick transforms into a donkey and starts to brae and is horrified, then Pinocchio. Lapwick sees his image in the mirror and breaks it, but it’s too late.

The cricket finds Pinocchio and takes him to the edge of the cliff at night to escape the Island, representing the blind leap from the impulsive, hedonic adolescent playground into the unknown. He jumps into the water to make a clean break.

Moses represents water and transformation. The Pharaoh represents desert stone. The kingdom is solid ground, but it can be tyranny, and the water is chaos, but it can become freedom. Escaping tyranny doesn’t come easy. Wandering in the desert for 40 years means it gets worse before it gets better. In order to aim up you have to let go of the order you know and embrace chaos, from which you might not recover, but there is no way forward without that risk.

Jung talked about the retrogressive restoration of the persona. You take a leap into a new identity, and when having trouble adjusting, try to return to an older identity, but there is no going back.

Many men are stuck under the thumb of their father and his judgment and tyranny. Why? Why does the opinion of your parents mean more to you than any other person their age? Jung would say to separate out the god image of your dad. Stop idealizing. Freud said no one can be an individual until his father has died. Jung said that can happen symbolically. This can happen when you realize your dad doesn’t have all the answers, and neither does his peers. You become an individual and come to a point where your parents depend on you in their old age.

Pinocchio goes home and his dad is gone. The place is abandoned and covered with cobwebs. The answers you are looking for won’t be found in your parents’ house.

A star appears, becomes a dove, and leaves a glowing piece of paper with gold script for them. Pinocchio’s father wishes Pinocchio would become an independent individual. Jung says when you orient your vision, different things appear to you in the world. It finds what’s relevant to your goal and makes those things visible, everything else becomes invisible.

Pinocchio wonders how he could pick up the pieces and create stability in his new identity. The transcendent star is a goal. As you read and think, surprising thoughts emerge, springing out of the void, bringing you to the next place.

The letter says Pinocchio’s dad went looking for him and ended up in the belly of a whale at the bottom of the sea. Out of chaos you can emerge similar to your previous state, but with new elements, having moved forward. University is similar—you show up a puppet, a bit of a jackass, and what the hell do you know? The humanities can allow you to incorporate the wisdom of your ancestors into your daily pursuits, which makes you stronger. It’s not about knowing more facts, but being a better person. If you can come out of college articulate, laying our arguments in writing, thinking, and speaking, the more articulate person always rises because they lay out strategies more particularly, give reasons, and defend themselves when challenged. Without this, you’re defenseless in the chaos.

Pinocchio now has to face his fears and the unknown. Jung said, “What you most want to find will be found where least want to look.” You can master things and be successful, but also know where you haven’t been successful, and it has this monstrous aspect that makes you feel small. If where are going isn’t working, where you haven’t gone where you need to go.

Let’s say you’re an agreeable person, you don’t like conflict, won’t stand up for yourself, and avoid anger as evil and wrong on top of uncomfortable. But this is exactly where you need to go to move forward. To get the gold, you have to face the dragon. You have to be pushed to the limit.

In the story of Jonah, he’s thrown overboard when not following the path he’s supposed to follow. Chaos finds him, swallows him, and keeps him down, spitting him back up when he’s learned his lesson, putting him back on the path.

Into the water Pinocchio goes. In chaos, you don’t know what’s going on, so you imagine what’s going on. You can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality. You’ve been betrayed by a lover, now you don’t know what the past, present, and future is. This is chaos, so you try to imagine in order to create order. If you face chaos, you’ll find order. You might not find success, but facing it is still your best bet.

Pinocchio’s father can’t get out on his own. An active agent must enter chaos and animate a way out.

When Pinocchio sees the whale, he leaves. When the hero sees the real terror, he flees, because it’s more terrible than he imagines.

The whale swallows Pinnocho and he is reunited with his father, who sees him with Donkey ears and a tail. He reveals he’s a jackass, which is good because it’s an honest appraisal of where he is.

Pinocchio makes a fire, hoping the smoke will make the whale sneeze so they can get out of there, but the father says that will just make him mad. This is the benevolent state against innovation. Even if the innovation is positive and transformative, the standard way will oppose it.

They escape the whale, and it becomes an industrial machine that destroys their raft. Pinocchio’s dad tells him to save himself. Instead, he died rescuing his father. The old personality has to die to give life to the new one. He is revived as a real boy, no longer a puppet. A big celebration ensues and all is resolved.

Cricket gets a gold badge of the sun from the star and blue fairy, representing a conscience properly aligned with the highest good. Pinocchio’s conscience is properly oriented towards the highest value. The movie closes.

Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief - Jordan Peterson - 3 - Marionettes and Individuals (Part 2) (Lecture Notes)

 The blue fairy in Pinocchio is Mother Nature.

Genetic studies show that even in a shared environment, temperament is genetically determined. Freud thought of the super ego as the tyrannical father in your head, but your father is just a voice for society that shaped him. The voice of society is in your head, but it’s not perfect and should be questioned.

Morality is the understanding of the rules by which the dominance hierarchy operates. The biggest, meanest chimps who don’t negotiate power or share with others, once weak, are brutally destroyed by the chimps below him. In proto-morality, even chimps hate tyranny. If two wolves are fighting, they are sizing each other up and try to scare each other by growling and puffing up. The subordinate wolf rolls over and shows his neck in defeat and is allowed to live, but lower on the hierarchy, which is better than being dead. Rats love to wrestle and pin each other down. When the big rat wins, the subordinate rat initiates play next time. Unless the big rat lets the little rat win 30% of the time, the little rat will not want to play anymore. If you deprive them of rough and tumble play their prefrontal cortex doesn’t develop and they become restless and impulsive. If you deprive human children of rough and tumble play, they also become restless and impulsive. Then you put them on Ritalin, which is no good.

Kids need rough and tumble play. They learn the limits of their bodies and that of others and their ability for reciprocal give-and-take. Dancing is a test to see if you can connect, mirror, reciprocate, express yourself in your body and are socially literate.

Rats run toward pleasure and away from pain, which are two different motivation systems in the brain. Similarly, humans are motivated by running toward rewarding goals and away from the pain they want to avoid.

Morality emerges from repetitive social interaction. We trust each other, you betray me, I whack you, and we start again. Don’t hold a grudge, try again. You’re open, but not a pushover.

Morality emerges before the representation of morality. It’s not a top down thing, but bottom up. Kids can play games even of they don’t fully know the rules. A rule describes a pattern of behavior, but a pattern of behavior is a pattern of behavior. The behavior comes first, then the description.

If you want to do something that is difficult and requires energy, your brain gives you something else hard to do that is less difficult—it gives you a reward for not putting yourself through the more difficult struggle. Don’t practice what you don’t want to become—you train your thoughts by rewarding or defeating them.

The cricket is Pinocchio’s conscience, but he is on a matchbox pontificating and lecturing, dull and tyrannical. There is nothing genuine in what he says. He just repeats moral platitudes.

Our brains are built to form representations of reality in the form of image and story. We are always acting things out, but don’t always know why we’re acting things out. Through dreams and talking we put the pieces together, discover what we’re doing, epiphanies arise, then we make strategies to improve.

You can unknowingly have a crush on someone and start to fantasize about them. Maybe you don’t want to know you have a crush on them. Freud’s idea of free association says to watch your fantasies and responses to them. Fantasies provide problems and possible solutions. Freud sees dreams as wish fulfillments. They are that, but not merely that. In fantasy, we can become a character, put ourselves in a situation, and run the simulation to test our response.

The birds in Pinocchio represent the Holy Spirit. Pinocchio heads out naïve and confident. The fox is the trickster. He’s a fraud and a con artist. If you are preyed upon by a narcissistic psychopath—and you will be—he views you as stupid and naïve. In his mind, if he can fool you, you deserve it. They are great at manipulating the best of us. [Peterson recommends watching serial killer Paul Bernardo being interviewed by the police on YouTube. He’s good looking, charismatic, and good at manipulating.]

Nietzsche asked, do you follow the rules because you’re good or because you’re afraid of getting caught? If you could get away with it, would you do the wrong thing? This is why he said Christian morality was cowardly. Those who don’t have the courage to be violent make a virtue of their meekness.

When men go bad they become tyrannical and antisocial, much more so than women.

We always wonder what’s going on behind the scenes in people. This is why we watch people’s eyes, to see what they are looking at. We can predict how to cooperate or take advantage of them.

The Fox grabs Pinocchio to take him to Stromboli. Stromboli is a puppet master running a show and needs a new money maker. The fox is like a pedophile—they watch and gain your confidence. Pedophiles are unlikely to go after kids that are assertive and noisy. They look for a defeated kid who needs a friend and won’t object. They look for a victim type. Sociopaths look for adults who carry themselves as nice and naïve.

Don’t teach kids to be afraid of strangers, make them courageous. This will protect them. Don’t terrify your kids. They will become targets.

The fox and wolf schmooze Pinocchio, singing to him about the benefits of unearned celebrity. He can go right to the top without hard work and sacrifice. Like the Kardashians, many want to be instantly famous or pretend to be famous for doing nothing. “Don’t bother with hard work, you have natural talents!”

Freud and Jung talked about the oedipal situation of the boy being overprotected by the mother. This occurs in families with bad boundaries, where the dad wasn’t around and his mom tries to get from him what she is missing from her husband. She’s scared of letting her son grow up and leave and having nothing left. These mothers love and smother their babies. Some boys become hyper-feminized as a result and others hyper-masculinized because they are trying to separate from her.

Don’t invite vampires into your life. You have to invite them in, and once they’re in, they’re hard to get rid of. They take your blood and drain your life from you.

For Jung, you start as a persona, or the mask you wear for society, a “good person.” You then investigate your shadow—the parts of you hidden away because they are taboo, which you find shocking because they are hidden even from you. Your goal is to explore your shadow, then integrate it into your conscious mind.

If you’re extraordinarily compassionate, you will sacrifice yourself for others and this will be endearing. But people will take advantage of you, so it’s not good and won’t get you through life. You have to develop teeth and be angry, vicious, and confrontational to be moral. You have to go to the shadow where that is repressed.

American Idol is a great look at narcissism—utterly talentless people becoming accusatory and homicidally angry when criticized and not unduly praised. In the opposite, you find introverted and humble people who don’t believe they are talented, but are extremely talented. No wonder the show is so popular.

[Peterson recommends Jean Piaget, who in his estimation is one of the best psychologists there is.]

You have to learn to be assertive and negotiate. You have to learn to say no. You have to know what you want and ask for it. If you ask for a raise, you have to have your reasons and your resume in order and have options. You make less money if you are agreeable and don’t ask for more. If you don’t have yourself in order, you’re just a façade which can be easily torn down.

The cricket falls asleep, which means conscience can be flawed. He’s not as conscientious a conscience as he should be. Conscientious people are industrious and orderly. They like willpower and order. They are very judgmental and hard on themselves and others. They rank high on disgust. These are the highest predictors of being drawn to conservatism.

To be a celebrity, you have to be a crowd pleaser. You become the puppet of the crowd and they reward you with money. You sell yourself out to please others. Don’t make a fool of yourself for public display.

When you blush, you feel shame or embarrassment. An interesting theory says you can trust people who blush because you know their conscience will betray them.

Celebrities become narcissistic with grandiosity and arrogance and surround themselves with sycophants who tell them what they want to hear. You have entitled, adult brats. But you want real friends who challenge you and tell you when you are doing things that upset other people. The job of a parent is to teach kids not to do things that cause people to dislike, exclude, and reject them. Your job is to socialize them to get along with others.

Hitler wasn’t a bad person who led people down a bad path, it was a conspiracy between him and is followers together. Maybe you were in WW1 and your friends got blown up, and your economy got destroyed, and you have moderate artistic talent that takes you nowhere, and there was a threat of communism from the East looming, so you’re angry. You’re charismatic, good with crowds, and can air grievances, though you don’t have your ideology together, and if enough people shout at you long enough that you are their savior, you start to believe it. Hitler was a conscious manipulator who could appeal to the darkest fantasies of the crowd, which he made a mob, so now they can scream their darkest thoughts and fantasies in public without fear of judgment from others.

Stromboli is counting the gold and notices that someone paid for the show with a bent washer and is angry. Tyrants don’t tolerate error, therefore people are always guilty of something, which he’s willing to exploit. He doesn’t pay Pinocchio, but puts him in a cage and sends a message by showing him the previous puppet with an ax in it for not performing well. This is what tyrants do—they use and exploit.

[Peterson recommends The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.]

If you were arrested by the KGB and hauled off to a tribunal, they wanted you to admit you were guilty and would torture you until you confessed. Why a mock trial? Why not just arrest you and throw you into the camp? Because they don’t want to you exist outside of the rules.

In all tyrannical societies, society is tyrannized all the way down. You terrorize your own conscience, and never admit or talk about anything going wrong, especially when just about everyone is a government informant, policing each other. Everyone participates in tyranny by lying together. The idea that good people were just following orders and only the tyrant is to blame isn’t true.

The jester is the only one who is allowed to tell the king the truth, because he is already beneath contempt. This is what makes comedians powerful voices of social commentary.

If you break a rule but were unaware, you get off easy. But if you willingly break it, the punishment is heavier. Kids are cute, which elicits compassion and sympathy, so we let them get away with more. Nature doesn’t.

Cuteness is cross-species, indicated by big eyes, round head, small nose, small mouth, and flailing limbs. Cuteness brings out compassion and the desire to nurture, unless you are a sociopath.

Mark Twain said one of the advantages to telling the truth is you don’t have to remember what you said. Lying is a hydra, it grows complexity and you have to keep lying. Pinocchio has learned don’t be an actor, and don’t lie.

Rousseau saw kids as innocent, but corrupted by society, which is partially true. Good kids turn twelve and become demon teens in an instant. Girls treated like princesses become teens, then look for someone to tear them out of that role, like a biker guy.

Dante’s hell in Inferno has Satan encased in ice at the bottom level surrounded by traitors and betrayers, which makes sense because when you betray someone you can damage them beyond recovery. Read Inferno with Milton’s Paradise Lost. They tell you why you end up in proverbial hell and what spirit takes you there. It’s where you discover just how evil you are. It’s worthwhile to understand that under the right conditions, you are capable of being an Auschwitz guard.

Compassionate people don’t think they can be brutal, but you can kill people with compassion by doing for them what they can do themselves. Let them struggle through it. Don’t make them dependent.

Women are choosy maters, so they let men compete, then pick the winners at the end—those highest in the hierarchy; men with status, power, and success.

Religious conversion is an amazing treatment for alcoholism, as are mystical experiences, some induced by LSD.

Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief - Jordan Peterson - 2 - Marionettes & Individuals (Part 1) (Lecture Notes)

 

We should view the world through a narrative lens because the fundamental question humans have is, “How do I act in the world in relation to myself and others over time.” It’s a viciously difficult problem to solve.

We have evolved to be social and live in dominance hierarchies. Even non-social animals live in dominance hierarchies. The dominance hierarchy is older than trees. But humans cannot live simply by power. How do we organize ourselves in both small and large social units without undo conflict?

The way we solve this problem isn’t primarily conscious. Social knowledge is in your being because you’ve practiced it over time. We have implicit, coded social behavior. For instance, the way the classroom is arranged has all of the chairs facing Peterson. He is the teacher, they are the students, and they will do what he says in order to graduate and find work. Everyone knows how to behave in this social context.

Beliefs have both psychological and sociological expectations, or better, desires, and we don’t want them destabilized or we will start fighting with each other, which could lead to death. Your beliefs protect you from both death and anxiety.

Rousseau believed nature was good and society corrupts us, but Hobbes believed the opposite, that in nature we are after each other, so we need social contract to create order. They were both right. Both together complete the picture.

Most of the time we are tranquil and satisfied in a well-meaning and ordered society, but put in the right situation, this will change. Primates are territorial, violent, and prone to war. Our emotional systems are on, but our brain tamps them down. We have reflexes ready to go, like jumping when we see something snake-like in the periphery of our vision before we even form of conscious image of snake in our mind.

Toddlers are manic with impulsive, positive emotions. We tell them to calm down because as adults we can’t be impulsive and manic or we become out of control. When toddlers have tantrums, they are lost in blind rage. In adults, people with borderline personality disorder do this. Your own kids are hard to like. They are little monsters. They are provocative. You think you’ll like your kids because you’re a good person, but you won’t and you’re not. Teach them to do things that make you and other people like them.

If you don’t have your kids socialized by age 4, forget it. The literature is clear that they will be hopelessly antisocial, feeling isolated, bitter, angry, and alone. By 3, they should be able to run simulations where they work together with others to play house—be Mom, Dad, build a fort, make tea, etc.

When we teach children to play well with others, they will be invited to play more. If they don’t play well with others, no one will want to play with them. They will become antisocial. We are built by evolution to play these games of getting along with others. Animals do this as well. It’s inborn, not a social construct.

Why have goals? Because without goals, you won’t have positive emotions. Start with any goal, then shape it into a goal other people care about, in which they might want to assist you. Find goals that suit your temperament: the extroverted want to play extroverted games, highly neurotic people want to play safe games, agreeable people want to play generous games, and disagreeable people want to play competitive games. You need a hierarchy of goals so you can aim up and set higher goals. This provides your life with meaning.

Life is like a hydra. You cut off a head and another one grows. You kill snakes and more keep coming. That’s life. A child having a dream of being attacked by dwarfs coming out of a fire breathing dragon must confront them and the dragon, taking on a hero archetype, because if he doesn’t, they just keep getting bigger and he keeps getting smaller until there is no way back. This is a lesson to deal with issues in your life while they are small and not to run from them or they will grow out of control and consume you.

In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins is a good citizen and is harmless, but to find the dragon he has to become a thief. He can’t be harmless. Harry Potter has to break the rules to attain the highest goal. The hero has to be a monster, but a controlled monster, like Batman.

If you’re a nice, compassionate person, you let other people win, and that’s no good. You need to win too. As a basis for negotiation between adults, you have to be a bit of a monster so you can learn to say no—to be assertive and stand up for yourself. Being a monster makes you a better person.

Chaos is both potential and a place of not knowing what to do. It’s symbolized as a dragon, a predatory beast that’s been after us forever.

Is life really meaningless or do people want to shun responsibility and goal-setting to drift through life meaninglessly, then rationalize that life is meaningless after the fact?

Orient yourself toward the highest good you can possibly imagine and aim for that, and you’ll get the best possible outcome.

The Jungian notion is that motivation, emotions, reason, and body should be integrated holistically.

Peterson explores the movie Pinocchio for its archetypes. Pinocchio’s conscience is Jiminy Cricket. Conscience can be defined both as a feeling and an inner voice. Freud would say it’s the voice of society speaking to you. We have a conscience, but the contents of our conscience differ from person to person. Pinocchio could have a perfect conscience and do what it says, but that would be a boring movie. You have to develop and dialogue with your conscience, which is imperfect. You have free will and can ignore your conscience.

You are the deterministic product of both nature and culture, but myth says there is a “you” that gets to negotiate between them with free will. Sam Harris says all is determined, including every seemingly free choice we think we make. Peterson disagrees. We can’t yet account for the experience of consciousness and the experience of free will, but we nevertheless experience it.

Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief - Jordan Peterson - 1 - Context and Background (Lecture Notes)

 

Peterson opens his lecture talking about communism and its brutality when implemented by the Russians, noting that there was a war over these ideas that put into play the possible use of civilization-destroying nuclear bombs. Slowly, communism crumbled in the world and people lost faith in it. This caused Peterson to ask himself:  “Why do people value things?” “Why do people believe things?” “Why are people so committed to ideas that they would risk their own lives and that of others to defend them?”

Belief systems regulate our emotions. We act out our beliefs in the world, and we want what we want to happen. We have a theory that helps us explain the world, as do others, and when we live it out with others and it works, this squelches anxiety and makes us happier.

We occupy time and space, and like cats, we familiarize ourselves with our territory, map our environment, and have expectations about how it works. This territory includes other people—what we believe about and expect from them. Belief is a territory to defend. If it falls apart, chaos and destabilization result, causing great anxiety, so it’s no wonder people protect their beliefs.

A belief system is a set of moral guidelines, not only telling you how you should behave, but what you must perceive. You can’t see things without a hierarchy of values. You pay attention only to what’s most important to you and other details fade to the background or go unnoticed. They become white noise.

We have both conscious and unconscious values. For instance, we are attracted to people we know are bad for us, driven by something of which we are not fully aware. We are a loose connection of arguing sub-personalities we are trying to integrate towards our valuable goals, but we often find we are hardly in control.

What determines what we value or should value? In some sense, it’s a mystery. Some, like Sam Harris, believe science can tell us how things work, then we can derive what we should value from science. But we run into Hume’s is/ought problem here: you can’t derive ought from is. Science can’t tell you why you should value truth or morality.

Objective morality in the West and ideas like the transcendent rights of the individual are predicated on unproviable axioms rooted in God and religion. Since the dawn of the Scientific Revolution, religions have been under heavy critique, and with that, their use as a basis for morality. Nietzsche said God was dead, and with him, the Judeo-Christian basis for values and morals in Western culture. We are running on the fumes of Christianity and it’s not clear where we’ll end up. For Peterson, even if religions aren’t scientifically true, we need their underlying presuppositions and metaphysics for civilization to be maintained.

Religious truth, for Peterson, is “deeper truth” than scientific truth. It allows you to act in a manner that best improves the probability of your existence and maximizes your ability to reproduce. This is Darwinian—our theories are pragmatic tools to keep us alive. If what you value and believe is good enough to get you through 80 or so years and get your genes into the next generation, they work.

Peterson, in line with Carl Jung and Huston Smith, believes that human beings have a central narrative of necessary human values that we express dramatically. They are built in by nature. We are not infinitely malleable or mere cultural constructions as the French postmodernists and deconstructionists say. Camille Paglia, a harsh critic of the postmodern takeover of the humanities in universities since the 1970s, admonishes students to learn about art, literature, poetry, fiction, drama, music, movies, and religious thinking—pop culture and high culture. Don’t just come to university and engage in dangerous and premature postmodern criticism of culture, shallowly viewing these disciplines from the standpoint of theory and power, divorced from nature.

Music is an invitation to drama. It accentuates the narrative in movies. It moves us. But is the drama real? It depends on what you mean by real. Dramas, like myths, are “hyper real,” or “realer than real.” They provide abstract guidelines on how to act.

We are interested in hearing adventure stories about the struggles of the protagonist. We hope the protagonist, when put in challenging situations, figures things out and can offer us wisdom and insight. He did the hard work, went on the journey, came out alive, and can share his hard-fought-for wisdom with us. If we pay attention, we get it cheap.

Chaos is what happens when things don’t happen the way you expect, and this happens to people in these stories. Their lives are destabilized, disrupted, and upended. They are blindsided by something and are now in unexplored territory. They explore and gather new information, retool their character or the world around them, and hopefully come out better in the end. That is a comedy, which doesn’t necessarily have to be funny, but only have a happy ending. This is the opposite of tragedy—you’re going along, you get blindsided, and that’s that.

People don’t read stories of ordinary people doing ordinary things. They read about exciting and interesting things and weed out to boring bits. They distill stories for the important parts. We don’t care that South Park is lo-fi animation or that Pinocchio is a puppet. We care about whether or not the puppet becomes a human, because it seems important. “Is the story true?” isn’t the question. “Does it help me understand how to act in the world?” is a better question.

Peterson loves Dostoyevsky, believing he is head and shoulders above any fiction writer he’s ever read. His protagonists lay out their worldview well while his antagonists pummel them—not with strawmen, but with formidable challenges. We are meant to distill these stories and learn from them.

Camille Paglia says articulate knowledge is embedded in inarticulate knowledge—high culture, pop culture, art, and literature. We use creative imagination to explore unexplored territory. We create drama to deal with what we haven’t yet mastered. Paglia, influenced by Jung, says without cultural tradition, we are too “just-here-now” and can’t serve our culture. We inhabit a story in the context of our culture.

What’s the meaning of life? Meaning is proportionate to the adoption of responsibility.

Start a career, create security, get ahead, move forward, grow, and play a role in the cultural structure that supports you. Continue to produce something of value. This creates meaning. Peterson says his clients have a hell of time without a fixed schedule or disciplined structure. They drift, get anxious, and depressed. They don’t know what to do with their free time.  We need to be engaged and have something to do. We can’t just lie on the beach or retire and do nothing. We are like horses without wagons. We need a load, but what kind?

No one argues with their own pain. Everyone who hurts acts as if that pain is real. The Jews recount their suffering in their history, Christians have a crucified God, Buddhists say life is suffering. There is a metaphysical reality that life is pain and suffering. You live every day with the knowledge that you and your loved ones can be broken, destroyed, and killed. You know you’re going to die, no matter what you plan to make your life go well. It will all be upended and thrown into chaos. Once you know that life is finite and full of suffering, you might question the value of existing at all—thus experiencing existential dread.

You don’t want to live an aimless life of meaningless toil and futility. Deconstructionists are of no help here. They tell you everything has no real meaning, undermining it with futility, then send you out into the world to start your life.

If the experience of pain and suffering makes life feel meaningless, then it logically follows that the reduction of pain and suffering makes life feel meaningful. To live a more meaningful life, you can start with reducing suffering in your own life and in that of others. You can then start to see yourself as a good person with something of value to offer the world.

The most fundamental reality is chaos, which results from the unexpected. You do what you’re supposed to do and things don’t work out. You are betrayed, cheated on, lied to, suffer chronic illness, the death of a loved one, or experience the collapse of a dream or vision you were pursuing. Everything comes undone, and when you are betrayed by someone, even your past isn’t true anymore. You feel stupid, incompetent, and doubt your own ability to perceive reality. You dissociate and are taken out of life. You might be trapped in PTSD, and that’s not where you want to stay. It will make you old and burn up all of your resources. The challenge for you is, when chaos finds you and you are taken to hell, can you come back?

Peterson presents three archetypes: the Individual, Father Culture, and Mother Nature. Culture can be seen as a judgmental father, a meta-person constantly watching and judging you. You have to shape yourself in order to get along with other people, so culture can be tyrannical. Nature is a mother because from it life springs, and it is both creative and destructive, full of beauty and terror. The individual is alone on an island in the ocean, both a hero and villain warring inside.

Why might you be villainous? Because you can be. It’s an offshoot of empathy. It’s the knowledge of good and evil in Eden. If you’re self-conscious and can conceptualize yourself as a human being, knowing what that’s like and what hurts you, you can imagine how to hurt others. A lion just wants to eat you, it’s not malevolent, but we can aim our malevolence with calculation and precision and really do damage. We can be truly evil. We each, under the right conditions, have a sadistic side. Evil isn’t only “out there,” but in us, and must be contended with there.

We are resentful because of our limitations and the suffering we must endure. We are resentful that life is the way it is; that we’re in a world that should not be this way. But if we act out that resentment in society, it makes what we are objecting to even worse. Instead, be the line between order and chaos. Bring order to chaos.

In this lecture series, Peterson is going to go over the movie Pinocchio and examine its archetypes. The soundtrack to Pinocchio contains the song “When You Wish Upon a Star.” A star is someone you admire and feel awe for. They are captivating and full of charisma. People wear diamonds and glitter to capture and project light, to shimmer and be transcendent. Something in you is looking for something they have that you want to have. They are a model for emulation, the way boys and girls in school have brief friend crushes for those a bit older than them who might be athletes or cheerleaders. To wish upon a star is to look above the horizon line to something transcendent. Wishing on a star is aiming for something higher.

Jordan Peterson developed the Future Authoring Program, in which his students are required to partake. He asks them to write an autobiography to help them know who they are and where they are right now. He then asks them to write about their future so they know where they’re going—what their goals are and what they’re aiming for. The second part is scary, he says, because you’ll now know exactly where you failed should you not achieve your goals. But if you don’t set goals, you just drift though life.

In this project, Peterson wants students to break their lives up into epochs—into important periods, based on their emotional impact. If you find something difficult to revisit or still get emotional about it, he notes, part of your soul is stuck back there. Because you have not solved the problem that keeps you back there, your brain is still tagging that event as a threat because you did not master it. Writing really helps figure that out.

If you can have what you want in 3-5 years, what would it be? How are you radically insufficient right now and what stands in your way? Positive emotions come from setting goals and moving toward them, not from having achieved them. You won’t be happy when you solve all your problems. You get dopamine kicks when you make progress toward them. When you’re satisfied that you’ve achieved a goal, you enjoy it for a moment, then it’s on to the next.

You’re also going to write where you might end up in 3-5 years if you don’t pursue your goals, because fear pushes you forward from behind as a motivator just as desire for something in front of you does.

Allow yourself to be challenged voluntarily rather than having a threat come after you. It’s better to go find the dragon in its lair than to wait for it to come and eat you. If you find it in its lair, you might find it’s a baby. Don’t let it grow up and chase you. Don’t avoid small problems that you know are there or they will become big problems.

What do you need for a meaningful life? Peterson offers friendship, intimacy with a partner, family, a career, meaningful hobbies, and to regulate substances, given addictions and impulsive behavior do so many people in.