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.